Comfort women

• 1. Introduction

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  Comfort women is the name given to the women and girls whom the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces held in sexual slavery before and during World War II. In June 1991, Japan's government told its parliament that the state had no involvement and rejected calls for an apology or compensation. Two months later, in August 1991, a Korean woman named Kim Hak-sun became the first survivor to tell her story in public. Until that moment, no former comfort woman had come forward. Others followed from several countries, and their testimony set off a dispute that has not ended. How did the military come to build such a system, and why did it spread across so much of Asia? Who were the women, and how many were there when the records were burned? What did Japan admit, what did it refuse to admit, and why do survivors still call its apologies empty?

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• 2. Stations for Soldiers

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  The first comfort houses opened in Shanghai after the Shanghai incident of 1932. Yasuji Okamura, the chief of staff there, ordered them built to stop Japanese soldiers from raping Chinese women. The idea of managed sex for troops was not new to the army. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the military had closely regulated privately run brothels in Manchuria.

  The name itself did work. The Japanese term translates literally as a comforting, consoling woman, a euphemism that disguised what the stations were. Army and Navy paperwork went further. Records tracking the transport of women used the phrase “units of war supplies.”

  After the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, Japanese forces adopted a general policy of opening comfort stations across occupied China. According to one account, the motive was not concern for Chinese victims but fear of stirring up hostility among Chinese civilians. The historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi adds that officials also wanted to avoid criticism from China, the United States and Europe after the mass rapes at Shanghai and Nanjing.

  Military correspondence from the army lists three aims. The stations were meant to cut rape by soldiers, to lower rates of venereal disease, and to stop civilians who met officers from leaking military secrets. Carmen Argibay, a former member of the Argentine Supreme Court, argues that Japan also wanted to confine abuse to controlled buildings and keep incidents out of the international press. She notes a financial motive too, since disease among soldiers hindered the army and cost money to treat.

  The historian Yuki Tanaka points to another worry. Private brothels beyond the military's reach carried the risk of spies posing as workers. Yoshimi says the army also used the women to placate discontented soldiers and head off revolt. By his account the stations failed at their stated purpose. They made rape worse and spread disease further.

  The system was run with a bureaucrat's eye. The Imperial Army offered accountancy classes on managing comfort stations, including how to judge the “durability or perishability of the women procured.”

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• 3. Procuring the Women

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  Japanese women were the first to be enslaved in military brothels. Some were recruited by ordinary means, and others through deception or kidnapping. Middlemen placed advertisements in newspapers read in Japan and in the colonies of Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo and China. These sources dried up quickly, especially in the Japanese home islands.

  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs then resisted issuing more travel visas to Japanese prostitutes, because it felt the practice tarnished the empire's image. The military turned instead to women outside Japan, mostly from Korea and occupied China. A system of licensed prostitution already existed in Korea, which made recruiting large numbers easy.

  Many recruits were tricked. Women answered offers of work as nurses or factory hands, or were promised sponsorship for higher education. Others were drawn in by payments that could ease a family's debts. A bulletin from the South East Asia Translation and Interrogation Center describes a facility manager who bought Korean women for 300 to 1000 yen, depending on their physical characteristics. The women then counted as his property and were not freed even after their contract terms ended.

  In northern Hebei province in China, Hui Muslim girls were enrolled in the “Huimin Girls' school” to be trained as entertainers. They were then forced into sexual slavery. The historian Bruce Cumings wrote in 1997 that Japan imposed quotas and that Korean men helped with recruiting. Daughters of the Korean gentry and bureaucracy were spared unless their families showed pro-independence leanings, so the overwhelming majority of those taken were poor.

  The army and navy often subcontracted the work to men with ties to organized crime, who were paid for each girl they delivered. A substantial minority of these contractors in Korea were Japanese, but most were Korean. A significant share of the women taken were minors.

  As supplies ran short, army units took what they needed from local people. Commanders demanded that village leaders produce women for brothels on the front lines, especially in the countryside where middlemen were rare. Where locals were judged hostile in China, soldiers followed the “Three Alls policy,” meaning kill all, burn all, loot all. That policy included kidnapping and raping civilians without distinction.

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• 4. Counting the Women

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  The Chinese scholar Su concluded that between 1938 and 1945, comfort women in Japanese-held territory numbered 360,000 to 410,000. About 200,000 of them, he found, were Chinese. Almost no other estimate comes close to this scale, and the gap shows how little paper survived.

  At the end of the war, huge quantities of material on war crimes and on the responsibility of the nation's top leaders were destroyed or hidden on the government's orders. Historians have therefore worked backward from the records that remain. They compare the number of soldiers in an area with the number of women, then adjust for how quickly women were replaced. Japanese historians arrive at figures between 20,000 and 200,000, and most researchers and media treat Yoshimi's estimate as the likeliest range.

  Public memorials and news outlets use different numbers. Monuments in New Jersey, New York, Virginia and California say “more than 200,000.” The BBC cites 200,000 to 300,000, while the International Commission of Jurists cites historians' estimates of 100,000 to 200,000. Qiu Peipei of Vassar College argues that rapid replacement of women makes a figure of 200,000-400,000 plausible, with Chinese women the majority.

  Ikuhiko Hata of Nihon University gives a far lower count. He estimates fewer than 20,000 women in the licensed quarters, divided 40 percent Japanese, 20 percent Korean and 10 percent Chinese. He puts all government-regulated prostitutes in wartime Japan at only 170,000.

  Yoshimi, by contrast, documented about 2,000 comfort stations holding roughly 200,000 women. The stations stood in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau and French Indochina.

  He also studied Imperial Army medical records of venereal disease treatment from 1940. If the women treated reflected the whole population of comfort women, then 51.8 percent were Korean, 36 percent were Chinese and 12.2 percent were Japanese.

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• 5. Women of Many Lands

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  In the Philippines, around 1,000 women were made into comfort women during the Japanese occupation. Some were as young as 12. Survivors recall garrisons and comfort stations scattered from the Cagayan Valley in the north to the Davao region in the south.

  In the Dutch East Indies, Japanese soldiers raped many Indonesian and European women and girls during the initial invasion. The Kenpeitai, the military police, then set up a comfort women program to control the problem. It forced and coerced interned women into brothels, including several hundred Europeans. A few chose to live in an officer's home and serve one man rather than many. One of them, K'tut Tantri, who was of Scottish ancestry, wrote a book about her ordeal.

  A Dutch government study put the number of European women in Japanese military brothels at 200 to 300. It concluded that some sixty-five were most certainly forced. Others faced starvation in refugee camps and accepted offers of food and payment without being told the nature of the work. Some volunteered hoping to protect younger women. J. F. van Wagtendonk and the Dutch Broadcast Foundation estimated that 400 Dutch girls were taken from the camps. The plight of Dutch victims entered public awareness only after groups such as the Foundation of Japanese Honorary Debts began advocating for them.

  Many Javanese women were recruited as well, along with around 1,000 East Timorese women and girls. Most Javanese recruits were girls aged 14-19 who had finished some schooling. They were deceived with promises of higher education in Tokyo or Singapore. The writer Pramudya Ananta Tur wrote that fathers from prominent families were tricked in this way. A Javanese girl named Siti Fatimah recalled being told she was going to study in Tokyo and instead being sent to a military brothel in Flores. After the war, many Javanese survivors stayed where they had been taken and blended into local communities.

  More than 2,000 Taiwanese women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, and more than half were minors. As of 2020, only two were believed to be alive. The last surviving Taiwanese comfort woman died in 2023.

  In Rabaul, in what is now Papua New Guinea, local women were recruited, along with mixed Japanese-Papuan girls born to Japanese fathers. An Australian captain, David Hutchinson-Smith, mentioned young mixed-race girls conscripted this way.

  In Malaya, the Japanese academic Nakahara Michiko of Waseda University found that recruiters targeted every ethnic group. She wrote about an ethnic Malay woman who told her, “I worked like an animal, they did to me just as they liked.” The woman's daughter said she suffered nightmares and still believed she had sinned. Her own village had never told her otherwise.

  In 1993, Mustapha Yaakub, a youth official in the governing party UMNO, urged Malaysian victims to speak out. He received letters from 3,500 people within four months, many hoping the party would demand an apology and reparations from Japan. Party leaders led by Najib Tun Razak forced him to back down, and the hopes of those letter writers were dashed.

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• 6. Inside the Stations

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  Asō Tetsuo, a Japanese Army doctor, testified that the women were regarded as “female ammunition” and “public toilets.” Treated as objects, they were beaten and forced to serve ten men on ordinary days and up to forty on days after combat. Food, water, housing, toilets and washing facilities were inadequate. Medical care was limited to treating sexually transmitted diseases, sterilization and ending pregnancies. Women who tried to flee or refused were tortured, and families of girls who attempted suicide were threatened. Some were even made to donate blood for wounded soldiers.

  Kim Hak-sun, interviewed in 1991, described being taken in 1941 at the age of 17, after she was told she could earn good money in a textile factory. She said she was raped thirty to forty times a day, every day of the year. “I was born a woman but never lived as a woman,” she said.

  Narcisa Claveria was enslaved at the age of 13 and held for 18 months. Fedencia David was kidnapped at 14. Both remembered cooking, cleaning and washing clothes by day while soldiers abused them at night. Dutch women taken from camps were reserved for officers.

  In February 1944, officers took ten Dutch women from prison camps in Java. Jan Ruff-O'Herne was among them. Photographs of the new arrivals were placed on a veranda where soldiers selected women from the pictures. Over four months, the women were beaten and raped, and those who became pregnant were forced to have abortions. They were then moved to a camp at Bogor, where the Japanese warned that anyone who spoke about it would be killed along with her family.

  In 1990, Ruff-O'Herne told a committee of the United States House of Representatives that this was “the most shameful story of the worst human rights abuse committed by the Japanese during World War II.” Her camp at Batavia was liberated on the 15th of August 1945.

  Condoms branded “Attack No. 1” were handed out free and soldiers were required to use them. In July 1943, for instance, the army issued 1,000 for soldiers in Negri Sembilan and 10,000 for those in Perak. But the women had no power to insist. Most were injected with Salvarsan, and together with the injuries from rape, this caused unusually high rates of sterility.

  As American submarines sank Japanese shipping, medical supplies were kept for the servicemen. Used condoms were washed and reused, often by the women themselves. In the Philippines, doctors billed women who needed treatment, and the seriously ill were often left to die alone. A later survey of former Korean comfort women found that 30 percent had biological children and 20 percent adopted.

  Sources do not agree on every point. A report from the interrogation of 20 Korean women and two Japanese civilians captured after the Siege of Myitkyina in Burma said the women lived comparatively well and received gifts and wages.

  As Allied forces closed in, many women died. At Chuuk Lagoon, 70 comfort women were killed before an expected American assault, after the Navy mistook an air raid for the start of a landing. On Saipan, some jumped from cliffs. In Burma, some Korean women took cyanide or were killed by grenades thrown into their dugouts. British soldiers reported that captured Korean women were astonished to learn they would not be eaten, since Japanese authorities had spread such tales about the enemy.

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• 7. Silence and Evidence

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  In China and Korea, where premarital sex was considered shameful, the survivors were treated as outcasts. A traditional expectation held that an unmarried woman who lost her virginity should die, so choosing to live was itself a mark of shame. The label “homecoming women,” first used for comfort women who returned to Korea, remains an insult for sexually active women in South Korea.

  Legal and diplomatic channels also stayed shut. The Tokyo war crimes trials did not address the enslavement of women, because rape was not then viewed as a war crime. Japan later read the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco and the 1965 treaty with South Korea as settling war-related claims, although neither mentions the comfort system. At the Batavia War Criminal Court, 11 Japanese officers were found guilty and one soldier was sentenced to death. The charge was that they had broken the army's order to hire only voluntary women.

  Early research came slowly. The writer Kakou Senda first saw photographs of comfort women in 1962 and published the first book on the subject, Military Comfort Women, in 1973. Historians in both Japan and South Korea criticized it for distorting facts, but it became a source for later activism. The first book by a Korean author appeared in 1981, though it plagiarized a 1976 Japanese work by Kim Il-Myeon. In 1985, a survivor named Shirota Suzuko, who lived from 1921 to 1993, released her autobiography.

  Some evidence had been taken in 1944. Allied forces captured twenty Korean women and two Japanese station owners in Burma and issued Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report 49. It said that about 800 women had been brought from Korea to Burma in 1942, deceived with promises of work visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals or rolling bandages.

  More documents surfaced in the 21st century. On the 17th of April 2007, Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi announced seven official documents from the Tokyo Trials archives. In one, a lieutenant confessed to organizing a brothel and using it himself. Another described naval military police arresting women on the street and placing them in brothels after forced medical examinations. On the 12th of May 2007, the journalist Taichiro Kajimura announced the discovery of 30 Dutch government documents about forced prostitution in Magelang in 1944.

  In 2014, China produced almost 90 documents from the Kwantung Army's archives, which it called ironclad proof of forced work in front-line brothels. The Chinese professor Su Zhiliang examined the Kwantung Army's records at the Jilin Archives and concluded that military authorities ordered, supported and managed the stations. A 2015 study found that officials had tried to avoid recording illegal mobilization. It concluded that most records were burned just before the surrender, though some survived. The study also noted that access to Chinese archives had been hard partly because of the China-Japan Joint Communiqué of 1972.

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• 8. Apology and Denial

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  In January 1992, Yoshiaki Yoshimi found documents in Japanese defense archives showing military involvement in setting up and running comfort stations. These papers had been returned by United States troops in 1958. On the 14th of January 1992, the chief government spokesman, Koichi Kato, said, “We cannot deny that the former Japanese army played a role,” and offered apologies. Three days later, at a dinner hosted by South Korean President Roh Tae Woo, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa declared his remorse and apologized to the people of Korea.

  In 1993, the Kono Statement, named for Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, confirmed that coercion was involved. Critics note that it distinguished carefully between the army and the government, so that the government carried no legal liability. Many victims also found it insufficient because it came from a cabinet official and was never adopted by parliament.

  In 1994, Japan created the Asian Women's Fund, a public-private body. Former comfort women from Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and the Netherlands received a signed apology from Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama. Sixty-one Korean women accepted 5 million yen each, about $42,000, but many refused on principle because the money came from private donations rather than the state. The fund was dissolved on the 31st of March 2007. On the 28th of April 1998, a Japanese court ordered the government to pay the women US$2300 each.

  A backlash followed in the mid-1990s. In 2004, Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama said he wanted references to comfort women removed from textbooks, and textbooks approved in 2005 had none. On the 1st of March 2007, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said there was no evidence that the government had kept sex slaves. In August 2014, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun retracted articles based on claims by Seiji Yoshida, while saying that the retraction did not weaken the evidence. Afterwards, attacks from conservatives grew. The journalist Takashi Uemura received threats, his employer received bomb threats, and online messages targeted his teenage daughter. In 2019, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared the expression “sex slaves” contrary to the facts.

  On the 28th of December 2015, Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye agreed to settle the dispute “finally and irreversibly.” Japan would pay ¥1 billion into a fund for the forty-six surviving women. South Korea would refrain from criticizing Japan and work to remove a memorial statue from outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Several survivors protested that they wanted a sincere acknowledgment of legal responsibility, not money. In January 2018, President Moon Jae-in said, “A knot wrongly tied should be untied.”

  Courts in Seoul kept returning to the question. On the 8th of January 2021, the Seoul Central District Court ordered Japan to pay 100 million won to each family of twelve women. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga answered that a sovereign state should not be put under foreign courts. In April 2021, a different judge rejected a similar case on grounds of state immunity. In November 2023, the Seoul High Court overturned that ruling and ordered Japan to pay 200 million won to a group of women, most of whom had died and were represented by families.

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