The Voices of Comfort Women: Stories from the Past

Comfort Women

Even though the first women were coerced into sexual slavery for Imperial Japan almost a century ago, the specifics of their enslavement are still painful and contentious in Japan and the former occupied nations. There are few records of women’s subjugation; an estimated 90% of “comfort women” did not survive the war, and there are very few survivors. Although military brothels had been a part of the Japanese military since 1932, they became much more widespread following the Rape of Nanking, one of the most notorious events in imperial Japan’s campaign to conquer the Republic of China and a large portion of Asia. The Chinese city of Nanking was virtually destroyed by a six-week massacre that Japanese troops started on December 13, 1937. Emperor Hirohito was worried about how the mass rapes would affect Japan’s reputation, and they appalled the entire world. He directed the military to increase its so-called “comfort stations,” or military brothels, as legal historian Carmen M. Agibay points out, in an attempt to stop additional crimes, lower the number of STIs, and guarantee a stable and
segregated group of sex workers to satiate the sexual cravings of Japanese soldiers.

The Truth Behind Comfort Women

The term “comfort women” describes the system of sexual slavery that the Imperial Japanese government established and oversaw from 1932 until 1945. This is the biggest instance of state- sponsored sexual slavery and human trafficking in contemporary history. The Japanese military created the euphemism “comfort women,” which many academics contend downplays the seriousness of the crime. The term “comfort women” is used in this article to specifically refer to the victims of the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery during World War II, ” The majority of academics concur that hundreds of thousands of women, including girls as young as twelve, were harmed, though estimates of the exact number of victims vary. While many women from Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Việt Nam, Thailand, East Timor, and the Dutch East Indies, as well as European women in Japanese-occupied territories, were forced into sexual slavery, the majority of those who were forced into it were from Korea and China.

Although little is known about the comfort women’s past, more and more educators are becoming aware of the problem as a noteworthy historical precedent in sexual violence and human trafficking. Similar to other historical atrocities like the sexual degradation of numerous black women in US antebellum slave states and current international sexual human trafficking, the case study of comfort women is an important historical issue because it affected a large number of women and because it teaches us the importance of human rights. By giving students a clear picture of the effects that human rights abuses have on people’s lives, educators can better emphasize the value of defending human rights by using comfort women’s personal stories as teaching materials. The stories of comfort women may be graphic, but they are essential to comprehending the abuses of human rights those women suffered. Students who are exposed to the media’s portrayal of today’s wars and atrocities would benefit from an honest and open discussion that teaches them to analyze both historical and contemporary events critically.

The brutal history of comfort women

Japan progressively expanded its influence and dominance over East Asia in the early 20th century, annexing Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1905 and annexing it in 1910, and Manchuria in 1932 under a puppet regime. Asia was at war all the time, starting with the Second Sino- Japanese War (1937), a situation that eventually led to World War II. The comfort women system was established and upheld by the Japanese Imperial Army during the years of nonstop conflict, which lasted from the early 1930s to 1945. Official Japanese military records and personal memoirs provide unmistakable proof that the system was established and run by the Japanese military. First opened in Shanghai in 1932, comfort stations later spread to other parts of the world, including Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, East New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and French Indochina. Everywhere the Japanese troops went, there were comfort stations.

It was equivalent to kidnapping or coercing women to recruit them for the brothels. In Japanese- occupied areas, women were either bought from their parents as indentured servants, rounded up on the streets, or persuaded to travel to what they believed to be nursing units or jobs. Although they were from all over Southeast Asia, most of these women were Chinese or Korean. The women were compelled to engage in cruel, inhumane sexual relations with their captors once they arrived at the brothels. Even though each woman’s story was unique, there are many commonalities among their testimonies, including recurring rapes that became more frequent before battles, excruciating physical pain, pregnancy, STDs, and depressing circumstances. Humans had no place there. To prevent the escalation of hostility among the residents of occupied areas, the Japanese military created the system for several reasons, including boosting army morale, controlling soldier behaviour, preventing venereal diseases among the troops, and preventing rapes by Japanese soldiers.

Japan’s military brothels persisted after World War II. Reporters for the Associated Press learned in 2007 that tens of thousands of women in the brothels were coerced into having sex with American men until Douglas MacArthur closed the system in 1946 and that American authorities permitted “comfort stations” to continue operating long after the war ended.

The Aftermath of World War 2- The atrocities through the narrative of Yong Soo Lee

The figures, however, are based on estimates made by historians using a range of existing documents because Japanese officials destroyed records on the system after World War II. The history of Japan’s enslavement of women was minimized as the country recovered from World War II, viewed as a repugnant relic of a past that people would prefer to forget. Women who had been coerced into sexual slavery, meanwhile, were shunned by society. Many of them committed suicide, while others perished from STIs or other complications brought on by the brutal treatment they received from Japanese soldiers. The history of the “comfort women” was ignored and unrecorded for many years. When the matter was brought up in Japan, officials denied it, claiming that “comfort stations” had never existed. Some women then started telling their stories in the 1980s. Following the Republic of South Korea’s transition to a liberal democracy in 1987, women began speaking out about their experiences. When South Korea denounced a Japanese official’s denial of the events in 1990, the matter erupted into a global dispute. The number of women who came forward to testify increased in the following years. The Japanese government finally admitted the atrocities in 1993. But the topic has continued to be contentious ever since. In 2015, the Japanese government finally declared that it would provide compensation to the remaining Korean “comfort women.” However, following a review, South Korea demanded a more forceful apology. As a reminder that the issue is still relevant to current foreign relations from earlier times, Japan recently denounced that request.

There are still a few dozen women who were coerced into sexual slavery by Japan. Among them is 90-year-old survivor Yong Soo Lee, who has made no secret of her wish for the Japanese government to apologize. In 2015, she told the Washington Post, “I never wanted to give comfort to those men.” “I can never forgive what happened to me, even though I don’t want to hate or harbour resentment.”

Conclusion

These women’s stories are representative of the stories of numerous other victims, both living and deceased. Human rights and civil liberties are violated by sex trafficking and exploitation. The Comfort Women are a significant case study because they illustrate both an ongoing problem and an institutionalized, government-sponsored sex trafficking operation during the war. Teaching about comfort women will foster empathy for these victims, who merit assistance, and assist a new generation in comprehending their experiences of sexual violence, as Margaret Stetz notes. Despite the media’s frequent portrayal of the comfort women issue as a nationalist conflict between Korea and Japan, those testimonies of former comfort women allow us to delve into their private lives and approach this issue from a human perspective that passes across national borders.

-Hridya Sharma

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