TORU YAMANAKA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Japan’s Comfort Women
A WOUND TOO DEEP, LEFT FAR TOO LONG
A formal closure to the issue
of Japan’s wartime sex slaves –
euphemistically known as comfort
women – occurred just at the end
of last year, when Japan’s Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe made a verbal
apology and offered a US$8.3 million
compensation to South Korea’s
President Park Geun-Hye.
This is almost 70 years after
the dark days of the second world
war. Back then, women in Imperial
Japanese colonies were duped into
joining military “comfort stations”,
which were essentially brothels,
where they served sexual needs of
Japanese soldiers.
Why establish such stations?
According to the Japanese Imperial
Army, these would not only prevent
rape crime – which may breed hostility
between the army and their colonies
- but also help to avoid venereal
diseases. Perhaps not unexpectedly,
these problems were not solved. In
fact, they were exacerbated.
Initially, comfort women were
willing Japanese prostitutes. However,
as the war continued, the army fell
short of volunteers. Furthermore, the
In 2015, Japan’s Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe
made a verbal apology
and offered a US$8.3
million compensation to
South Korea’s presidentText Kathy PohJapanese protestors hold
portraits of Chinese, Filipino,
South Korean and Taiwanese
former comfort womenJapanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
was reluctant to issue travel visas to
these prostitutes in fear that it would
mar Japan’s image, thus the army
could only resort to acquiring women
from their occupied territories.
There were many means through
which civilians were tricked into
becoming a comfort woman. One
victim who lived in Japan-occupied
Korea recounted being ordered to
report for work in a Japanese military
factory. Instead, she was taken
to a military base where she was
repeatedly raped for two weeks before
being put in a comfort station.
A 1944 report by the United States
Office of War Information, based on
accounts by Korean comfort women in
Myanmar (then Burma), also revealed
that the girls were lured by easy work,
the promise of a new life in Singapore,
as well as monetary rewards. They
eventually found themselves in
comfort stations with no means to
travel back home.
Documentation on comfort women
is poor. Historians’ estimates put
the total number of victims between
50,000 and 200,000, coming fromcountries like China, Korea, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar
and Australia. Some were as young
as ten years old. After the war, it is
believed that three-quarters of the
comfort women died, while remaining
survivors were mostly left infertile due
to sexual trauma or venereal diseases.
Apologies and compensations
have been repeatedly demanded,
but for over 60 years Japan remained
stubborn that the government
never kept sex slaves. Even now,
Japan’s deal with South Korea has
been deemed by some survivors as
insufficient and insincere. It is difficult
for people to find solace in words
and money when wounds have been
slashed far too deep and left open far
too long. agmemoRies