zh-cn:慰安妇
Comfort women is a term for those who worked in the wartime brothels of Asia under Japanese occupation. Many surviving women have testified to being tricked or otherwise coerced into serving the Japanese army as prostitutes during its occupation of Korea, China and much of South East Asia.
Forced into sexual slavery by Japan and raped dozens of times daily by Japanese soldiers, the euphemistically named "comfort women" have faced lives of enduring shame.
The number of women forced into brothels during the war range from 100,000 to 300,000. Most of these brothels were located in Japanese military bases, usually in occupied areas in mainland Asia. Conditions in these brothels were very harsh, and many were never kept clean. Those women who contracted STD's from the soldiers were often left to die of shot.
Up until 1992, the Japanese government has denied any official connection to the wartime brothels. In June 1990, the Japanese government declared that they were run by private contractors.
The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery filed suit, with help from Japanese organizations, in 1990 and independently several comfort women filed suit in the Tokyo District Court demanding apologies. More suits followed in the years to come. Most of these attempts for formal compensation and legal redress have been rejected in Japanese courts.
However, after the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered incriminating documents in the archives of Japan's National Defense Agency in 1992 indicating that the military was directly involved in running the brothels (by for example, selecting the agents who recruited or coerced women into service), Japan's official position has been one of admitting "moral but not legal" responsibility.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone admitted in his memoirs that he had built a comfort station during his service in the war.
In 1995, a Japanese semi-governmental "Asia Women's Fund" was set up for atonement in the form of material compensation and provide each surviving comfort women with a signed apology from the prime minister (unofficial). Many comfort women have rejected these funds due to their unofficial nature and continue to seek an official apology and compensation.
Following official admission of a military connection to the brothels in 1992, the debate has shifted to consideration of evidence and testimony of coercive recruitment of comfort women during the war. Surviving women have testified in a number of trials and a UN mock trial as to their own stories of being subjected to coercion and rape.
Some recent work on the comfort women issue include:
Tanaka, Yuki "Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation"
Yoshimi, Yoshiaki "Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II"
A review of these books and a history and historiography of the issue, from a view critical of the above books can be found in issue 58:2 of Monumenta Nipponica:
Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashii "Comfort Women: Beyond Litigious Feminism"
