"Comfort" Women

Context

During the early twentieth century, Japan gradually established its power and control over East Asia, including Taiwan (colonized in 1895), Korea (made a protectorate of Japan in 1905 and annexed in 1910), and Manchuria (a puppet government set up in 1932). Beginning with the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War (1937), Asia was constantly at war, a state of affairs that later became part of World War II. During the period of constant warfare from the early 1930s to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army implemented and maintained the comfort women system. That the Japanese military set up and controlled the system is clearly evidenced by official Japanese military records and personal memoirs. For example, Okabe Naosaburō, a senior staff officer in the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, wrote the following in his diary, related to establishing a comfort station in the Shangai area in 1932:

Rescued Korean comfort women under Allied protection in Burma

"Recently, soldiers have been prowling around everywhere looking for women, and I often heard obscene stories [about their behavior]. As long as conditions are peaceful and the army is not engaged in fighting, these incidents are difficult to prevent. Rather, we should recognize that we can actively provide facilities. I have considered many policy options for resolving the troops’ sexual problems and have set to work on realizing that goal. Lieutenant Cononel Nagami [Toshinori] will bear primary responsibility in this matter."

The document indicates that senior staff officers of each army typically issued orders to establish comfort stations, and staff officers of subordinate units made a plan and carried it out. Comfort stations were to be used exclusively for troops and officers. The Japanese military used several justifications for creating the system: to boost army morale; to control the behavior of the soldiers; to contain venereal diseases among the troops; and to prevent rapes by Japanese soldiers, thus avoiding the rise of hostility among the inhabitants of occupied areas.

Comfort stations were established first in Shanghai in 1932, then in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, East New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, French Indochina, and other regions. Comfort stations were established wherever the Japanese troops went. At the early stage, many of these stations were filled with prostitutes who voluntarily came from Japan. However, as the Japanese army continued military expansion from the late 1930s, it turned to the local population in occupied areas, such as Korea, Taiwan, and China, to coerce women into serving sexually in these stations.

Four Korean comfort women after they were liberated by US-China Allied Forces outside Songshan, Yunnan Province, China on September 7, 1944.

“They had stripped me of everything. They had taken everything away from me, my youth, my self-esteem, my dignity, my freedom, my possessions, and my family.” (Jan Ruff O’Herne, survivor from the Dutch East Indies)

In 1938, the Japanese military began to utilize Japanese or local brokers to “recruit” women, particularly in Korea and Taiwan. It was common that those agents or their subcontractors would go from one city to another, procuring forty to fifty young girls at once. Once they secured enough women, they would send them to China and other war zones. The most common way to “recruit” young girls in Korea was deceit, that is, making false promises of employment as factory workers, nurses, laundry workers, or kitchen helpers in Japan or other Japanese-occupied territories. Typically, daughters of poor peasant families would be deceived by this “recruiting” and would not know the real nature of the work until they were taken into a comfort station.

Toward the end of the war, the military used the police force to procure women. Many young girls were forcibly taken.

Japanese soldiers waiting in line at a comfort station.

English translation of the 2nd Independent Heavy Siege Artillery Battalion’s “Regulation for the Use of Comfort Stations.” March 1938, Shiryoshusei, Vol. II, PP. 351–258. Source: Asian Women’s Fund website at

Source(s): Association for Asian Studies