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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.
The Story of Yong Soo Lee (optional reading for CP World History 10)
The Story of Yong Soo Lee (optional reading for CP World History 10)
Lee lived in Taegu, Korea, under Japanese occupation in the early 1940s. Her family was poor, and she received only one year of formal education. She began working in a factory to support her family at the age of thirteen. In the autumn of 1944, when she was sixteen years old, she and a friend were taken to Taiwan, where they were forced to work as sexual slaves for the Japanese military. She remembers that a Japanese man came to her home and called her to come out. Without knowing where she was going or why, she was taken away by Japanese soldiers. She met three other girls, and they were all put on a train. They went to Kyôngju first, then to P’yôngan Province in northern Korea. During the trip, Japanese soldiers hit and kicked them, and she sometimes lost consciousness. On a ship and again a train, she was taken to Dalian, Shanghai, and finally Taiwan. Various official documents and testimony verified that comfort women were transported by army cargo ships from Japan and Korea to many places in the Asia–Pacific region. It implies that Japan’s Ministry of War was directly involved in transporting those women to war zones, since it was impossible to use any Japanese military ships without the ministry’s permission.
Japanese soldiers waiting in line at a comfort station.
On the way and at the comfort station in Taiwan, Lee was raped, beaten, and tortured. She had to serve four or five men a day. Some victims testified that they had to serve up to sixty soldiers a day. Lee was never paid for these services. According to the Japanese policy of the time (the so-called “Rules of Use for Military Comfort Stations”), acts of abuse against comfort women were prohibited, but daily violence by comfort station operators or soldiers was common.
For the women, refusal to serve meant immediate punishment and torture. Lee said that the girls were warned that if they tried to venture beyond the confines of the station, they would be killed. As she was so frightened and did not know where she was, she could not think of escape. Another survivor from Korea, Ok-sun Yi, described how strict the surveillance at the comfort station was. She tried to escape once, but was caught by Japanese soldiers and stabbed in the arm and leg. She still has those scars, permanent reminders of what she went through. She said that many women were assaulted, tortured, killed, or committed suicide at the comfort station. Yi commented, “It was not a ‘comfort’ station. It was a slaughterhouse!”
Yong Soo Lee delivering her 2007 testimony before the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee about violations of their civil liberties by the Japanese government.
The accusation shows the striking contrast between the dictionary definition of the word “comfort” and the horrible reality of the comfort women system. Yi’s point is supported by other survivors’ stories that in comfort stations, including the one in Qhaojiauyan, Hainan Island, China, comfort women who were “too sick to work were killed rather than given medical treatment.” Other survivors testified that they were prohibited from going out or only allowed to go out for specific purposes under heavy surveillance. Even if they were allowed to go out, unfamiliarity with the local languages and geography made it impossible for the women to escape. In addition, those who did attempt to escape were publicly tortured and killed as examples to the others. According to testimony, when comfort women died, they were not properly buried and were instead abandoned in the street. The women were hungry and constantly abused.
Lee said that the women were given Japanese names and were not allowed to speak in Korean. If they were caught doing so, they were beaten. Many other Korean survivors similarly testified about being prohibited from speaking Korean. Presumably, it was part of the “Japanization policy” in the 1940s that required all Koreans to change their names to Japanese-style names and to speak only Japanese. But it was also to keep the women from escaping. Some survivors testified that they were ordered to sit apart from each other on carriages or ships while they were transported to war zones so that they could not talk. Other survivors said that at the comfort station, the Japanese soliders did not allow the women to congregate and talk, as they were afraid that the women might plan an escape together.
Comfort women on the frontlines had to share the fate of the Japanese soldiers. During frequent air raids, these women, along with the soldiers, had to be evacuated and hidden in mountains or caves. Lee described how, after the bombing ceased, the soldiers would set up makeshift tents and make the women serve them. Many women were killed by bombings or drowned in transit when transport ships sank. After the war, many other comfort women were murdered by retreating Japanese soldiers or abandoned. Some of the victims were rescued or captured as prisoners of war by the Allied Forces and eventually sent home. Lee was one of them. After the war, she was in a POW camp and then went home. When her mother saw her, she thought Lee was a ghost and fainted.
Even after coming back to her hometown, Lee suffered from serious psychological trauma and social stigma, in addition to physical injuries, like many other survivors. Lee said that she could not tell her story to anybody for decades and that the shame of her shattered childhood has haunted her through her life.
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
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