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"comfort women"refers to the system of sexual slavery created and controlled by the Imperial Japanese government between 1932 and 1945. It is the largest case of human trafficking and state-sponsored sexual slavery in modern history. Many scholars have argued that the term comfort women, a euphemism coined by the Japanese military, obscures the seriousness of the crime. While the authors agree that "military sex slaves" is a much more accurate and appropriate term, in this article we use the term comfort women to refer specifically to victims of the Japanese military system of sexual slavery during World War II. and "to... .. decades of international debates, historical investigations and legal discourses are being built", based on previous academic work.1Estimates of how many women were involved vary, but most academics agree that hundreds of thousands of women were victims, and that includes girls as young as twelve. Most of the women forced into sexual slavery were from Korea and China, although many women were from Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, East Timor, and the Dutch East Indies, as well as European women in the territories. . occupied by Japan were forced into sexual slavery.
The history of the comfort women is still largely unknown in the United States, but more and more educators are paying attention to the issue as an important historical precedent for human trafficking and sexual violence.2The comfort women case study is an important historical issue, not only because it has affected many women, but also because it teaches us the value of human rights, as well as other historical atrocities such as the sexual degradation of many black women in the antebellum slave states of the United States and contemporary international sex trafficking.
As with these other issues, we must study the past to avoid similar tragedies in the future. Also, the history of comfort women is a current issue that is yet to be resolved. Victims and organizations working on their behalf have asked the Japanese government for an apology, reparation and recognition for the atrocities suffered by the women.
Using the personal stories of comfort women as instructional material can help educators emphasize the importance of protecting human rights, giving students a vivid picture of the impact human rights violations have on life. of people. The stories of the comfort women may be graphic, but they are necessary to fully understand the human rights abuses these women suffered. For students learning about today's wars and atrocities in the media, an open and frank discussion would be helpful in teaching how to critically understand such events, both past and present.
Story of the Comfort Women
Comfort stations were first established in Shanghai in 1932, then in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, East New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macao, French Indochina and other regions.
In the early 20th century, Japan gradually increased its power and control over East Asia, including Taiwan (colonized in 1895), Korea (declared a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and annexed in 1910), and Manchuria (a puppet government installed in 1932). ). Beginning with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937), Asia was constantly at war, a condition that later became part of World War II. During the period of constant warfare from the early 1930s to 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army introduced and maintained the comfort women system. Official Japanese military records and personal memoirs provide unequivocal evidence that the Japanese military built and controlled the system. For example, Okabe Naosaburō, a senior officer in the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, wrote the following in his diary about establishing a comfort station in the Shanghai area in 1932:
Lately, the soldiers have been going everywhere looking for women, and I often hear obscene stories [about their behavior]. As long as conditions are peaceful and the military is not involved, these incidents are hard to avoid. Rather, we must recognize that we can actively provide facilities. I considered many policy options to solve the sexual problems of the troop and began to work towards that goal. Lieutenant Colonel Nagami [Toshinori] will be primarily responsible for this matter.3
The document shows that the staff officers of each army generally gave orders to establish comfort posts, and the staff officers of the subordinate units devised a plan and carried it out.4Comfort stations are to be used for troops and officers only. The Japanese military cited various justifications for creating the system: to increase army morale; control the behavior of soldiers; contain venereal disease among the troops; and the prevention of violations by Japanese soldiers, thus avoiding an increase in hostility among the residents of the occupied territories.5
Comfort stations were first established in Shanghai in 1932, then in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, East New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macao, French Indochina and other regions. Comfort stations were set up wherever the Japanese troops went.6
Yong Soo Lee's Story
The comfort stations were initially filled with prostitutes who came from Japan voluntarily. However, as the Japanese military continued its military expansion from the late 1930s onwards, it turned to local populations in occupied areas such as Korea, Taiwan and China to force women to perform sexual services at these stations.
In 1938, the Japanese military began using Japanese or local middlemen to "recruit" women, mainly in Korea and Taiwan. It was common for these agents or their subcontractors to go from city to city placing forty or fifty girls at a time. Once they had enough women, they would send them to China and other war zones. The most common way of "recruiting" girls in Korea was deception, that is, H. false promises of employment as a factory worker, nurse, laundress, or kitchen helper in Japan or other Japanese-occupied territories. Normally, the daughters of poor peasant families would be deceived by this "recruitment" and would not know the true nature of the work until they were placed in a consolation position.7
Towards the end of the war, the military used the police to pick up the women. Many girls were forcibly abducted. In Yong Soo Lee's story, we get to see how a girl was tricked into becoming a comfort woman against her will.8Lee was one of three survivors who testified before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs about violations of his civil liberties by the Japanese government. This testimony led to the passage of the non-binding US House of Representatives Resolution 121 (2007), which requires Japan to take full responsibility for the actions of its military. The personal stories of the testimonial victims give us a vivid picture of this terrible tragedy.
Lee lived under Japanese occupation in Taegu, Korea, in the early 1940s. His family was poor, and he received only one year of formal education. At the age of thirteen, he began working in a factory to support his family. In the fall of 1944, when she was 16, she and a friend of hers were taken to Taiwan to work as sex slaves for the Japanese military. She remembers that a Japanese man came to her house and invited her out. Not knowing where she was going or why, the Japanese soldiers took her away. She met three other girls and they all got on a train. They went first to Kyôngju, then to P'yôngan province in North Korea. As she was driving, the Japanese soldiers beat and kicked her, and she occasionally blacked out. She was taken to Dalian, Shanghai and finally to Taiwan by boat and train again. Various official documents and testimonies confirmed that the comfort women were transported by army cargo ships from Japan and Korea to many locations in the Asia-Pacific region. This implies that the Japanese War Ministry was directly involved in transporting these women to war zones, as it was impossible to use Japanese military ships without the Ministry's permission.9
There were detailed regulations for the use and operation of the comfort stations, which is a clear indication that the Japanese military controlled the system.
Provisions for the use of comfort stations
Clause 59 Basic Principle
To help enforce military discipline while providing opportunities for relaxation and comfort.
Clause 60 Facilities
Comfort stations are mounted on the southern walls of Nikka Hall...
Visiting days are defined for each unit.
Hoshi Session - Sunday
Kuriiwa Unit - Monday and Tuesday
Matsumura Unit – Wednesday and Thursday
Narita Session - Saturday
Power Unit - Friday
Murata Unit - Sunday
Clause 61 Price and Term
1 Comfort posts are open to non-commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
2 Price The time limit is one hour for a man.
Chino – 1 yen
Korean – 1 hyena 50 sen
Japanese – 2 yen
§ 62 Review
Every Monday and Friday is exam day. On Friday, the women will be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
English translation of the "Regulations for the Use of Comfort Posts" of the 2nd Independent Battalion of Heavy Siege Artillery. March 1938,Shiryoshusei,Vol II, pp. 351-258. Source: Asian Women's Fund websitehttps://tinyurl.com/y3roaafs.
Along 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 she had to serve up to sixty soldiers a day. Lee was never paid for these services. According to Japanese policy at the time (so-called "Rules of Use for Military Comfort Stations"), abusive acts against comfort women were prohibited, but daily violence by station operators or soldiers comfort was common. There were detailed regulations for the use and operation of the comfort stations, which is a clear indication that the
The Japanese military controlled the system. For example, the regulations of the Huayue-lou comfort post in Nanjing, dated March 6, 1939, contain provisions regarding the medical examination of these women, the hours and fees of soldiers and officers of various ranks, and the requirement to use condoms.10
However, these rules were not enforced on the ground, especially at makeshift comfort posts on the front lines, where a lack of strict surveillance and inadequate supplies of condoms caused problems. Soldiers refused to use condoms, and medical personnel were not always available. Many women had to work even after contracting sexually transmitted diseases. In some cases, including the consolation center in Shanghai, the Japanese military forced women to receive injections of salvasan or arsphenamine to prevent syphilis. Salvasan is extremely toxic and many women who have received it have suffered serious side effects such as infertility. The fees collected for the consolation stands also did not go to the women, but to the operators of the consolation stands. Although some women were able to deposit their savings into military mail savings accounts, they were unable to withdraw their money during and after the war.11
For women, refusal to serve meant immediate punishment and torture. Lee said the girls were warned they would be killed if they tried to venture beyond the station's boundaries. Because she was so scared and she didn't know where she was, she couldn't think of running away. Another survivor from Korea, Ok-sun Yi, described how heavily guarded the comfort station was. She once tried to escape from her, but the Japanese soldiers caught her and stabbed her in the arm and leg. She still has those scars, permanent reminders of what she's been through. She said that many women in the comfort room were beaten, tortured, killed or committed suicide. Yi commented, "It wasn't a 'comfort' station. It was a slaughterhouse!"12The indictment shows the stark contrast between the dictionary definition of the word "comfort" and the terrible reality of the comfort woman system. Yi's point is supported by the stories of other survivors that at comfort posts, including those in Qhaojiauyan on Hainan Island, China, comfort women who were "too sick to work were killed and received no medical treatment."13Other survivors stated that they were prohibited from leaving the house under close surveillance or were only allowed to leave the house for specific purposes. Even when allowed to leave, the women's ignorance of the local languages and geography made escape impossible. Furthermore, those who tried to escape were publicly tortured and killed as an example to others. According to witnesses, when comfort women died, they were improperly buried and left on the streets. The women were starving and constantly abused.
“They took everything from me. They took everything from me, my youth, my self-esteem, my dignity, my freedom, my possessions and my family.”
Lee said the women were given Japanese names and not allowed to speak Korean. If they were caught, they were beaten. Many other Korean survivors also testified that they were prohibited from speaking Korean. Presumably, it was part of the "Japanization policy" in the 1940s, which required all Koreans to change their names to Japanese names and speak only Japanese. But it should also discourage women from running away. Some survivors testified that they were ordered to sit separately in carriages or boats while being transported to war zones so they could not speak. Other survivors said that the Japanese soldiers did not allow the women at the consolation station to meet and talk, fearing that the women might plan a common escape.
The comfort women at the front had to share the fate of the Japanese soldiers. During frequent air raids, these women had to be evacuated with soldiers and hidden in mountains or caves. Lee described how, after the shelling stopped, the soldiers set up makeshift tents and made the women wait for them. Many women were killed in shelling or drowned in transit when transport ships sank. After the war, many other comfort women were killed or abandoned by retreating Japanese soldiers. Some of the victims were rescued by the Allies or captured as prisoners of war and eventually sent home. Lee was one of them. After the war, he was in a prisoner of war camp and then returned home. When her mother saw her, she thought Lee was a ghost and fainted.
Even after returning to his hometown, in addition to his physical injuries, Lee suffered severe psychological trauma and social stigma like many other survivors. Lee said that she was unable to tell anyone her story for decades and that the shame of her broken childhood haunted her throughout her life. Some people, she said, may think that what happened to her sounds like a script or a novel, but she assured that it is about real things that really happened to her. After all the experiences of the war, marriage was out of the question. In 1992, Kim Hak-soon, a survivor, testified publicly for the first time. Encouraged by Kim's testimony and survivor support groups, Lee broke her silence and began to speak about her experiences during World War II. Since then, Lee has become a public figure and activist in the women's rights movement, and to this day she has called on the Japanese government to officially acknowledge and apologize to comfort the women. She has participated in numerous international conferences and US Congressional hearings and has presented her testimony in Japan, the United States, China, and Taiwan to raise public awareness of the issue of comfort women.
The Jan Ruff O'Herne Story
Jan O'Herne is another survivor who testified in the 2007 US Congressional hearing. She was born in Java, in the former Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia), in 1923 to a fourth-generation Dutch family. She grew up on a sugar plantation. When she was nineteen in 1942, Japanese troops invaded Java and interned thousands of Dutch women and children, including the O'Herne family, in a prison camp. In 1944, when she was 21, she was forced into a brothel to become a sex slave for the Japanese army. One day, high-ranking Japanese officials came to the camp and ordered all single girls over the age of seventeen to line up at the camp. They went down the line, looking the women up and down, and chose ten pretty girls from the camp. O'Herne was one of them. The entire camp protested and the girls' mothers tried to make them back off. O'Herne hugged her mother, not knowing if she would see her again. These girls were thrown into an army truck and taken to a Dutch colonial house in Semarang, which turned out to be a brothel.
Although they protested, the girls were given Japanese names and taken away one by one. She could hear screaming coming from the bedrooms. She was raped "in the most brutal manner" and more Japanese soldiers were waiting for her. This went on all night and "this was just the beginning, week after week, month after month." The girls were "systematically beaten and raped day and night," O'Herne said. “They took everything from me. They took everything from me, my youth, my self-esteem, my dignity, my freedom, my assets and my family”. She was repeatedly abused, beaten and raped for three months, she was returned to the detention center with threats that her family would be killed if she revealed the truth about the atrocities.
Survivors in the Philippines also testified that they were forcibly abducted and taken to consolation posts. In many places in the Philippines and China, toward the end of the war, Japanese troops directly recruited young women into consolation positions.14When interviewed, a Filipino survivor, Hiralia Bustamante, said she was kidnapped by Japanese soldiers on her way home while helping her mother harvest rice. They took her to a house and locked her in rooms with two or three other women who were also kidnapped. They were not allowed to talk to each other and had to cook and clean during the day. Every night they were raped by Japanese soldiers. No one could escape. Those who tried to flee were shot on the spot or publicly executed. The horror lasted several months.quince
Fifty years passed before the life of O'Herne and many other survivors became a human rights issue. Testifying before the United States Congress, O'Herne said that "the war for comfort women never ended." When the war broke out in Bosnia in 1992, O'Herne again saw women being abused in an organized way, and she also saw survivors offering comfort to women on television while begging for justice, apologies and compensation from the Japanese government. It was at that moment that O'Herne decided to break her silence to support the other survivors and prevent similar crimes against women. She testified as a witness at the International Public Hearing on Japanese War Crimes in Tokyo, Japan, in 1992.
O'Herne campaigned for the plight of comfort women in Australia and elsewhere and for the protection of women in war. O'Herne emphasizes that time is running out. After sixty years (since 2007, when she testified before the United States Congress), comfort women deserve justice. Although their backgrounds and experiences differ, these former comfort women have surprisingly similar demands from each other. They demanded a formal apology from the Japanese government, legal compensation and reparations, a full investigation into the comfort women system, and recognition of the atrocities they suffered through the establishment of monuments and museums. Above all, they want their story to be included in Japanese textbooks. They want future generations to know about this atrocity.
O'Herne campaigned for the plight of comfort women in Australia and elsewhere and for the protection of women in war. O'Herne emphasizes that time is running out. After sixty years (since 2007, when she testified before the United States Congress), comfort women deserve justice. Although their backgrounds and experiences differ, these former comfort women have surprisingly similar demands from each other. They demanded a formal apology from the Japanese government, legal compensation and reparations, a full investigation into the comfort women system, and recognition of the atrocities they suffered through the establishment of monuments and museums. Above all, they want their story to be included in Japanese textbooks. They want future generations to know about this atrocity.
What the stories tell us
The stories of these women represent the stories of many other victims, living and dead. Trafficking and sexual exploitation are a denial of human rights and civil liberties. Comfort women are an important case study, as they are an institutionalized, government-sponsored sex trafficking operation during the war and also an ongoing problem. As Margaret Stetz points out, teaching about comfort women will foster solidarity with victims who deserve support and help a new generation understand their experiences of sexual violence.sixteen
Although the comfort women issue is often portrayed in the media as a nationalist conflict between Korea and Japan,17These comfort stories of ex-wives allow us to look into their personal lives and address this issue from a human rights perspective beyond national borders. The active compensation movement for comfort women in the United States is a good example. Japanese-American Congressman Mike Honda introduced HR 121 to the United States Congress. After its passage in 2007, similar resolutions calling on the Japanese government to acknowledge and apologize were passed in the city halls of many American cities and in other countries, including the Philippines, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States European Union. In the years that followed, monuments to comfort the women were erected in at least ten cities across the United States, including Palisades Park, New Jersey; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Glendale, Calif. Although Korean-American groups initially started this movement, public-private partnerships and cross-cultural connections have been a driving force in the comfort women awareness movement in the US. For example, the Comfort Women Memorial Peace Garden in Fairfax County, Virginia, is the result of a collaboration between a Korean-American activist group, the Washington Coalition of Comfort Women Issues (WCCW), and the Fairfax County government, which led to Comfort in Mind Women a story on women's rights and human trafficking, which in 2014 resonated with its own serious issue of adolescent trafficking.18The Comfort Women Memorial in San Francisco is another excellent example of cross-cultural efforts on this issue. A cross-cultural nonprofit organization, the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, began installing a memorial. In 2015, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution to erect a monument dedicated to the Comfort Women to educate the community to end the trafficking of women and girls. The statue was unveiled in 2017. This bronze statue shows three teenagers representing China, Korea, and the Philippines standing in a circle and holding hands. Next to them is an elderly female figure in Korean clothes who looks at the girls. The inscription begins with the comment of a former comforter: "Our greatest fear is that our painful history during World War II will be forgotten."
Survivor stories as teaching material
Using the personal stories of victims as educational material has many benefits. We conclude this essay by presenting the reactions of students who learned about the issue of comfort women through the personal stories of survivors. One of the authors conducted a special internship program with students from the city's community college on war crimes that focused on East Asia during World War II. The students were men and women and of different ethnicities. Using Skype, the students interviewed surviving comfort women in Korea and the Philippines. Survivors told stories of how they were lured into prostitution and brutalized. After classroom discussions and interviews with survivors, the students reacted strongly. A student shared how he learned the facts of the comfort woman system in the internship class, but interviewing one of the survivors and learning her personal story made the story real for him. He has a fifteen-year-old sister who helped him trace the survivor's story, as this survivor was transferred to a comfort room when she was fifteen. She said she wouldn't knowwhat to do if this happened to your little sister. Another student said that interviewing a consoling woman was like talking to her own grandmother, and that fact made her story very personal to him. A young student spoke about how she was touched by the testimony of the dildos and promised that she would share her story so the world would know of her suffering. For her thesis, students wrote poems, created flyers on behalf of survivors to inform the public, and created Facebook pages. A young man painted a portrait of a comfortable woman, showing a single face divided down the middle, with one side depicted as a young woman and the other as an old woman. As he explained, she doesn't have a mouth on either side because comfort women don't have a voice, then or now. The victims not only lacked agency when the crimes occurred, they still lack agency today, despite the fact that they were excluded from the negotiation process that specifically addressed the issue between Japan and South Korea in the 1993 Kono Declaration and Agreement on 2015 as main examples.19
The reactions of these students to the subject are instructive. The atrocities occurred almost eighty years ago, but the students found the dilemmas and consequences facing women today very real. The survivors' personal stories, in all their vividness and immediacy, galvanized students into action.20
COMMENTS
1. Peipei Qiu, Zhiliang Su y Lifei Chen,Chinese Comfort Women - Testimonials from Sex Slaves of Imperial Japan(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1.
2. In 2016, the California Board of Education included an explanation of the Japanese imperial system of sexual slavery in the revised 10th grade History/Social Science framework.
3. Okabe Naosaburō,Okabe Naosaburō taishō no nikki(Tokyo: Fuyō shobō, 1982), 23 (entrada del 14 de marzo de 1932), citado en Yoshimi Yoshiaki,Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Army during World War II(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 45.
4. Yuki Tanaka,Japanese Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the American Occupation(Nueva York: Routledge, 2002), 21.
5. For the historical background of comfort stations, see Chapter 2 of Yoshimi's book. This chapter provides context and evidence of how the Japanese military was involved in the establishment and control of comfort stations.
6. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson,Broken Silence: Korean Comfort Women(Parkersburg: Mid-Prairie Books, 1999), 40.
7. Tanaka, 38.
8. The stories of Yong Soo Lee and Jan Ruff O'Herne are based on their testimony in the US Congressional hearing Protecting the Human Rights of Comfort Women: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Asia, Pacific and Committee on Foreign Relations, Global Environment, House of Representatives, 110th Congress, 1st Session (2007, February 15) (Serial Nos. 110-16) (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office) .
9. Tanaka, 24–25.
10. Here, Su and Chen, 6.
11. Ebd., 61–62.
12. CUNY Queensborough Community College, Asian Social Justice Internship Final Presentation, 2015,https://tinyurl.com/y4qxv2qc.
13. Based on Wu Lianshen's statement quoted in Qiu, Su and Chen, 61.
14. Tanaka, 48.
15. Hiralia Bustamante's story is based on her May 2015 interview with Asian social justice interns at CUNY Queensborough Community College.
16. Margaret D. Stetz, "Teaching 'Comfort Women' Topics in Women's Studies Courses,"The Radical Teacher66 (2003): 18.
17. In 2015, the governments of Japan and South Korea signed an agreement to address the issue of comfort women. However, most of the survivors in Korea and their supporters did not accept this as an appropriate or legitimate way to solve war crimes due to the complete lack of victim voices in Korea and elsewhere. For current debates and issues related to comfort women between Japan and South Korea, see Tom Phuong Le, "Negotiating in Good Faith: Overcoming Legitimacy Issues in the Japan-South Korea Reconciliation Process."Asian Studies Journal78, no. 3 (2019): 621–644; und Young-Hwan Chong, “The Problem of the Japanese Army's Comfort Women and the 1965 System: Empire's Comfort Women and Dual Historical Revisionism”European Journal of Korean Studies19, WOMAN. 1 (2019): 201–227.
18. Mary M. McCarthy, "America's Comfortable Women Memorials: Vehicles for Understanding and Change,"Asia Pacific Newsletter, no. 275 (2014): 1.
19. Death, 631-632.
20. The authors have developed a lesson in a research project format for the high school or college classroom. The curriculum and materials are available for free download athttps://tinyurl.com/y5zo3wle.