Comfort Women: an ongoing battle for justice

Written by Gopiga Arulchelvam and Graziana Gigliuto

The terms comfort women and comfort stations appeared especially during the Second World War in reference to houses in military camps where women were coerced to practise sexual activities with Japanese soldiers. Following the Manchurian incident (September 1931), in 1932, in Shanghai, the Japanese army opened one of the earliest comfort stations. In 1937, the number of comfort stations in China increased with the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war. Since that moment, comfort stations expanded rapidly to South-East Asia, especially with the Pacific war (Imperial Japan against British Empire, USA, Netherlands…) that was going on. It is hard to determine the number of comfort women and this is a frequent source of debate.

Today, the Japanese government is still reluctant to recognize the issue and to give formal apologies. Consequently, comfort women's memories are still part of the culture and keep living through the activism of protesters all around the world. Also, the issue is often a source of diplomatic tensions between Japan and concerned Asian countries.

Comfort stations spreading in Asia

The creation of comfort stations was formally justified by the Japanese government to serve two main objectives: to counter rape and to avoid transmission of sexual diseases. Another purpose was to reward soldiers for their work. This official discourse and system completely disgraced women’s dignity and rights. Indeed, they were sexually abused by Japanese soldiers and even by medical workers that initially had to control their health because of STDs. Most of these women were only aged between 14 and 18.

Furthermore, there were two types of comfort women depending on their connection with the Empire of Japan. The first group included Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese women who were subjects of Imperial Japan. Thus, they were perceived as accomplishing “a patriotic duty in supporting Japan’s war effort”. The recruitment process for each of those women was different. Indeed, Japanese women were generally prostitutes, while Korean and Taiwanese women were deceived through job ads looking for nurses and waitresses, and ended up in military camps as sex slaves. The number of Korean women enrolled in comfort stations was drastically higher than the one of Taiwanese women because of the demography. The second group was composed of women from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. They were considered “spoils of war” and Japan’s adversaries, then they were kidnapped by the Japanese army in occupied areas. Moreover, they were treated even more terribly than the other group of women.

Comfort Women in popular culture and their outcry through art

Although the harrowing comfort women’s stories represent one of the many historical cases of intersectionality that puts gender issues together with colonization issues, they have been ignored for a very long time by public opinion. Only in 1991, after the South Korean Kim Hak-Soon broke over 50 years of silence by testifying about the effective abuses she had suffered at a young age, the issue became popular and other women found the courage to overcome the feeling of shame that haunted sexual abuse victims and denounce the terrible actions that the Japanese military army committed.

In the absence of institutional support and recognition, arts were a useful instrument to convey strong messages and sometimes to relieve pain; for instance, the House of Sharing (Nanumi Jip) in South Korea is a nursery home for still-living comfort women situated in the outskirts of Seoul, and the collection of paints exposed in The Museum of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery has given a voice and an identity to these women' traumatic experiences. In China, other cultural sites such as the Nanjing Museum have paid tribute to the history of comfort women by opening new areas dedicated only to this human rights violation, that happened during the Second World War and, unfortunately, too many years passed without it to be denounced. Films recently released, documentaries, art exhibitions, and museums are all important means to use in order to fight historical revisionism promoted by some scholars and historians, and even not too thinly supported by the Japanese Government, which tends to cancel or cover the inconvenient issues that can stain the national image.

Full recognition of the war crimes committed and the effort to keep the memory of past mistakes alive should not only be a human responsibility but also represent a precious though brutal lesson for the next generations.

Comfort Women today, protesting to not be forgotten

The embarrassment to denounce the acts of sexual violence that they went through and the fear of being ostracized by their own families and communities were just some of the struggles that comfort women had to experience during their lives.

Moreover, the difficulty of being recognized as a victim still matters today. The ‘Comfort Women’ Protest Movement is one of the longer-lived in South Korea, initially conceived as a peaceful protest in 1992 and still going on after about three decades. The ‘Comfort Women’ Protest Movement started when the survivors asked the Japanese government to officially apologize to Korean victims, who were forced into sexual acts by Japanese military personnel before and during the Second World War, by adopting an institutional resolution and condemning a revisionist history proposed by some professors, historians, and conservative civil action groups. Many academic reports and international articles have observed that this movement has spread across South Korean cities, especially in Seoul, but also in other Asian countries such as the Philippines, China, Indonesia, and even Japan, where other women have experienced the “Japanese comfort houses”. The movement also arrived in Western countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, mainly interested in the Korean diaspora.

This protest movement has obtained the support of many organizations, especially the ones concerned about women’s rights protection, and also caught the attention of the youngest generation. The noise provoked by the protest is the cause of much friction between the South Korean and Japanese governments. On one hand, the Japanese institutional representatives are reluctant to admit the involvement of the Japanese government in the management of the “comfort houses” and, on the other hand, the South Korean Council has been accused of taking advantage of the victims’ stories to fuel the anti-Japanese sentiment in the country.

In conclusion, although the political games do not often take the human and social components of an issue into consideration, comfort women were and still are just women whose innocence was stolen, mostly at a young age when they could not expect such violence. The recognition of their suffering will not pay them back but their stories could return back the respect that they deserved and remind us that such violations of human rights still happen all around the world and do not concern only truly dark times as the Second War World was.