Japanese Military Sexual Slavery

Between 1932 and 1945, an estimated 200,000 girls and young women were abducted by the Japanese military and forced into sexual slavery in military brothels. Women and girls were taken from Japan, its colonies, and Japanese-occupied countries throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, including Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, among others. Girls were captured or lured away from their families with the promise of a job, then detained in facilities, called “comfort stations,” where they were systematically raped and abused by Japanese military personnel. Throughout history, systemic rape and other forms of sexual violence have been used as weapons of war aimed at dehumanization, humiliation and the destruction of community bonds, and is now considered a war crime by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Women were recruited from existing brothels in Japan. In Korea and Taiwan, the Japanese government licensed contractors to recruit or otherwise procure women, oftentimes through kidnapping or coercion and sometimes in collaboration with local governments and police; in other occupied countries, the military kidnapped women or forced local leaders to provide them. While women entered “comfort stations” under different circumstances, they are considered victims of sex trafficking by today’s standards. In addition to sexual assault, they endured other forms of violence such as beatings and stabbings, along with sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies and psychological trauma.[3] Most of the women did not survive - it’s estimated that 87% died as a result of their experiences. Some survivors were able to return to their families after the war. However, due to cultural taboos regarding sex and morality, as well as the complicity of the colonized Korean state and lack of public knowledge about military sexual slavery, the women were often viewed as “defiled”, and rejected by their local communities.

In 1990, a coalition of activist groups formed to support the survivors and demand redress from Japan. Japan had not yet acknowledged its role in the atrocities, insisting that the women were voluntarily serving as prostitutes. In 1991, a Korean woman named Kim Hak-soon became the first survivor to share her story publicly and to demand redress from the Japanese government. Since then, hundreds of women in Korea, the Philippines, China and across Asia, many of whom had stayed silent for decades, came forward to testify about their experiences.

After Kim Hak-soon came forward, a group of Korean survivors who were called halmoni—grandmother in Korean—filed a class-action lawsuit against the Japanese government, demanding an official investigation, admission of war crimes, formal apology, and compensation. In 1992, after a Japanese historian discovered evidence proving that the Japanese military established and operated the “comfort stations”, Prime Minister Miyazawa issued a personal apology and launched two formal investigations. In 1995, Japan established the Asian Women’s Fund, which provided compensation for the remaining survivors funded jointly by the government and private donations. But many survivors and activists rejected this fund, arguing that it framed reparations as a generous moral act rather than an admission of legal culpability for the government’s war crimes. Indeed, a 2015 agreement between the governments of South Korea and Japan that established another national fund to care for the survivors still did not recognize Japan’s legal responsibility. Advocates criticized the 2015 statement for its evasive wording about the state’s institutional role in the atrocities and apologetic stance, the omission of the need for education and memorialization, and the absence of survivors and their advocates at the negotiating table.

The issue of sexual slavery during World War II is still contentious in Japan, where the public is split on whether Japanese military sexual slavery constituted a war crime. As part of the 2015 agreement, the Japanese government called for the removal of a bronze statue of a young girl, which memorializes survivors, that was installed across from the Japanese embassy in Seoul in December 2011. In January 2017, Japan temporarily recalled its ambassador to South Korea in protest of an installation of another bronze girl statue near the Japanese consulate in Busan, and in October 2018, the city of Osaka terminated its 50-year sister city relationship with San Francisco over a "comfort woman" memorial. As of October 2018, there are 109 similar bronze girl statues in South Korea and 22 abroad, including ten “comfort women” memorials in the United States.

Since 1992, activists with the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (now called the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan) have staged weekly protests outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul. As of 2017, only 35 of the Korean grandmothers were alive, and their average age was 91. Some of the women live together in group homes in Seoul, and some attend the protests regularly.

Advocacy groups working with survivors have five primary demands of the Japanese government. First, an official apology accompanying a Cabinet or parliament resolution (rather than one that can be construed as one leader's personal view, such as the Prime Minister's letter issued in 2015); second, formal compensation to the victims; third, lessons on this history in Japanese classes and textbooks; and finally, investigation of official policies that established and maintained the system of sexual slavery; and finally, memorialization of the survivors.

For further information on this period in history, please see:

Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School: Military Sexual Slavery During World War II: The "Comfort Women" – https://www.law.columbia.edu/korean-legal-studies/sexual-slavery-during-wwi-comfort-women-issue

Facing History and Ourselves: Rape as a Weapon of War –https://www.facinghistory.org/nanjing-atrocities/judgment-memory-legacy/rape-weapon-war

Fact Sheet on Japanese Military “Comfort Women” (The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus)

https://apjjf.org/-Asia-Pacific-Journal-Feature/4829/article.html