The “Comfort Women”: A Silent Struggle and Ongoing Fight
Jack Birns, A Nationalist officer guarding women prisoners said to be “comfort girls” used by the Communists, 1948, https://www.history.com/ne, Fair use.
Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military forced tens of thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery.1 The military transferred these women to what it called comfort stations where they were given the title of “comfort women.” Reports have revealed that there were between 100,000 and 200,000 “comfort” women during this time.2 Although eighty percent of these women were Korean, the Japanese military also took women from China and the Philippines.3 The “comfort women” were primarily lower-class Koreans, reflecting Japanese ideas of dominance over Koreans. The demeanor of superiority was an extension of Japan’s colonization of Korea in the late nineteenth century, and its possession in 1910 of the Korean peninsula.4 The Japanese military also forced Japanese women to work at comfort stations; these women were assigned to officers and Korean women were assigned to soldiers.5 Comfort stations were controlled by Japanese civilian proprietors and the military. While at these stations, when they were not serving soldiers sexually, women performed household duties for soldiers such as cooking, laundering, and mending. Comfort stations were open the entire day. Soldiers usually paid a sum of money, which was shared between the proprietor and the woman. Whether it was evenly divided or not is unknown. Some stations permitted the women one day off each month; other stations provided no time off. “Comfort women” could not leave their station without military approval. The patriarchal control in the stations kept women isolated from the public world so they could not expose secrets to potential spies.6
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