Teaching about the Comfort Women during World War II and the Use of Personal Stories of the Victims

“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 government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history. Many scholars have argued that the term comfort women, a euphemism coined by the Japanese military, obscures the gravity of the crime.

 While the authors agree that “military sexual slaves” is a much more accurate and appropriate phrase, we use the term comfort women in this article to refer specifically to the victims of the Japanese military’s sexual slavery system during World War II and “on which decades of international debate, historical research, and legal discourses are mounted,” following the earlier scholarly works.

1 Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, but most scholars agree that hundreds of thousands of women were victimized, and that includes girls as young as twelve years old. A majority of the women who were forced into sexual slavery came from Korea and China, although many women from Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Việt Nam, Thailand, East Timor, and the Dutch East Indies, as well as European women in Japanese-occupied territories, 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 a significant historical precedent in human trafficking and sexual violence. 2 The case study of comfort women is a significant historical issue, not only because it affected so many women, but also because it teaches us the value of human rights, much like other historical atrocities, such as the sexual degradation of many black women in US antebellum slave states and contemporary international sexual human trafficking.
Four Korean comfort women after they were liberated by US-China Allied Forces outside Songshan, Yunnan Province, China on September 7, 1944. Source: The Hankyoreh website at https://tinyurl.com/y4dddxjn. Photo by Charles H. Hatfield, US 164th Signal Photo Company. Note: The original photo is available in the National Archives Catalog at https://tinyurl.com/yyumu88z.

As in these other issues, we have to study the past in order to prevent similar tragedies in the future. Furthermore, the comfort women story is a current issue that has not yet been resolved. The victims and organizations working on their behalf have sought an apology from Japan’s government, reparations, and recognition of the atrocities the women suffered.

Using personal stories of the comfort women as teaching materials can help educators emphasize the importance of protecting human rights by providing students a vivid picture of the impact that human rights violations have on people’s lives. Comfort women stories may be graphic, but are necessary to fully understand the human rights violations that those women endured. For students who hear about today’s wars and atrocities from the media, an open and forthright discussion would be helpful to teach how to critically understand such events in both the past and the present.

History of the Comfort Women

Japanese soldiers waiting in line at a comfort station. Source: Digital Museum: The Comfort Women Issue and the Asian Women’s Fund website at https://tinyurl.com/y6skq9hv. Photo by Japanese journalist Murase Moriyasu. Rescued Korean comfort women under Allied protection in Burma. Source: The Fight for Justice website at https://tinyurl.com/y4qpvamv.

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.

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: