Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Japan's Comfort Women Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the Us Occupation by Y Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the Us Occupation by Yuki Tanaka. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #8e04cf40-d090-11eb-839c-9597ffbb61b8 VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Fri, 18 Jun 2021 23:54:44 GMT. Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the Us Occupation by Yuki Tanaka. During World War II, many atrocities occurred and no nation escaped untarnished. Many of these crimes are well known. Others have faded into the background - in some cases simply because no one cared, and in others because those that suffered were too ashamed of what had been done to them to tell their story. One such atrocity was the enforced sexual slavery of an untold number of women. During World War II, and continuing under the US Occupation of Japan, the Japanese forced, or tricked, women from a variety of countries into forced prostitution. Their job, to service the sexual desires of Japanese soldiers. In Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation Yuki Tanaka takes an honest and in- depth look at the history of Japan's Comfort Women. Tanaka delves into the circumstances that caused the Army to begin to use Comfort Women - including wanting to increase the moral of the men, to maintain army discipline, to prevent the wholesale rape of the women in overrun communities, and as a means of preventing the spread of VD and other sexually transmitted diseases. The Japanese Navy also had their own 'form' of comfort women, euphemistically called special staff . As Tanaka points out, at first the army used professional prostitutes, but as the 'need' increased, they found that professionals could not longer meet the demand. To fill this gap, ordinary women, and even young girls, where forcefully taken, or tricked, into becoming an inmate at a comfort station. In this monumental work, Tanaka describes the various types of comfort stations that existed during the war, the duties the women were forced to perform - and the punishments if they did not obey. Tanaka also describes who the comfort women were. While many were from Korea (a Japanese colony at the time), the Japanese also forced women from just about every country they entered to serve as sexual slaves. Into the mix were also found numerous Western women captured by the Japanese. However, in each area, the Japanese tailored their 'recruitment' methods to maximum advantage - including bargaining for the women, i.e., give us so many women and your village will be spared. The comfort women suffered much more than physical abuse and rape. They also faced the prospect of forced abortions, venereal disease, and worse - shame. To make matter worse, after the war many of these women where unable to return home due to lack of funds, others because they did not want to shame their families by returning 'tarnished' even through no fault of their own. Many of these women kept their horrid secret for decades, and it is only recently that a number of women have begun to speak out about what happened to them. Tanaka has done much to unbiasedly tell the story of the comfort women, and the culpability that other nations had in fostering, even sanctioning, the continuation of the slavery of many women - even after the war ended. Perhaps the most controversial topic covered in this book is the information concerning the prosecutions that followed the war. When it came to the enslavement of Asian comfort women, the allies, namely the US, looked the other way. However, when they discovered a Western, i.e., white women, had been thus abused, they went after the offenders with every means at their disposal. This indifference to the plight of the Asian comfort women was perhaps as insidious as the abuse of their bodies had been, for it told them in clear and uncertain terms that they did not matter! It is little wonder that so many of these women bore their secret in silence and shame. In this work, Tanaka does not simply list the various crimes committed against the women, but also how the activities they were forced to endure affected them - both at the time and in years since. He also details the available scholarship on the subject, and attitudes in Japan, during the war and today, regarding the subject of comfort women. A monumental work of scholarship, Japan's Comfort Women includes a comprehensive list of end notes. Related Reviews: The Floating Brothel , By Sian Rees. The extraordinary story of an eighteenth-century ship and its cargo of female convicts tho were transported from England to Australia. Twentieth-Century China - New Approaches , Edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Eleven compelling essays that take a 'new' look at Contemporary Chinese history. Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the Us Occupation by Yuki Tanaka. ASIAN COMFORT WOMEN - WORLD WAR II PERIOD - SEXUAL SLAVERY. Link to Associated Press Article by Eric Talmadge: America's Comfort Women - Tokyo Officials Kept Sex Slaves for US Occupiers. Attached is a Photo Copy of the Memorandum for the Members of the Third Fleet Naval Landing Force Regiment - US Navy - By Commandier L. T. Malone. September 29th, 2007. Trafficking is A Long Standing Crime - US Troop Use of Japan�s Trafficked Women 1945. - Lys Anzia - WNN - Women News Network. Trafficking of women for forced sexual use is a long standing crime. The United States was also guilty of involvement in these acts immediately following World War II in Japan. According to an April 25, 2007 Associated Press article about US involvement with Japanese brothels in 1945, by Eric Talmadge, �An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan�s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war.� On the days of Japanese surrender to the United States after the devastation of World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, records show that Japan�s Ibaraki Prefectural Police Department, the Kempeitai, which had been in charge of forced prostitution during the war, set up numerous �comfort stations� for US GIs by order of the office of Japan�s Ministry of Interior on August 18, 1945. The Kempeitai were founded in 1881 as Japan�s military police force. They numbered up to 75,000 during the war and were the ongoing managers of the Japanese brothel system. One brothel called Yasu-ura House �comfort station� in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture was set up immediately by the Japanese Kempetai and Japan�s RAA � the Recreation and Amusement Association using Japanese government funds. This brothel was used for US military men flooding Japan at the end of the war on August 18, 1945. Numerous other brothels were also created. At times, the brothels were very crowded with up to 600 men standing in line. The publicly accepted logic, used by Japan�s office of the Ministry of Interior for setting up the prostitution houses, was that a strong barrier between the foreign �winners of the war� and the �good� women of Japan had to be made to save �respected� regular women from the invaders. In massive numbers women from the Philippines, Korea and China were shipped to �comfort stations� worldwide. Through this forced trafficking of women the continuing betrayal and severe suffering of the women in the brothels went on � even after the war was over. �Twelve soldiers raped me in quick succession, after which I was given half an hour rest. Then twelve more soldiers followed. They all lined up outside the room waiting for their turn. I bled so much and was in such pain, I could not even stand up. The next morning, I was too weak to get up. . . I could not eat. I felt much pain, and my vagina was swollen. I cried and cried, calling my mother. I could not resist the soldiers because they might kill me. So what else could I do? Every day, from two in the afternoon to ten in the evening, the soldiers lined up outside my room and the rooms of the six other women there. I did not even have time to wash after each assault. At the end of the day, I just closed my eyes and cried. My torn dress would be brittle from the crust that had formed from the soldiers� dried semen. I washed myself with hot water and a piece of cloth so I would be clean. I pressed the cloth to my vagina like a compress to relieve that pain and the swelling,� said Maria Rosa Henson, a former Filipina comfort woman, in Yuki Tanaka�s 2001 searing book, Japan�s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II & the US Occupation . On landing in Japan, the overwhelming numbers of US troops demanding sexual service grew quickly causing Japan�s (RAA) Recreation and Amusement Association to use force and coercion to get greater and greater numbers of women for forced sex-use. Another �comfort station� brothel after Japan�s surrender was called Komachien , The Babe Garden. It quickly expanded in size from 38 to 100 women. When the US Navy landed in Yokosuka Naval Yard, Japan, on Aug. 30 1945, Commander of the Third Fleet Naval Landing Force � US Navy Commander L.T. Malone set the ground rules for all military men going on shore. At that time the �comfort station� in Yokusuka was quickly being set in place for the incoming men by the Ministry of Interior�s office in Tokyo. On landing, Cmdr. Malone wrote a memo to his men two days before the men stepped ashore stating, �We have been chosen, largely by luck, to represent our U.S. Navy in occupation of Tokyo. There were close to one quarter of a million officers and men in the THIRD Fleet to pick from and we got the nod. We are honored to have this opportunity to represent our Navy in this occupation. Many others will follow us in after we have squared things away but we make the initial impression and, mark you well, it will be one of the great first impressions of history.� Today this �good� impression of history is being re-written so the truth can be told about the US use of trafficked women in Japan. In Dec. 6, 1945, Lt. Col. Hugh McDonald, a senior officer with the Public Health and Welfare Division of the US occupation�s General Headquarters, wrote of the US knowledge in the forced use of women as sex-servers. In his memorandum he wrote on the subject, �The girl is impressed into contracting (the RAA) by the desperate financial straits of her parents and their urging, occasionally supplemented by her willingness to make such a sacrifice to help her family. . . It is the belief of our informants, however, that in urban districts the practice of enslaving girls, while much less prevalent than in the past, still exists.� �These recruiters were actively assisted by the military police (kempeitai) and local police, to ensure that the girls and women �volunteered�. It is indisputable that these women were forced, deceived, coerced and abducted to provide sexual services to the Japanese military,� states the 1994 report, Japan � Comfort Women: An Unfinished Ordeal: Report of a Mission by Ustinia Dolgopol and Snehal Paranjape for the International Commission of Jurists, Geneva, Switzerland . The postwar Japanese sponsored brothels serviced US military men for almost a year from August 1945 until General Douglas MacArthur closed the program in the spring of 1946 as occupied Japan began to attempt rebuilding from its 3 million dead and nine million homeless. �Whether it was morning or night, once one soldier left, the next soldier came. Twenty men would come in one day�� said Korean comfort woman, Pak Kumjoo, of her torture from sex-enslavement at the age of seventeen. Women forced by the Japanese to service men during the war years were called the � jugun ianfu � � �comfort women.� The place where women were forced to sexually perform was called a �comfort house� or �comfort station.� In recent, April 2007, �previously undisclosed� war documents provided by the French, Dutch and Chinese governments provide undisputed proof of the forced use of women as �comfort women.� Brothels in remote locations at the Japanese frontlines included �comfort stations� in Indonesia, China, East Timor, Vietnam and as far away as New Guinea. From these newly released documents the conditions of the unending suffering of women used as sex-slaves during the war has finally come to light in the public�s eye, especially the eye of Japan . In an attempt to pander to conservative politicians, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has given opposite statements on the subject though. As recently as March 1, 2007 he said to a group of reporters, �The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.� The newly released documents from 1948 clearly prove the opposite. These documents, filed under the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo , also called the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, were released in April 2007 by the scholars from the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan �s War Responsibility. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal is simply called today by many Japanese citizens the � Tokyo Trials.� Nation participants in the tribunal included eleven judges from the allied powers of the United States, Soviet Union , United Kingdom , Republic of China, the Netherlands , Provisional Government of the French Republic, Australia , New Zealand , Canada , British India and the Philippines . In the 1948 judgment on war crimes during the tribunal, prosecution document No. 5330, clearly mentions the forced use of women for brothels during the war. This document was quoted recently in a April 18, 2007 article in The Japan Times by Reiji Yoshida, saying, �The Special Naval Police (Tokei Tai) had ordered to keep the brothels supplied with women; to this end they arrested women on the streets and after enforced medical examination placed them in the brothels.� The 1948 document continues, �Women who had had relations with Japanese were forced into the brothels, which were surrounded by barbed wire. They were only allowed on the streets with special permission.� - Jang Jum Dol, Japanese Comfort Woman, was 14 when Kidnapped by the Japanese - image: Chris Steele-Perkins - These and other statements included in numerous tribunal documents and findings caused 28 defendants, comprised of military and political leaders, to be sentenced. Two Japanese defendants died during the trial, seven were sentenced to death and sixteen more were sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1948, the US government played a strong position as a member of the tribunal. Only three years earlier US troop use of the atrocious �comfort stations,� were set in place in the late summer 1945 to spring of 1946. During this time these crimes and behaviors were accepted and encouraged the US military. �The Japanese military preyed on the most vulnerable members of society for its sexual slavery system � those who because of age, poverty, class, family status, education, national, or ethnicity were most susceptible to being deceived and otherwise trapped into slavery. The women were drawn primarily from Japan �s occupied and annexed territories, mostly from poor and rural communities,� said the transcript from The Oral Judgement delivered by the Judges of the Women�s International Tribunal on Japan �s Military Sexual Slavery given on Dec. 4, 2001 at The Hague, in the Netherlands . Today, through recent exposure of tribunal documents, we know that the War Crimes Tribunal specifically cited the forced sexual use of women as an example of war crimes during World War II . While the US was attempting to legally close the door on war atrocities, along with all other nation partners during the tribunal, it was hiding its own terrible secret � its own direct involvement in sex crimes against innocent women that occurred as US military men reached the shore of occupied Japan in August 1945. Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the Us Occupation by Yuki Tanaka. The “Bangka Island Massacre”: Australian military nurses in the Pacific War. Angharad Fletcher London and Hong Kong. Centaur Poster. “Civilian nurses, bound on errands of mercy among the worst underworld dens, are never in danger from the most hardened criminals. But Australia’s nurses were not safe from the Japanese. No British citizen forgets the name of Nurse Edith Cavell. Australia now has her own Edith Cavells to remember.” [1] Sometime during the afternoon of February 16, 1942, Staff Nurse Vivian Bullwinkel regained consciousness on Radji Beach, an isolated stretch of coastline running along the northern edge of Bangka Island, and located approximately 50km from the Dutch colony of Sumatra. Shot by members of the Japanese Imperial Army (JIA) and left for dead, she was the only survivor of one of the most infamous war crimes of World War II (1939- 45), an event that would later become known as the “Bangka Island Massacre.” As Bullwinkel crawled from the shoreline to the relative safety of the jungle, she began a journey that would entail over three years of imprisonment in Indonesian internment camps before taking her back to her native Australia where she, alongside some of her fellow nurses, would become cultural icons, symbolizing heroic resistance, altruistic sacrifice, and bravery. During World War II about 3,500 Australian military nurses served in combat regions throughout the world, most of whom were enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS). After the Japanese advance and the fall of Hong Kong (December 1941) and Singapore (February 1942), many of these nurses spent over three years as prisoners of war (POWs) in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines. While there these women experienced starvation, disease and deprivation, and repeatedly cited instances of physical and sexual abuse. A further twenty-two nurses were shot on Radji Beach by the JIA during the “Bangka Island Massacre”. Vivian Bullwinkel, as the sole survivor of this event, consequently became the focus of many postwar narratives and reinterpretations of the event. This process began, as illustrated by the quote from the Australian Women’s Weekly at the start of this essay, as soon as the nurses were released in 1945, with the media playing a key role and war correspondent Haydon Lennard as the individual who actually located and collected the nurses from Indonesia after the cessation of hostilities. The stories of the nurses who became prisoners of the Japanese on Sumatra between February 1942 and September 1945 have been told and retold, in newspaper accounts, autobiographies, films, exhibitions, and historical narratives. These stories played a significant role in the development of a professional nursing self-identity in Australia and across the British Empire. They have also been incorporated into the ceremonial rituals surrounding the remembrance of the Pacific conflict and have consequently helped to shape the construction of a distinctive post-war Australian nationalism. The experiences of this highly specific group of medical personnel, both during World War II and in the immediate post-war era, provide a unique opportunity for the study of the role of Australian women in the Pacific War, and the nature of national commemoration practices. Perhaps the most notable of these influences was the post-war feminist reshaping of the previously almost entirely masculine “Anzac legend,” Australia’s militaristic interpretation of national character. [2] The wartime experiences of these nurses, and the more general impact of the war on military nursing, is by no means a neglected chapter in the history of the World War II, yet the significance of Australian nurses within the conflict is often characterized in one of two ways. Firstly, the rise of feminist history in the 1970s and 1980s provoked interest in female interpretations of defining moments in Australian history, including World War II. However, this tended to result in simplistic and overly sentimental histories of female empowerment that lacked critical analysis and failed to compare or contextualize the accounts of nurses; for example, Rupert D. Goodman’s Our War Nurses (1988). Secondly, the nurses killed on Bangka Island and interned on Sumatra have become exemplars of Japanese war crimes enacted against “Western” women and, as such, are often discussed in anthologized works alongside reports of “comfort women”, those individuals who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese military, for example in the work of Yuki Tanaka and Yoshimi Yoshiaki. [3] Such an approach ignores the unique perspective offered by some of the first Allied female military personnel to be interned by the enemy in active battlefields. Furthermore, Australia’s nurses have come to represent ideas that are very different from those characterized by Asia’s comfort women, many of which are influenced by the specific fears of Asian invasion Australia had long since maintained. The AANS still feature heavily in commemorative rituals in Australia and overseas. Betty Jeffrey, one of the nurses interned alongside Bullwinkel on Sumatra, wrote a book about her experiences entitled White Coolies , which became one of Australia’s most consistently best-selling books. The Australian Nurses Service memorial on Anzac Parade, close to the Australian War Memorial was not unveiled until October 1999, and the interned nurses, as well as those killed aboard the Centaur , occupy a permanent display in the AWM’s World War II galleries. The AWM, Australia’s second most popular tourist attraction after the Sydney Opera House, also recently opened a lavish new exhibition entitled Nurses: from Zululand to Afghanistan in 2012. The Muntok Memorial Peace Museum, constructed largely by surviving members of the nurses’ families and Sumatran volunteers, was opened at the former site of the women’s camp at Kampong Menjelang. The continued exposure of the experiences of these women, their place in national memory, and the retelling in many forms, demands a more objective and nuanced analysis of the nature of Pacific internment, race and gender relations during wartime, and the role of key medical personnel during conflicts. The execution of members of the AANS on Bangka Island, and the subsequent internment of surviving nurses on Sumatra, has become a symbolic episode in Australian history. Like many Pacific prisoners of war, when recounting their experience, the nurses developed a formulaic style, replete with reoccurring themes, images and motifs. As this dissertation has also demonstrated, these narratives were shaped by social conventions, and reflected strategies of psychological self-preservation, as well as multiple and shifting conceptions of identity. The nurses were women, professionals, and Australian nationals, whose overlapping identities created tensions and contradictions in the stories they told. Indeed, a key aim of this study has been to recuperate these tensions, probing the inconsistencies, which have tended to be overlooked or even denied. The nurses’ narratives have been incorporated into Australia’s post-war nationalism through a process of enshrinement and collective ritualization, the legitimacy of which is only now being belatedly contested. Thus, aside from furnishing a unique perspective on internment in the Pacific, the experiences of the returning members of the AANS provide a distinctive opportunity for reconsidering the relationship between private and public memory, the role of testimony in history, and what Hobsbawm and Ranger memorably term “the invention of tradition”; the process of self- invention through which “national” cultures are produced. The Bangka Island executions demonstrate how nursing history, particularly in Australia, needs to move beyond the reiteration of “heroic” exploits to adopt analytical approaches that reconnect nursing history to wider historical formations. To do so would mean that the history of nursing as a field of research will move to the forefront of historiographical debates, offering fresh insights into transformative cultural, social and political processes, with consequences for the contemporary world. References. The Australian Women’s Weekly , 29 September 1945, p.10. The Anzac legend, sometimes also referred to as the Anzac myth or Anzac spirit, is a concept originating in World War I, which argues that Australian and New Zealand servicemen possess qualities that render them superior warriors. These merits include bravery, egalitarianism, humour, disrespect for commanding officers, endurance, ingenuity, devotion to “mates” and a more impressive physique than that of other colonial soldiers. These characteristics were ostensibly forged by Australia’s punishing physical landscape and stockman traditions. The name itself derives from the abbreviation for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). Literature on this subject is vast and the issue continues to fuel controversial historical debate in Australia. The Anzac legend will be discussed further in relation to commemoration in Chapter 5 of this thesis, but for a broad overview of the subject, see Patsy Adam-Smith, The ANZACS (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia Pty Ltd, 1997); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarization of Australian History (Sydney: New South Books, 2010); Jane Ross, The Myth of the Digger: The Australian Soldier in Two World Wars (Sydney: Hale andIremonger, 1985). Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996) and Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002). Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II , trans. Suzanne O’Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) and Jugunianfushiryoshu, “Collected Documents Relating to Comfort Women” (Tokyo: OtsukiShoten, 1992). ANGHARAD FLETCHER is currently completing a joint PhD at King’s College, London, and the University of Hong Kong. She holds a BA and MA from University College London, and her present research focuses on British imperial nursing during the third plague pandemic in Cape Town, Hong Kong, and London. She was awarded the inaugural Wang Gungwu Prize for her MPhil. Her work has also appeared in Medical History and Manchester University Press’ recent release, Colonial Caring . The Brutal History of Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’ Lee Ok-seon was running an errand for her parents when it happened: a group of uniformed men burst out of a car, attacked her and dragged her into the vehicle. As they drove away, she had no idea that she would never see her parents again. She was 14 years old. That fateful afternoon, Lee’s life in Busan, a town in what is now South Korea, ended for good. The teenager was taken to a so-called “comfort station”—a brothel that serviced Japanese soldiers—in Japanese-occupied China. There, she became one of the tens of thousands of “comfort women” subjected to forced prostitution by the imperial Japanese army between 1932 and 1945. Lee Ok-seon, then 80, in a shelter for former sex slaves near Seoul, South Korea, holding an old photo of herself on April 15, 2007. Seokyong Lee/The New York Times/Redux. It’s been nearly a century since the first women were forced into sexual slavery for imperial Japan, but the details of their servitude remains painful and politically divisive in Japan and the countries it once occupied. Records of the women’s subjugation is scant; there are very few survivors and an estimated 90 percent of “comfort women” did not survive the war. Though military brothels existed in the Japanese military since 1932, they expanded widely after one of the most infamous incidents in imperial Japan’s attempt to take over the Republic of China and a broad swath of Asia: theRape of Nanking. On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops began a six-week-long massacre that essentially destroyed the Chinese city of Nanking. Along the way, Japanese troops raped between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women. The mass rapes horrified the world, and Emperor Hirohito was concerned with its impact on Japan’s image. As legal historian Carmen M. Agibaynotes, he ordered the military to expand its so-called “comfort stations,” or military brothels, in an effort to prevent further atrocities, reduce sexually transmitted diseases and ensure a steady and isolated group of prostitutes to satisfy Japanese soldiers’ sexual appetites. A Nationalist officer guarding women prisoners said to be “comfort girls” used by the Communists, 1948. Jack Birns/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. “Recruiting” women for the brothels amounted to kidnapping or coercing them. Women were rounded up on the streets of Japanese-occupied territories, convinced to travel to what they thought were nursing units or jobs, or purchased from their parents asindentured servants. These women came from all over southeast Asia, but the majority were Korean or Chinese. Once they were at the brothels, the women were forced to have sex with their captors under brutal, inhumane conditions. Though each woman’s experience was different, their testimonies share many similarities: repeated rapes thatincreased before battles, agonizing physical pain, pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and bleak conditions. “It was not a place for humans,” Leetold Deutsche Welle in 2013. Like other women, she was threatened and beaten by her captors. “There was no rest,”recalled Maria Rosa Henson, a Filipina woman who was forced into prostitution in 1943. “They had sex with me every minute.” The end of World War II did not end military brothels in Japan. In 2007, Associated Press reportersdiscovered that the United States authorities allowed “comfort stations” to operate well past the end of the war and that tens of thousands of women in the brothels had sex with American men until Douglas MacArthur shut the system down in 1946. A group of women, who survived being forced into brothels set up by the Japanese military during World War II, protesting in front of the Japanese Embassy in 2000, demanding an apology for their enslavement. Joyce Naltchayan/AFP/Getty Images. By then,between 20,000 and 410,000 women had been enslaved in at least 125 brothels. In 1993, the UN’s Global Tribunal on Violations of Women’s Human Rightsestimated that at the end of World War II, 90 percent of the “comfort women” had died. After the end of World War II, however, documents on the system were destroyed by Japanese officials, so the numbers are based on estimates by historians that rely on a variety of extant documents. As Japan rebuilt after World War II, the story of its enslavement of women was downplayed as a distasteful remnant of a past people would rather forget. Meanwhile, women who had been forced into sexual slavery became societal outcasts. Many died of sexually transmitted infections or complications from their violent treatment at the hands of Japanese soldiers; others committed suicide. For decades, the history of the “comfort women” went undocumented and unnoticed. When the issue was discussed in Japan, it was denied by officials who insisted that “comfort stations” had never existed. Former comfort woman Yong Soo Lee next to a picture of comfort girls. Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images. Then, in the 1980s, some women began to share their stories. In 1987, after the Republic of South Korea became a liberal democracy, women started discussing their ordeals publicly. In 1990, the issueflared into an international dispute when South Korea criticized a Japanese official’s denial of the events. In the years that followed, more and more women came forward to give testimony. In 1993, Japan’s government finallyacknowledged the atrocities. Since then, however, the issue has remained divisive. The Japanese government finallyannounced it would give reparations to surviving Korean “comfort women” in 2015, but after a review, South Korea asked for a stronger apology. Japan recentlycondemned that request—a reminder that the issue remains as much a matter of present foreign relations as past history. Meanwhile, a few dozen women forced into sexual slavery by Japan are still alive. One of them is Yong Soo Lee, a 90-year-old survivor who has been vocal about her desire to receive an apology from the Japanese government. “I never wanted to give comfort to those men,” shetold the Washington Post in 2015. “I don’t want to hate or hold a grudge, but I can never forgive what happened to me.” FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. SIGN UP FOR MORE HISTORY! 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