After Japan’s surrender ended the Second World War, the United Nations War Crimes Commission was set up to investigate atrocities committed by the Axis powers. Yet even though the commission’s preliminary findings included both rape and forced prostitution, the crimes against the women euphemistically called “comfort women” were never mentioned at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. That trial ran from May 1946 until December 1948. Under the Tokyo Charter, rape was not treated as a war crime or a crime against humanity, forced prostitution was barely raised by the tribunal, and no rape victims were called to testify.
It is now widely believed that Washington’s relatively mild denunciation of wartime Japan, including the complete silencing of the comfort system, was at least partly driven by its desperation to see capitalism take hold somewhere in Asia. That concern was especially acute at a time when China, North Korea, and North Vietnam were rapidly moving toward communism. More than 40 years after the trial, Kim Hak-sun became the first named former comfort woman to take legal action against the Japanese government. Her move broke through half a century of official silence.
Her testimony and those of other survivors were published in Korea in 1993, and an English-language edition edited by Keith Howard for the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan appeared in 1995. By the 1990s, the living survivors felt safe enough to testify, knowing they would not have to endure the shame and social condemnation they once expected from their admissions for long. Still, the Tokyo Tribunal’s initial failure to even mention the crimes against them had solidified a dangerous silence that never truly healed. The Pacific War actually began years before what is generally considered the start of World War II.
Japan had already annexed Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910, then seized China’s Manchuria in 1931 after a false flag operation known as the Mukden Incident. Within months, 40,000 Japanese soldiers poured into the region. In 1940, Japan invaded and claimed French Indochina. In 1941, it attacked Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and soon afterward Tokyo formally declared war.
During the Pacific War, at least 200,000 women from Japanese-occupied territories were abducted, sold into prostitution, and held against their will in brothels serving the Japanese military. These brothels were meant to reduce sexually transmitted diseases and to prevent a repeat of the internationally condemned mass rape that took place during the assault on China’s Nanjing. Thousands of women from Korea, China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia were forcibly conscripted into sexual servitude and were repeatedly raped and beaten by Japanese soldiers. On August 14, 1991, 67-year-old Kim Hak-sun became the first former comfort woman to testify publicly against Japan’s government, stating that she had been a sex slave of the Japanese Imperial Army.
She had been just 17 when Japanese soldiers abducted her and took her to a so-called comfort station in China. She managed to escape several months later with the help of a Korean man, whom she later married and had two children with. Her 1991 testimony opened the floodgates for other survivors to come forward with their own accounts. By the time the true stories of the Korean comfort women were published, 19 survivors were willing to have their experiences told to the world.
Their testimonies describe daily brutality. Kim Hak-sun recalled that soldiers usually came in the afternoon, but on days after they had been out in the field, they arrived in the early morning. On such days, she said, they had to serve seven or eight men a day. She was often disgusted by their requests, but if she resisted, they beat her until she gave in.
Another survivor, Yi Yong-suk, described life at a comfort station in Taiwan. She said they rose around seven each morning, cleaned their rooms, had breakfast, and then began serving soldiers. There were two meals a day. In the ground-floor hall, chairs were arranged along three sides of a square, with a placard on the wall behind each chair bearing a woman’s name and number.
The women sat there while soldiers came in and chose whoever took their fancy to take to bed. They generally served five or six soldiers a day, but on weekends they had to serve 15. After the war ended, Yi Yong-suk was sent back to Korea aboard a ship filled with other comfort women. She said she had no family, no relatives, and no home to go to.
Certain she could never find a husband, she thought it would be better to drown than to return to her country, but she did not have the courage to throw herself overboard. Another survivor, Ha San-ok, remembered being beaten after trying to escape the comfort station. When her wounds had almost healed, soldiers began coming to have sex with her. She resisted, so the proprietor hit her on the head with a club.
She remembered blood gushing from the wound, then nothing else until she blacked out. Kim Tok-chin said that every night they were raped. Each woman had to serve an average of 30 to 40 men a day, and they often had no time to sleep. She blamed Japan but said she resented the Koreans who served as their instruments even more than the Japanese they worked for, and she had much to say to her own government.
After the war ended in 1945, Japan simply denied that the comfort system had ever existed. It was only in the 1990s, around the same time Kim Hak-sun and other survivors came forward, that the Japanese government finally offered an official apology. Until the 1993 Kono Statement, the Japanese government had repeatedly rejected claims that the comfort women had been coerced. Instead, it argued that the comfort system was completely legal and involved consensual sex work.
Japan stopped short of providing monetary compensation along with the apology, but it did offer medical and welfare support, plus so-called atonement money paid from a non-government fund. Since few people now genuinely believe the comfort system never existed, the main point of contention among especially conservative Japanese is whether the military itself was directly involved in organizing and operating it. Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said publicly in 2007 that the military had not coerced these women into becoming prostitutes. In 2015, however, Abe’s government signed what it called a final and irreversible resolution with the South Korean government, including $8.
5 million in reparations for South Korea’s surviving comfort women. Instead of going directly to the women, the deal specified that the money would fund projects for recovering their honor and dignity and healing their psychological wounds. The surviving Korean comfort women were effectively silenced twice: first inside the rooms where they were beaten and raped, and then again by Korean society if they were lucky enough to return home. Korean survivors became outcasts, forced to navigate impossible patriarchal and Confucian standards that treated premarital sex as the worst possible thing that could happen to a woman.
Unable to seek redress for fear of bringing shame upon their families, these women were forced into silence for half a century. In 2021, a Reuters report revealed that only 14 of the 240 registered comfort women in South Korea were still alive. The BBC reported that Thailand’s last known survivor of the comfort system died in 2023.
It is not known how many of these women are still left.