During the Pacific War, an estimated hundreds of thousands of women and girls were abducted, sold into prostitution, and held against their will in brothels that served the Japanese military. The victims came from Korea, China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia, where they were forcibly conscripted into sexual servitude and subjected to repeated rape and beatings by Japanese soldiers. Lee Young-sook, one of the survivors of Japan’s military brothels, described the brutal conditions she endured. “We remained seated as soldiers came in to choose whoever took their fancy to take to bed,” she recalled.
“We generally served five or six soldiers a day. At weekends, we have to serve 15 men a day. ”
Following Japan’s surrender at the end of the Second World War, the United Nations War Crimes Commission was established to investigate accusations of war crimes committed by the Axis powers. However, the crimes committed against these women and girls, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” were not even mentioned at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial.
It was not until 1991 that Kim Hak-sun became the first named former comfort woman to launch a legal case against the Japanese government over her sexual enslavement. Her decision opened the floodgates for hundreds of other survivors to come forward with their accounts of what they endured.