As a counter to all silly and frivolous posts I’ve made here and elsewhere, I’ll post this…
I know Wikipedia isn’t a great source for citations, but this entry about Comfort Woman summarizes the horror of it better than I could:
"Comfort women were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during World War II.[1][2][3]
The name “comfort women” is a translation of the Japanese ianfu (慰安婦),[4] a euphemism for “prostitute(s)”.[5] Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 (by Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata[6]) to as high as 360,000 to 410,000 (by a Chinese scholar[7]); the exact numbers are still being researched and debated.[8] Most of the women were from occupied countries, including Korea, China, and the Philippines.[9] Women were used for military “comfort stations” from Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan (then a Japanese dependency), Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), East Timor (then Portuguese Timor),[10][11] and other Japanese-occupied territories. Stations were located in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, then Malaya, Thailand, Burma, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and French Indochina.[12] A smaller number of women of European origin were also involved from the Netherlands[13] and Australia with an estimated 200–400 Dutch women alone.[14]
According to testimonies, young women were abducted from their homes in countries under Imperial Japanese rule. In many cases, women were lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants, or opportunities for higher education; once recruited, they were incarcerated in comfort stations both inside their nations and abroad.[15]"
Before I continue, a bit about me. I’m a third-generation American of Japanese/Okinawan ancestry born and raised in Hawaii and have had older (i.e. born before WWII) Filipinos and Koreans tell me point blank that if I had been born a generation earlier, we couldn’t be friends. I understand these wink, wink, nudge, nudge comments as an allusion to the travesties committed by the Japanese in Korea and the Philippines.
The most touching comment came from a Korean video shop owner who was just slightly older than me and whom I built a friendly rapport with, having weekly rented movies from her. She recommended I rent Men Behind the Sun, a Chinese “horror” movie about the infamous Unit 731 (the subject of the thread “Why were the Japanese so cruel in World War II?”. She gave a slight wink as she said the movie was about “Maruta” (the euphemistic code name for the experiments performed by Unit 731) and said “You don’t know Maruta?”
Back to Comfort Women. As of Feb 2018, its been reported that only 30 Korean comfort women are still living, though the actual number is probably much higher though unknown because may survivors won’t acknowledge their past. This is highly significant because once these last survivors pass away, the issue of comfort women will fade further away.
For decades after WWII, Japan asserted the women were voluntary prostitutes and not sex slaves and finally in 2015 issued an apology and reparation to the Korean survivors:
"On December 28, 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye reached a formal agreement to settle the dispute. Japan agreed to pay ¥1 billion (₩9.7 billion; $8.3 million) to a fund supporting surviving victims while South Korea agreed to refrain from criticizing Japan regarding the issue and to work to remove a statue memorializing the victims from in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul.[141] The announcement came after Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida met his counterpart Yun Byung-se in Seoul, and later Prime Minister Shinzo Abe phoned President Park Geun-hye to repeat an apology already offered by Kishida. The Korean government will administer the fund for the forty-six remaining elderly comfort women and will consider the matter “finally and irreversibly resolved”.[142] Despite the official, final agreement between Japan and South Korea, some Korean comfort women protested the outcome.[143]
On February 16, 2016, the United Nations’ “Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women”, Seventh and Eighth Periodic Reports, was held, with Shinsuke Sugiyama, Deputy Minister for Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan), reiterating the official and final agreement between Japan and South Korea to pay ¥1 billion.[144][145] Sugiyama also restated the Japanese Government apology of that agreement: “The issue of comfort women, with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women, and the Government of Japan is painfully aware of responsibilities.”[146]"
As of May 2018, Japan has still not issued an apology or reparation to the Philippines and Filipinas and to my knowledge any other country other than Korean. In addition, they successfully petitioned for the the removal of a a commemorative statute in Manila and have petitioned for the removal of statues in Germany, Australia and the US.
There are several documentaries about comfort women, and few movies viewable by non-Korean speaking audiences. The only ones I know are available on DVD (though difficult to find) are Snowy Road (1977) directed by Lee Na Jeong and Spirit’s Homecoming (2016) directed by Cho Jung Rae.
Snowy Road was a 2 part TV drama reedited for theatrical release and Spirit’s Homecoming director Cho Jung Rae has stated that he directed the pseudo-documentary Duresori - The Voice of East to get the funding to do Spirit’s Homecoming. The general events of the treatment of the comfort women in Spirit’s Homecoming was based on the testimony of survivor Kang Il-chul, but the mystical and some more extreme events are artistic license by the director.
