Comfort Women
The euphemism for the women and girls, by many estimates up to 200,000, forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army.
'Comfort women' is a translation of a Japanese euphemism, ianfu, and the softness of the phrase is part of what makes it so bitter. Behind it stands one of the largest systems of state-organized sexual slavery in the twentieth century: by many estimates up to 200,000 women and girls, held in military brothels for the Imperial Japanese Army before and during the Second World War. Most were Korean, from a peninsula Japan had colonized in 1910, but the victims also came from China, the Philippines, Taiwan, and the occupied Dutch East Indies. Many were teenagers. Many did not survive.
The system
The first 'comfort stations' opened in Shanghai in 1932, and the network spread across Asia as the army advanced. The military presented them as a way to reduce mass rape, curb venereal disease, and keep order among soldiers, an official logic that treated the women as sanitary infrastructure. Recruiters lured girls with promises of factory work or nursing jobs; others were simply taken. Once inside, women were confined, given Japanese names, and subjected to sustained abuse under conditions the survivors would spend the rest of their lives struggling to describe. When the war ended in 1945, records were burned and the stations vanished, and with them, for a time, the memory.
The decades of silence
What followed was nearly half a century of enforced quiet. In the cultures the survivors returned to, the shame attached to the victims rather than the perpetrators, so most women told no one, sometimes not even their families. The subject was diplomatically inconvenient for a Japan rebuilding as a Western ally and for governments eager to move on. The silence broke on August 14, 1991, when a Korean survivor named Kim Hak-sun gave public testimony, putting a face and a voice to what had been an abstraction. Others followed. In 1992 survivors and activists began a weekly protest outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, the Wednesday Demonstrations, which have continued for more than thirty years.
A wound that will not close
Japan has acknowledged the system, most notably in the 1993 Kono Statement, which conceded military involvement and coercion. But acknowledgment has never fully settled the matter. A 2015 agreement between Tokyo and Seoul, meant to resolve the issue 'finally and irreversibly' with a one-billion-yen fund, was rejected by many survivors and later effectively abandoned in South Korea, where critics felt it had been negotiated over the victims' heads. Statues of a seated girl, the Statue of Peace, now sit in Seoul and in cities around the world, each one a deliberate refusal to let the story be filed away.
The dwindling number of survivors, most now in their nineties, have asked for something narrower and harder than money: a full and unambiguous admission, on the record, of what was done to them, so that it counts as history rather than as a dispute. Beside the seated girl in Seoul stands an empty bronze chair. It keeps a place for those who died waiting.