Japan, Where is Your Conscience? – Japan's Comfort Women (Sex Slaves)

When we think of slavery, we often associate it with African slaves in The Americas and Europe. But that's only part of slavery's history. On the other side of the world, slavery has destroyed children and has brutally tore apart families as well. I want to talk about Japan's sex slaves and the miserable lives these 'comfort women' had to endure.

Comfort women were forced into sexual slavery for the Empire of Japan mostly during WWII and were trapped in "comfort stations," or military brothels. Though these 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: the Nanking Massacre. On 12/13/1937, 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 ordered the military to expand its "comfort stations" in an effort to prevent further atrocities, reduce STDs, and ensure a steady and isolated group of prostitutes to satisfy Japanese soldiers' sexual appetites (https://www.history.com/news/comfort-women-japan-military-brothels-korea).

Young girls were kidnapped or coerced off the streets of Japanese-occupied territories. Some were told they would get jobs but were brought to "comfort stations" instead. Most of the women were from Korea or China. They had to face men everyday, every minute.

By the end of WWII between 20,000 and 410,000 women had been enslaved in at least 125 brothels, and 90 percent of the comfort women had died. After the end of WWII, however, documents of the system were destroyed by Japanese officials.

I have read a lot about survivors' testimonies and their descriptions of the way people were tortured and killed by Japanese soldiers. Some descriptions are even more horrific than Sethe's infanticide. The woman pictured above was atrociously tattooed and tortured by Japanese troops (similar to Sethe's "tree").

The Japanese government refuses to sincerely apologize for these atrocities. Today, a statue commemorating the killed and surviving comfort women stands in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul.