Written by: Amy Xia

Edited by: Orli Adamski

“I don’t want to hate or hold a grudge, but I can never forgive what happened to me,” 

reported Yong Soo Lee, a 90-year-old survivor of the notorious “comfort women” system. She told her story in 2015, retelling her lived experience in the Japanese “comfort stations,” otherwise known as military brothels for Japanese soldiers. 

Violence Against Women as War Tactics

During World War II, as the Japanese military began its invasion of Asia, historical documents recorded numerous atrocities, including murders, rapes, and massacres. In 1937, during the six-week-long massacre known as the Rape of Nanking, soldiers raped, tormented, assaulted, and killed between 20,000 to 80,000 women. To protect Japan’s international reputation as a country, Emperor Hirohito ordered the creation and establishment of “comfort stations,” or military brothels, with designated prostitutes to satisfy soldiers’ sexual desires. Such institutions were created to stop further sexual assaults and control sexually transmitted diseases. Soldiers abducted women and brought them to areas of legally imposed and systematic rapes, tortures, and sexual abuse, ironically known as “comfort stations.” “There was no rest; they had sex with me every minute,” recalled Maria Rosa Henson, a Filipino survivor of the comfort women system in 1943 when she was only 16 years old. It was a system of tacitly permitted sex crimes. 

Historically, assault and sexual abuse against women have been strategies during warfare. The systemization of comfort women was also a way of maintaining control over the populations of the countries Japanese soldiers invaded. As victims were tortured, terrorized, and humiliated, enslaving these women had an equivalent effect of repressing the entire nation, the entire cultural community that these women were from. As sex and gender based violence intimidated victim populations, it became easier for perpetrators to assert control. 

Japan did not formally acknowledge and apologize for its war crimes until 1993. In August of that year, the Japanese government issued an apology through the “Kono Statement,”  acknowledging the forced recruitment and unjustified mobilization of women from multiple countries in sexual slavery. Throughout the years, victims, victims’ families, feminists, and activists endeavoured to voice their past experiences, to spread the truth of history. These communities of social activists and feminists continue to influence the narratives through which the stories of comfort women are told. They craft and shape a survivor-centred narrative that sheds light on the individual pains and distinct experiences of victims like Yong Soo Lee and Maria Rosa Henson. In essence, these activists’ reinterpretation challenges state-sanctioned memory politics—narratives that counter government-sponsored ideologies and instead draw attention to the human rights violations, gendered suffering, and how the world should view these women as individuals who suffer. 

The Neglected Victims: Japanese Women

While feminist interpretations of the comfort system center on victims across the nations which Japan targeted, related discussions often marginalize and neglect Japanese women. Intentionally crafted state narratives silence their voices and overlook their trauma, prioritizing political ideologies like nationalism and statecraft instead. Most victims of the comfort women system had previously served as prostitutes or were sold to the sex industry by their debt-pressured families. Researchers have estimated that 65,000 prostitutes later chose to serve the military due to pressures to pay off debts either for their families or “their civilian brothel owners.”

The state’s decision to force its women into sexual abuse is emblematic of the larger sexual inequality that became deeply rooted in Japanese society because of nationalistic state-sponsored narratives aiming to control both men and women. One can interpret such government-sponsored narratives as a combination of a traditional and patriarchal power structure and a sexual social contract. 

For men, nationalism permeated every part of society through education and state propaganda, fostering extreme loyalty to the state and values of militarism and imperialism. The nation’s core education taught that Japan and the Emperor must restore the country’s sovereignty, and as a militaristic state, wars and military victories were essential to this goal. Nationalistic propaganda spread the belief that a soldier’s death held meaning only if he sacrificed himself for the state. Those who failed to meet these expectations faced isolation, ridicule, and ostracism. Influenced by “bushido,” the samurai code, described as “a way of dying,” Japanese society glorified and normalized self-sacrifice in devotion to one’s lord. This glorification created a “death cult” that, fueled by extreme nationalism, deeply shaped Japan’s militaristic behaviour.

The oppression of Japanese women complements the excessive patriarchal social structure that emphasizes the power and the role of Japanese men. Such repression focused on gender-based labour and reduced them to second-class citizens to serve the needs of the patriarchal state. During the Taisho period, even as democratic freedoms expanded, universal suffrage in 1925 applied only to men; women did not gain the right to vote until 1945. The exclusion of women in political participation that connects citizens to leaders in democratic activities like voting reinforced the sexual hierarchy and inequality between the genders. Within this context, women became universally treated as subordinates to men and subjects of the imperial state. 

Politicized Roles of Comfort Women

Before the war, the prostitution system was already an “integral part of patriarchal capitalism.” The Japanese government promoted the belief that it was honourable for women to serve the state by becoming comfort women, a notion that lured and coerced many into sexual slavery within hundreds of comfort stations. After the war had started, the government framed these prostitutes as a “sexual breakwater”—a “barrier” that protects other virgin women from being raped—to glorify these sexual workers’ sacrifices. 

While these narratives and propaganda may explain why many women became comfort women, they do not offer genuine recognition or respect to those labelled as “sexual breakwaters.” Many of these women went unacknowledged and were silenced amidst the brutal sexual exploitation at comfort stations, and became victims of this new system after the trauma. In August 1945, after Japan’s defeat and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, young comfort women were sent by their own communities to “provide sexual services” to Soviet soldiers so other settlers could safely return to Japan. Female settlers initially despised these comfort women. Whether those comfort women stayed voluntarily for the safe departure of their people or were socially isolated and forced to fulfill their responsibility as a sexual breakwater remains unknown. As they collectively committed suicide, these women remain nameless in the course of history. 

These comfort women, once objectified to protect others, were later abandoned by the same state that depended on their bodies. Branded as ‘bad women’ used to protect the virgins, they even received training to fight alongside soldiers—yet the state, hiding its dependence on them out of nationalistic shame, would abandon them afterwards. This concealment reveals how political narratives obscured individual suffering and erased the humanity of those forced into sexual servitude.

In records collected by Japanese scholar Takasaki Ryūji, military officers “honoured” comfort women with a supposed elevation in status: “We will treat all of you as Japanese and not as women; therefore, we would like you all to be aware of your responsibility as Japanese and behave in a disciplined manner.” Through such rhetoric, the government framed sexual servitude as a patriotic duty, portraying it as an act so commendable that it granted women a symbolic status equal to men.

Demanding Recognition

The government’s politicized narratives, rooted in the sexual subordination of women, obscured the individual struggles of victims, distorted their perception, and subsequently their treatment. These women were not seen as individuals deserving of dignity but as nameless collectives serving militaristic goals. When such political narratives dominate, the comfort women issue becomes removed from its true context of human rights violations, making it more difficult to recognize the victims’ experiences and acknowledge their trauma.

The legacy of the “comfort women” and how their stories were told reveals the varying approaches state authorities and activists take to control historical memory. Feminist activists highlight survivors’ voices and challenge patriarchal narratives of war, while the Japanese government frames the victims’ suffering as tools for military expansion. This discrepancy in historical narration shows how the comfort women system stems from and extends beyond sexual inequality, gendered power imbalances, and the state’s use of nationalism to control women for military aims. The two narratives demonstrate the struggle over the authoritative power to define points of view through which we understand the past. This struggle is a reminder that recognition of victims and their trauma is not only an act of remembering history, but also the advocacy for restoring dignity and demanding justice itself. 

Bibliography

Photo: A Nationalist officer guarding women prisoners said to be “comfort girls” used by the Communists, 1948.

Jack Birns/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Accessed from: https://www.history.com/articles/comfort-women-japan-military-brothels-korea