WHO WERE THE COMFORT WOMEN? THE PACIFIC WAR & SPREADING COMFORT STATION

Comfort Women – Japanese: 'ianfu' is the historical euphemism used in Japanese military documents for women held in military brothels called 'comfort stations' established by the Japanese military in its occupied territories between 1932 and 1945.

Who were they?

They were women and girls taken from all over Asia and the Pacific. Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, Filipina, and Indonesian women comprised the vast majority.

Most were between 16 and 20 when recruited. The majority identified after the war were Korean. Estimates of the total number vary because there were no official consolidated figures. Research based on troop ratios, deployment records, and survivor testimony puts the number at tens or hundreds of thousands, with a commonly cited upper estimate of 200,000.

Why were comfort stations created?

The first stations appeared in Shanghai in 1932 after the Japanese intervention there. The system was greatly expanded after 1937.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, after the mass rape and killing of civilians in Nanjing, the Japanese government decided to establish "comfort stations" for the sexual service of its soldiers in territory that they occupied, partly to control venereal disease and to avoid negative propaganda consequences from widespread rape of local civilians.

The stations were not private brothels operating independently: 

• They were established by the Japanese government, which issued special travel permits and transported women on military vehicles and ships.
• The military built buildings for them, set fee structures and schedules, and arranged visits even at the front.
• Military doctors checked the women for venereal diseases.

How were women recruited?

Recruitment changed over time:

1. Early phase (1932-1937): Primarily from existing licensed brothels in Japan. Women were offered a way to repay debts more quickly.
2. Expansion phase (1937-1945): As demand grew with the Asia-Pacific War, the military licensed contractors to procure women in collaboration with local governments and police departments in colonies like Korea and Taiwan. Women were frequently deceived with promises of lucrative factory, nursing, or waitress jobs and held in debt bondage, unable to leave after realising the nature of the work. Many were poor girls lured by false offers of jobs.
3. Late Pacific War phase: In areas under direct military occupation such as China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, the military kidnapped local women or ordered local leaders to provide women for them. As the Pacific War spread and demand increased, some girls were violently kidnapped and forced to serve.

Spreading across the Pacific War

With the start of the Pacific War in December 1941, the front expanded from Northern China to Myanmar, Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, the Philippines, New Guinea, Rabaul, Truk, and other Pacific islands. Comfort stations followed the troops.

The typical pattern:

• China and Manchuria: The largest network, with hundreds of stations near garrisons and railway lines.
• Korea and Taiwan: Collection and transit points; stations for troops stationed there.
• Southeast Asia: After 1942, stations were opened in Rangoon, Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta), Manila, and other occupation capitals. Local women were added to the Korean and Chinese women already transported.
• Pacific Islands: Small stations near airfields and naval bases, where women were shipped in under military transport and often abandoned or killed when Japan lost the war.

Women who were held in debt bondage earned a percentage of fees but had earnings confiscated for debt repayment and living expenses. They were forced to have sex with many men each day. Other women who were forcibly taken were forced into sexual servitude, often without pay.

These women, including teenagers, euphemistically referred to in Japanese documents as Comfort Women, were shipped to the vastly expanded battlefronts throughout the Japan-occupied territories covering Northern China to Myanmar.

After the war

Upon losing the war, the Japanese government tried to hide the existence of the system. Some women managed to return home but suffered from disease and stigma.

The issue surfaced publicly in 1991 when Kim Hak-sun, a Korean survivor, testified publicly. In 1992 historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi found documents in Japan's National Institute for Defence Studies proving direct military involvement, leading to the 1993 Kono Statement acknowledging government role and use of force and deception.

Since then, there have been factual disputes over the exact number and ethnic background and the extent of direct coercion, as well as legal/political disputes over apologies and compensation.

NEW RESEARCH FROM JAPAN, SINGAPORE, MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA

It is a transcription of an October 2023 webinar with the three authors whose books rewrote the Southeast Asia story. Moderator Mary McCarthy notes the common theme is silence - silence of the women after the war, silencing by communities and states, and silence of academia on Southeast Asia.

1. Singapore and Malaysia - Kevin Blackburn

Book: The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory (NUS Press / UChicago, 2022)

Blackburn set out to do two things:

Prove the existence of local comfort women. Singapore appears in every list of comfort stations, but when lists of comfort women are generated, Singapore women never appear. It is one of a handful of countries where local comfort women never came forward at all.

From archives in Singapore National Library and sources from Japan, Korea, the UK, the US, and Australia, he documents how local women – Chinese, Eurasian, Malay, a few Indian, and captured European women – were sexually enslaved.

What was new:

"And what my research uncovered in both Malaysia and Singapore... is the great deal of diversity within these comfort stations, where you have Chinese women, who are local women, working side by side with Korean and Japanese women."

First-hand accounts and Japanese veterans' memoirs show this, but it is not often recounted in scholarly literature. He also documents the trafficking circuit – including the notorious Comfort Corps and circulation of women from Singapore to stations elsewhere in Java, Malaya and Thailand – with multiple maps documenting physical locations of known comfort stations in peninsular Malaya and Singapore.

Why they never came forward:

After the war, Korean and Japanese women went home, but local women didn't go home. Many continued in sex work and became streetwalkers. Younger ones were rounded up by a colonial government indifferent to their fate. There was very little sympathy – the perception that they were simply volunteers, despite abundant evidence many were abducted from villages or coerced into the system even if they had been in sex work before. This created a patriarchal response and an unfavourable postwar environment that enforced silence.

2. Indonesia - Katharine McGregor

Book: Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

McGregor takes a structural approach:

"When the Japanese entered Indonesia in 1942... there was already a colonial patriarchal gender order at work, according to which Indonesian women were treated as sexually available to Dutch men."

Local cultures of patriarchy contributed - local chiefs tried to convince girls to go with Japanese, sometimes with false promises of other work.

Her second contribution is the history of activism. Compared to Korea, where democratisation, women's rights movements, police violence awareness, and women's studies programmes enabled Kim Hak-sun's 1991 testimony to activate survivors, Indonesian activism was slower.

She examines the crucial role of Japanese activists – lawyers and feminist activists – who assisted Indonesian activists and Dutch activists. Her book is one of the first histories of human rights activism in Indonesia and a history from below of working-class Indonesian women where written records are scarce.

3. Japan - Sachiyo Tsukamoto

Book: The Politics of Trauma and Integrity: Stories of Japanese “Comfort Women” (Routledge, 2022)

Tsukamoto's core argument:

"My research is about the silenced history... revealing... Japanese victims of their own state’s violence... Japanese women were the initial victims."

Most were debt slaves of the state-licensed prostitution system, which laid the foundation for the institutionalisation of human trafficking in the comfort women system.

She analyses the exploitative relationship between the patriarchal state and women as a tool to control men, with a class-based sexual contract – the emperor as father of the nation – with a two-layered system for officers vs. enlisted.

She recovers internal voices of two Japanese silence-breakers: 

• Kikumaru – allocated only to a few officers
• Suzuko Shirota - provided to numerous enlisted soldiers in the same way as many non-Japanese victims

Their postwar hell shows similar endless psychological trauma regardless of nationality and analysis of citizen soldier masculinity and homosocial bonds among soldiers.

All three authors stress transnationalism: the system itself was transnational, and the redress movement was transnational, but patriarchal structures, post-colonial nation-building priorities in Malaysia/Singapore, and Cold War politics silenced local women in ways that differ from Korea.

Hj Zulheimy Maamor

5 October 2026: 10:00 p.m.