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History

Comfort Women of WWII


It has taken half a century for a certain war crime to surface. During World War II thousands of Asian young girls and women were taken from their villages either by force or lied to and coerced into believing they were getting well-paying jobs or the opportunity to study abroad. Instead, these women ended up as “comfort women”, imprisoned behind barbed-wire military compounds unable to escape their fate. According to the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, some 200,000 women were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army between 1932 and 1945. (Internet resource)

In the years since Japan’s defeat, these women have lived with the physical and emotional scars of their enslavement in silence. That silence, enforce by patriarchal and discrimination in both Japan and their own countries, bought Japan a comfortable four-decade respite from facing its responsibility for these war crimes. (Yoshimi intro)

According to one Javanese women, Siti Fatimah, she was sixteen when told that she would be sent to Japan to study in Tokyo. In 1943 she and four others girls from her home subdistrict were put on a ship. They joined a few hundred other Indonesian girls who had also been deceived. These girls were put into a camp where they were forced to render sexual services to the Japanese soldiers. (Stetz pg61)

The women drafted as comfort women had a regimented schedule. Each women had to serve twenty to forty men a day. In the morning, rank and file soldiers would queue up outside women’s room. Afternoons would be reserved for middle ranking officers. Commanders of a military unit or the camp where the comfort station existed monopolized the overnight stay privileges. (Stetz pg 12)

When necessary women were shipped from camp to camp following troops and listed as military supplies. Many times the women did not know where they were. They often arrived in the middle of the night and the women were not allowed outside the barbed-wire fence military compound. Wherever the Japanese troops went, comfort house were set up. (Stetz 12)

Mardiyem is a former Indonesian sex slave who came out into the open after the Social Services Minister Inten Suweno said in 1993 that victims of the Japanese atrocities needed to be located. But, she said, that many of them felt disillusioned after the government, in March 1997, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Japanese government for nine billion rupiah compensation over a 10-year period. Instead of going directly to the women, the money would be used to build old people’s homes where the women are expected to spend the rest of their lives (Hepatitis weekly;Oct 1997).

In another Asia human rights news source there is talk of needing to revise the memorandum to provide better benefits and official protection of the identities of victims who want to come forward. The final outcome for the surviving victims, most of which are now in their 70's, is yet to be determined.

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