Emergence of the "Comfort Women" Issue and Breaking Silence of Comfort Women Victims

• In Event: 3250 - Social and Political Movements in Asia and Asian America

Abstract

During the Asia-Pacific War between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military mobilized about 200,000 young unmarried Asian women to military brothels in China and other Asian and Pacific countries to “comfort” Japanese soldiers. The majority of these so-called “comfort women” were drawn from Korea, which was a colony of Japan at the time. Many former Korean “comfort women” who came back home after the war kept silent about their sufferings for about half a century. However, since 1991, Korean women’s organizations have helped more than 200 surviving Korean “comfort women” come forward to tell the truth since 1991. The testimonies by these surviving victims have accelerated the redress movement for them. This paper examines Korean women’s fight against “sex tourism” (kisaeng kwankwang) by Japanese businessmen and sexual interrogation (sunggomun) of college women activists by the police in the 1980s as a precipitating factor for the emergence of the “comfort women” issue in South Korea. It also examines the beginning of the redress movement since the late 1980s and the victims’ process of breaking the silence for the first time in 1991. This paper is based on personal interviews with nineteen surviving Korean victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, fourteen leaders of the redress movement, and secondary sources.

Keywords: Sexual Violence against Women; the “Comfort Women” Movement; the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery; Asia-Pacific War

Author

• Pyong Gap Min, City University of New York-Queens College