Reveals how the Japanese military forced one hundred thousand women into involuntary prostitution

"The most extensive record available in English of the ugly story."—Elisabeth Rubinfein, New York Newsday Over 100,000 women across Asia were victims of enforced prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Forces during World War II. Until as recently as 1993 the Japanese government continued to deny this shameful aspect of its wartime history. George Hicks's book is the only history in English regarding this terrible enslavement of women.

"The most extensive record available in English of the ugly story."—Elisabeth Rubinfein, New York Newsday Over 100,000 women across Asia were victims of enforced prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Forces during World War II. Until as recently as 1993 the Japanese government continued to deny this shameful aspect of its wartime history. George Hicks's book is the only history in English regarding this terrible enslavement of women.

The story of the over 100,000 women who were forced to be prostitutes for the Japanese Imperial Forces during World War II.

Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women. This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers.

During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army forced young women and girls in occupied territories into sexual slavery. The purpose was to prevent rapes, sexually transmitted diseases, leaking of confidential information, and to provide "comfort" to Japanese soldiers. This sexual servitude gave rise to the euphemistic label "comfort women." It is estimated there were between 50,000 to as many as 400,000 "comfort women" throughout more than ten occupied countries including Korea, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies, Taiwan, Burma, and Vietnam. This dark period of Asian history remains hotly debated between the right-wing Japanese government and sympathetic groups of activists and feminists.Interestingly, this conflict found a new and unexpected battlefield on American soil and has become part of the discourse on human rights. "Comfort women" represent something universally troubling: the endemic assault on the rights and ownership of a woman's body and the patriarchal systems that leave such transgressions unpunished. "Comfort women" issues reflect the atrocities that continue to plague modern society today: rape, violations of human rights, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and more broadly, war-time traumas.What has made many sympathetic to this cause is not just the horrific experiences of these women, but also the realization that women's rights and justice have not greatly improved since World War II. This book is dedicated to compiling and recording the tremendous efforts of diverse groups of people for the cause of the "comfort women" in the United States for the last 28 years in hopes that readers can use and learn from these archived materials to prevent such atrocities in the future and to fight those battles today, where the voices of women in the past could not.