31 Facts About Comfort women

Some women of Papuan origin including Japanese-Papuan girls born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers were conscripted as comfort women.

Japanese Comfort women were the first victims to be enslaved in military brothels and trafficked across Japan, Okinawa, Japan's colonies and occupied territories, and overseas battlegrounds.

Comfort women lived in sordid conditions, and were called "public toilets" by the Japanese.

Comfort women stations were so prevalent that the Imperial Army offered accountancy classes on how to manage comfort stations, which included how to determine the actuarial “durability or perishability of the women procured.

Many Comfort women were tricked or defrauded into joining the military brothels.

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Comfort women'storians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation, which indicates the ratio of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women, and replacement rates of the women.

In further analysis of the Imperial Army medical records for venereal disease treatment from 1940, Yoshimi concluded that if the percentages of women treated reflected the general makeup of the total comfort women population, Korean women made up 51.

The Kenpeitai forced and coerced many interned Comfort women to serve as prostitutes, including several hundred European Comfort women.

Local women were recruited from Rabaul as comfort women, along with some number of mixed Japanese-Papuan women born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers.

Since comfort women were forced to travel to the battlefields with the Japanese Imperial Army, many comfort women perished as Allied forces overwhelmed Japan's Pacific defense and annihilated Japanese encampments.

For example, Dutch Comfort women captured in the Dutch East Indies were reserved exclusively for the officers.

Thomas writes that the Comfort women working at the brothels "most likely served 25 to 35 men a day" and that they were "victims of the yellow slave trade".

Igusa wrote in his memoirs that the women continued to work through infection and severe discomfort, though they "cried and begged for help".

Contrarily, reports based on interrogation of Korean comfort women captured after the Siege of Myitkyina in Burma indicated that they lived comparatively well, received many gifts, and were paid wages while they were in Burma.

In Confucian cultures, traditionally an unmarried woman must value her chastity above her own life, and any Comfort women who loses her virginity before marriage for whatever reason is expected to commit suicide; by choosing to live, the survivors made themselves into outcasts.

An early figure in comfort women research was the writer Kakou Senda, who first encountered photographs of comfort women in 1962, but was unable to find adequate information explaining who the women in the photographs were.

However, the comfort women issue was not a central topic and instead most of this resurgence in historical interest went towards other themes such as the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731.

Comfort women's followed by others in several different countries demanding an apology from the Japanese government through filing a lawsuit.

In 2014, China released documents it said were "ironclad proof" that the comfort women were forced to work as prostitutes against their will, including documents from the Japanese Kwantung Army military police corps archives and documents from the national bank of Japan's puppet regime in Manchuria.

Three South Korean Comfort women filed suit in Japan in December 1991, around the time of the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, demanding compensation for forced prostitution.

Abe again expressed his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women and acknowledged that they had undergone immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.

Several comfort women protested the agreement as they claim they did not want money, but to see a sincere acknowledgement of the legal responsibility by the Japanese government.

The co-representative of a support group of the surviving women expressed that the settlement with Japan does not reflect the will of the comfort women, and they vowed to seek its invalidation by reviewing legal options.

Kobayashi's book contains an interview with Taiwanese industrialist Shi Wen-long, who stated that no Comfort women were forced to serve and that the Comfort women worked in more hygienic conditions compared to regular prostitutes because the use of condoms was mandatory.

Comfort women has been criticized by other Japanese scholars for minimizing the hardship of comfort women.

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In 2012, the former mayor of Osaka and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, Toru Hashimoto initially maintained that "there is no evidence that people called comfort women were taken away by violence or threat by the [Japanese] military".

In 2014, Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone chaired a commission established to consider "concrete measures to restore Japan's honor with regard to the comfort women issue", despite his own father Yasuhiro Nakasone, having organized a "comfort station" in 1942 when he was a lieutenant paymaster in Japan's Imperial Navy.

In June 2016, the Research Center for Chinese Comfort Women was established at Shanghai Normal University.

Thanks to this increasing awareness in society, and with the help of TWRF, Taiwanese comfort women have gained the support their government, which on many occasions has asked the Japanese government for apologies and compensation.

The statue symbolizes Comfort women forced to work in wartime brothels for the Japanese military.

In 2013, a memorial statue to comfort women called Peace Monument of Glendale was established in Glendale, California.