Korean Comfort Women Research Paper

Comfort women” were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during World War II. The women were coerced by soldiers who told them that they would be going to work in factories or to be nurses. They were instead forcibly taken to Japanese military comfort stations and repeatedly raped, day and night, by Japanese soldiers. In my paper, I will explore the horrific treatment of these sex slaves and how it compares to the way Japanese prostitutes would’ve been treated had they been used in place of Korean girls. I will explain how the use of these Korean comfort women underlies Japan’s contempt for other Asian nations. I have concluded that Japan not only used these sex slaves for their personal pleasures, …show more content…
I would argue that this wasn’t even an instance of prostitution; it was trafficking of human sex slaves. The military didn’t set up these comfort stations simply for the soldiers’ happiness. If that were the case, they would’ve been able to recruit enough women from Japan, seeing as prostitution was legal during the time in Japan. The reason that the women who were recruited were mostly Korean is because Japan felt a strong sense of superiority to Korea in general and didn’t see them as humans. Majority of the Korean women had been “cheated by being told the lie that they were going to earn money in factories making military supplies.” (Howard, p76) There are still many discrepancies regarding the actual number of comfort women and how many of them were actually Japanese. Numbers range from 20,000 to 200,000 comfort women in total. It’s been reported that “some of the comfort women were Japanese” (Japan Times) but most of the personal accounts of women say that they were mostly Korean, with a few Chinese women because the comfort stations were in China. “We were all Koreans, and we were all stricken with illness.” (Howard, Omok, page …show more content…
A soldier is quoted saying, “when we procured the girls, we had to look at their endurance, how used up they were, whether they were good or not. We had to calculate the alloted time for commissioned officers, commanding officers, grunts, how many minutes.” (Cook, page 95) These girls were seen as nothing more than a commodity to soldiers in the war. However, the treatment of these girls demonstrated that they were not just a commodity, but seen as worthless trash that could be abused by the Japanese because they were Korean. The term used for the procurement of women was ‘choben’, an old military word that referred to gathering food for the horses, implying the worthlessness of these women. (website article) Surely the Japanese wouldn’t say the same for their own women as legal prostitutes. After all, if prostitution is legal, that makes room for regulations in fair treatment of Japanese women when they provide their services. It also guarantees them to be paid for their job, which the comfort women were

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Korean Comfort Women Research Paper

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