century Korean Soldiers, Comfort Women Drafted for Japan’s WWII Effort
By Michael Breen
Korea Times Columnist
In 1941, when Korea was still part of Japan, Tokyo attacked the United States and the world went to war.
Korean men were drafted to help the Japanese war effort in huge numbers. From 1941 to 1945, for example, half a million Koreans were shipped to Japan.
Some 250,000 men were put to work in Japanese coal mines. Some were sent to the island of Sakhalin and remained there all their lives, unable to return home after the Soviet Union took over the territory.
By 1944, four million Koreans, or 16 percent of the population, were living overseas. One ugly fact that gets lost in this history is that as organizations were created for mobilizing workers, the dirty work of fulfilling quotas was done by Koreans.
These organizations also policed the workers. Thus, Koreans mobilized and spied on their fellow Koreans.
An especially unpleasant feature of this time was the rounding up of unsuspecting young women for work in military brothels.
Studies have undermined claims by some Japanese that comfort women were prostitutes. In fact, they were frequently village girls tricked by promises of factory work.
At a typical comfort station, a soldier paid a fee, received a ticket and a condom, and was allowed into a woman's "room," often just partitioned with sheets.
Many of these establishments were in front-line combat zones and women were required to endure large numbers of soldiers who, it is alleged, believed that sexual release in this fashion would enhance their performance in combat.
These "comfort stations," as they were known, represented the institutionalizing of the Japanese army's belief that a soldier had a right to rape.
It has been speculated that they were created in response to the outcry over the 1937 Rape of Nanking, when Japanese soldiers went on an orgy of rape and killing in the Chinese city.
It took almost 50 years for this issue to come to light because of the reluctance of victims to come forward.
The story would have died with the victims and those among the two-and-a-half million Japanese and Korean soldiers who surrendered to the Allies in 1945 and who would have used the comfort service.
International awareness began in 1988 when Professor Yun Chung-ok of Ewha Womans University formed an activist group that publicized its research.
In 1990, 37 women's groups combined to form the Voluntary Service Corps Problem Resolution Council, which demanded disclosure, apology, honoring of victims and compensation.
The government in Tokyo denied that women had been coerced, saying it was never involved in operating comfort stations.
In 1992, the authorities admitted guilt after a Japanese academic, Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Chuo University, found wartime documents in the Library of the National Institute for Defense Studies confirming that the military had run the brothels.
Activists, meanwhile, found and persuaded several elderly ladies to recount their terrible stories of brothels and day-long assaults by queues of soldiers. By 1993, 121 former comfort women had registered in Korea for government benefits.
In 1995, the Japanese government issued its first official letters to individual victims personally signed by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, along with $20,000 compensation.
The money came from a fund that included donations from companies and individuals. In this way, the nature of the apology was broadened to the citizenry.
However, while some, in the Philippines for example, accepted, victims in Korea rejected on the grounds that by using donated funds, the government was avoiding responsibility.
Thus, while Japanese remember that the country has apologized for this issue, in Korea, people have tended to forget that they rejected an apology.
It is estimated that 150,000 Korean women and 50,000 Thais, Filipinas, Chinese, East Timorese and other nationalities served in the brothels.
The numbers included some Dutch women captured in Indonesia, which had been a Dutch colony.
Those who caught diseases were left untreated, and some were executed. Those who survived the war went on to suffer an anonymous life of loveless and lonely shame.
For modern Koreans, there is no better image for the barbarous experience of Japan's colonial rule of their country.