Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military : Includes New United Nations Human Rights Report (Science and Human Rights Series, 1) 1st Edition
by Sangmie Choi Schellstede (Editor), Soon Mi Yu (Photographer)
4.3 out of 5 stars 4 ratings
ISBN-13: 978-0841914131
ISBN-10: 0841914133
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During World War II, an estimated 200,000 girls and young women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial military, which was authorized by the highest levels of Japan's wartime government. This system resulted in the largest, most methodical and most deadly mass rape of women in recorded history.
Japan's Kem pei tai political police and their collaborators tricked or abducted females as young as eleven years old and imprisoned them in military rape camps known as "comfort stations," situated throughout Asia. These "comfort women" were forced to service as many as fifty Japanese soldiers a day. They were often beaten, starved, and made to endure abortions or injections with sterilizing drugs. Only a few of the women survived, and those that did suffered permanent physical and emotional damage.
Little was known about the true scope of this crime against humanity until 1991, when after almost fifty years of silence, seventy-four-year-old Kim Hak-soon bravely told the world of her experiences as a comfort woman. Her testimony gave others the strength to tell their stories. The Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW) carefully transcribed and translated the stories of nineteen survivors, which are now presented in this book.
These courageous women have shared their experiences to document a crime that must never be repeated. They seek a formal apology and reparation from Japan's government for the horrors it imposed on them. Thus far, that government has responded with gestures that many survivors regard as a new and more subtle form of the same degradation they have faced throughout their lives.
This is not simply a history book. COMFORT WOMEN SPEAK documents the lives of nineteen courageous women who continue to fight to bring to account one of the most powerful governments in the world.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
From about 1933 until the end of WWII, the Japanese military conscripted an estimated 200,000 women to work in "Comfort Stations" or brothels where Japanese soldiers could receive sex on demand. Frequently lured from their homes with promises of high-paying factory work, these women, most of whom came from countries like Korea and the Philippines (which were under Japanese rule at the time), were imprisoned in the comfort stations for as long as eight years, received no money for their services and suffered torture or even death if they refused to comply with the soldiers' demands.
Because those who survived were too traumatized and ashamed to speak of their experience, the history of the comfort women remained largely unknown until 1991, when one survivor spoke out and brought the attention of human rights activists to the women's plight. Here the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues has compiled an oral history comprised of interviews with 19 surviving comfort women, who describe their ordeals in harrowing detail. They were routinely underfed and forced to service up to 50 soldiers a day. While their responses to their experience range from anger to resignation, all feel that their lives were permanently blighted as a result.
As the first volume in a series on science and human rights issues, these testimonies make a powerful case for the apologies and reparations that the Japanese government has yet to grant. Readers dedicated to human rights, and women's rights in particular, as well as Korean-Americans will form a solid if modest market for this moving document, whose text is complemented by articulate photographs by Soon Mi Yu.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON, editor of the series, is an associate professor specializing in information literacy at American University's School of Communication. He has authored several books concerning genocide, international human rights laws, and national security.
Product details
Publisher : Holmes & Meier Pub; 1st edition (September 1, 2000)
Language : English
Hardcover : 168 pages
ISBN-10 : 0841914133
ISBN-13 : 978-0841914131
Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
Dimensions : 10.5 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,227,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#223 in South Korean History
#301 in Civil Rights
#393 in U.S. Civil War Women's History
Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars 4 ratings
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Top reviews from the United States
spark5
4.0 out of 5 stars A very important book
Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2011
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Comfort Women is one of the most heinous crimes committed by Imperial Japan, and yet it does not receive the international scrutiny and condemnation that it rightly deserves. This book goes a long way toward exposing the horrific nature of Imperial Japan's crimes through chilling personal accounts.
My only reservation with this book is that I also have read the Korean version of the testimonies by many of these women, and the English versions appear to be heavily abridged. I am not sure why that was done.
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chuka
5.0 out of 5 stars Comfort Women Speak
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2012
I am born and raised in Japan.
I have just read this book. I am truly shocked and appalled by the cruelty of our forefathers who it seemed to possess no human heart and mind.
At the same time I sincerely respect and admire the courage of former Japan's comfort women from Korea in this book to testify with such honest candidacy.
I gave 5 stars to the book because this book had and will have a great impact over Asian women's issues.
It was in 70s' when the comfort women became a big topic in Japan. But they were professional Japanese prostitutes. But to young school students like us, it was still a surprise because we were never taught at class nor in any history book that Japanese troops during WWII marched alongside the troop of " prostitutes" and we felt that was incredibly shameful and morally unacceptable.
Recently I have leaned that those comfort women were from other occupied territory by Japanese military and the horrible atrocity was committed by none other than our people.
When I was growing up, we often heard about the cruelty of the oppressive Imperial regime and suffering and exploitation of the Japanese people especially during WWII.
That is the reason why so many Japanese including Japanese Communist Party thought that American occupation in 1945 was "liberation" and General MacArthur as a liberator. (General "Mac" as he was referred to in Japan)
Then why can't current influential groups of Japanese who call themselves "patriotic" cannot accept the governmental responsibility by denying the obvious and further covering up these atrocities with pitiful excuses?
This phenomenon has truly opened my eyes about the truth about public prostitution system in Japan.
Before its defeat in 1945 there was legalized prostitution which was based on women's free will. However Japan had patriarchal law which set up mini-emperor in each household and did not allow Japanese women to posse property, nor could enter a contract without family patriarch's agreement. Basically it became modern slavery.
Due to extreme poverty or greed, women were sold to the licensed brothels by their father, brother, husband as family patriarch. Such women alone were responsible and forced to repay the lump some debt already paid out to the patriarch. The result was devastating. Those women, good natured and loyal to their family were shamelessly exploited by brothel owners, socially abandoned and rotted away with STD's. Therefore the legalized prostitution was a sham but in reality a sex slave system.
In 1932 before WWII, Japanese military had adopted military recreational facility and by themselves set legalized brothel system which had been heavily criticized in Japan on moral ground and already in decline due to too high prices at that time.
They supplemented the shortage by forcibly recruiting from Korea, china and other occupied countries including white P.O.W's.
Notice how blind some historians of today's Japan are by what THEY say about comfort women....that they were free willed, highly paid, fun-loving escorts!
There were no licensed prostitutes of free will in Japan, it was all by force.
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4 people found this helpful
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Philip H
4.0 out of 5 stars A shameful episode
Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2004
Stark and moving. The sheer numbers of women dragged into sex slavery, the extreme youth of many, and the brutality of their experience... That a handful of courageous women were allowed to tell their story is the first step to justice for the comfort women. It demands our attention.
I'm curious, what in Japanese society prompted them to establish such an "institution"? Even today, Japanese sex culture is problematic, to say the least, with its manga and Lolita fetish.
The sad thing is the American government has opposed the suit against Japan brought by some comfort women in the California courts, based on what it claims is the settlement of all claims in the 1951 treaty. I'll bet no Koreans and Filipinos were represented there.
The reviewer below should be ashamed at his atrocity denial. Elsewhere on Amazon he denies the Nanking incident. Civilized people would not tolerate such unreconstructed behavior from a German, and the same standard should apply to Japanese.
Contrary to Hiromi's assertions, the Japanese government apologized not to save Korean face, but its own. Imagine the national shame if this controversy kept appearing in the headlines, and Japan had to pay reparations. Ishihara is hardly a bleeding-heart liberal, if he was party to such concessions the truth must have been damning.
"They had picnic, sports-day, fun evening and diner [sic] party with Japanese soldiers"? This lame attempt at justification makes me ill. He doesn't refute the kidnapping, the 11-year-old sex slaves, nor the frequency of debasement these women faced.
"...there are unbelievable amount of propaganda spreaded by so-called anti-Japanese Japanese out there." So if a person questions the actions of his government, past or present, we should not believe him? I can see Hiromi would have made a good life during the fascist era. False patriotism - the last refuge of a scoundrel.
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16 people found this helpful
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Naomi Sato
4.0 out of 5 stars Japan's other "forgotten" Holocaust
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2007
Having lived in Japan for twenty-three years, I have seen too much
whitewashing and denial by the Japanese government whenever there's any
attempt by outside scholars or journalists to report on wartime atrocities
carried out by the Japanese Imperial Army against its former colonial or
imperial subjects. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prevented Japan's national
television station NHK from broadcasting even a one-hour documentary about
the heinous comfort stations and Japan's brutal wartime system of sex
slavery and serial rape.
The sex slaves were twice victimized. First by
Japanese soldiers in the field who looked upon these enslaved women and children as nothing more than "masturbation machines", the diseased or broken "machines" were taken out and disposed of with a gunshot to the head. After Japan's half-hearted surrender in l945, the thousands of
'liberated' sex slaves were victimized again by the total whitewashing or denial of these atrocities by postwar Japan.
Shinzo Abe and his ilk are no better than those Europeans who deny the Holocaust when they deceitfully suggest that the women forced into Japan's wartime hell of sex slavery were just "common prostitutes", which I have heard in Japan a number of times. Abe is certainly just a very common politician, bought
and paid for.
Part of the problem has also been America's Eurocentric
focus for far too long. The crimes against these former sex slaves were
all but ignored during the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in the late l940's.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Thankfully the U.S. House of Representatives saw fit to offer the last surviving sex slaves some measure of justice by passing the sex slave Congressional Resolution this
past week (Aug. 1st, 2007).
The Resolution soundly condemns Japan's
wartime involvement in mass serial rape and sex slavery on a scale that
has never before been seen in the annals of mankind's inhumanity. The
Resolution states in no uncertain terms that Japan must make a very formal apology to the last surviving sex slaves for the suffering and
inhumane brutality inflicted upon them during the long war years (Japan
began invading Asia in l931!). And most importantly, the Resolution wants
Japan to include accurate accounts of the sex slave atrocities in the
nation's Ministry of Education high school history textbooks. High school students in Japan learn little or nothing about WWII, except
Hiroshima. This is by design. The government wants all Japanese to think
of themselves as victims of "white man's colonialism" and that Japan
fought WWII to "liberate" all of Asia from the yoke of western imperialism. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malayasia, Indonesia, and
even Vietnam are fed up with Japan's revisionist lies and self-serving
distortions.
I am a former English teacher at Japan's elite Waseda University. Students at that school admitted to me that they never learn
about "greater East Asian War" because there is no time during the academic year to include such information on the university entrance exams! Japanese professors at both Tokyo University and Asia University
completely deny the Rape of Nanking as just communist Chinese propaganda.
Many Japanese prefer the revisionist version of WWII and feel that this
is the best way to deal with the past. The rest of Asia is fed up.
And many Americans too with such denials. The same Japanese leaders
who deny the atrocities at Nanking or the suffering of the sex slaves
enjoy paying homage to 14 Class A war criminals, including Tojo Hideki, at Tokyo's now infamous Yasukuni Shrine.
Please read the book "Comfort Women Speak". Just as survivors of the Holocaust have given testimony to the world so that the world will know and never forget, so
we owe it to the victims of Japanese wartime racism and aggression to
never forget their "season in hell" either.
Read also "Silence Broken:the Korean Comfort Women". The euphemism "comfort woman" was introduced
by the Japanese to avoid dealing in an intellectually honest way with the
horrors of sex slavery, prison camps, and serial rape. Based on this sort of deceitful historiography, Auschwitz concentration camp was just a "holiday work camp".
The Japanese love to dissemble and lie about past atrocities. But the world is beginning to wake up to the truth. I wrote a letter to Sen.
Edward Kennedy in l987 to protest Japan's whitewashing of the sex slave
atrocities. Finally after twenty years the U.S. government responded.
Read "Comfort Women Speak" and find out why Mike Honda urged his fellow
Congressional representatives to pass the resolution. In time even the
Japanese might see the wisdom of such a resolution.
Review by Naomi's husband, Robert McKinney.
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