Scholarly Works, Memoirs and Novels about the "Comfort Women"

There have been a number of books and journal articles written by historians and sociologists on the "comfort women" by scholars in Korea, Japan and the United States and the following list is by no means comprehensive. This list also includes memoirs and compiled testimonies, denoted with an asterix.

  • Ahn, Yonson. Whose Comfort?: Body, Sexuality and Identity of Korean Comfort Women and Japanese Soldiers During WWII. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2019.
     
  • Barkan, Elazar. "Sex Slaves: Comfort Women and Japanese Guilt." In The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 
     
  • Brooks, Roy L. When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
     
  • Chai, Alice Yun.  "Korean Feminist and Human Rights Politics:  The Chongshindae/Jugunianfu ("Comfort Women") Movement."  In Korean American Women:  From Tradition to Modern Feminism, eds. Young L. Song and Ailee Moon.  Westport, Conn.:  Praeger, 1998.
     
  • Choi, Chungmoo, ed. The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
     
  • Chong, Yong-hwan. Reconcilation for Whom? Comfort Women of the Empire as Invented History. Soul-si: Purun Yoksa, 2016.
     
  • Chung, Hyun-Kyung. " 'Your comfort versus my death': Korean comfort women." In War's Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes against Women, ed. Anne Llewellyn Barstow. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2000: 13-25.
     
  • Dolgopol, Ustinia and Snehal Paranjape. Comfort Women: An Unfinished Ordeal. Report of a Mission. Geneva, Switzerland: International Commission of Jurists, 1994.
     
  • Dudden, Alexis. Troubled Apologies – Among Japan, Korea and the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
     
  • Gustafsson, Karl. Transnational Civil Society and the Politics of memory in Sino-Japanese Relations: Exhibiting the "Comfort Women" in China. Lund: Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, 2014.
     
  • Hata, Ikuhiko. "No Organized or Forced Recruitment: Misconceptions about Comfort Women and the Japanese Military." Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact (2007). Available at: http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/31_S4.pdf
     
  • Hata, Ikuhiko. "The Flawed U.N. Report on Comfort Women."  In Women and Women’s Issues in Post World War II Japan, ed. Edward R. Beauchamp. New York: Garland, 1998.
     
  • *Henson, Maria Rosa. Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999.
     
  • Hicks, George. The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
     
  • Hicks, George. "The Comfort Women." In The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945, eds. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.
     
  • *Howard, Keith, ed. True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women: Testimonies.  London: Cassell, 1995.
     
  • Hyun, Dae-song. The Historical Perceptions of Korea and Japan: Its Origins and Points of the Issues Concerning Dokdo-Takeshima, Yasukuni Shrine, Comfort Women, and Textbooks. Gyoha-eup Kyeonggi-do, Korea: Nanam, 2008.
     
  • International Symposium on Filipino Comfort Women: Papers and Proceedings. Diliman, Quezon City: Institute of International Legal Studies, University of the Philippines Law Center, 1994.
     
  • Kang, Laura Hyun Yi. Traffic in Asian Women. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press: 2020.
     
  • Kim-Gibson. Dai Sil. Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. Parkersburg, Iowa: Mid-Prairie Books, 1999.  
     
  • Kimura, Maki. Unfolding the "Comfort Women" Debates: Modernity, Violence, Women's Voices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
     
  • *Media Joha Translation Committee, trans. Can You Hear Us? The Untold Narratives of Comfort Women. Seoul, Korea: The Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea, 2014.
     
  • Min, Pyong Gap. Korean "Comfort Women": Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2021.
     
  • Min, Pyong Gap, Thomas Chung and Sejung Sage Yim, eds. The Transnational Redress Movement for the Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery. Germany: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020.
     
  • Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea. Documents on the Victims of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army During the Second World War. United Nations Reports and Relevant Documents. 2014.
     
  • Naoko, Kumagai. The Comfort Women: Historical, Political, Legal and Moral Perspectives. Translated by David Noble. Tokyo: International House of Japan: 2016.
     
  • Nihon Bengoshi Rengokai. Recommendation on the Issue of "Comfort Women." Supplementary Explanation of the Recommendation on the Issue of "Comfort Women." Tokyo (?):Japan Federation of Bar Associations, 1995.
     
  • Nihon Bengoshi Rengokai. Recent Development of JFBA's Activities on the Issue of "Comfort Women." Tokyo: Japan Federation of Bar Associations, 1998.
     
  • Nishino, Rumiko, Puja Kim and Akane Onozawa. Denying the Comfort Women: The Japanese State’s Assault on Historical Truth. Milton Park, Abington, U.K.: Routledge, 2018.
     
  • Norma, Caroline. Comfort Women and Post- Occupation Corporate Japan. Milton Park, Abington, U.K.: Routledge, 2019.
     
  • Norma, Caroline. The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery During the China and Pacific Wars. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
     
  • Pilzer, Joshua D. Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese Comfort Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
     
  • *Qiu, Peipei. Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
     
  • *Ruff O'Herne, Jan.  50 Years of Silence. Sydney: Editions Tom Thompson, 1994.  
     
  • Sajor, Indai Lourdes, ed. Common Grounds: Violence Against Women in War and Armed Conflict Situations. Quezon City, Philippines: Asian Center for Women’s Human Rights, 1998. 
     
  • Sancho, Nelia. War Crimes on Asian Women: Military Sexual Slavery by Japan during World War II: The Case of the Filipino Comfort Women, Part II. Manila: Asian Women Human Rights Council, 1998. 
     
  • *Schellstede, Sangmie Choi, ed. Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000. 
     
  • Schmidt, David A. Ianfu: The Comfort Women of the Japanese Imperial Army of the Pacific War: Broken Silence. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
     
  • Son, Elizabeth W. Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.
     
  • Stetz, Margaret and Bonnie Oh, eds. Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001.
     
  • Tai, Erika. Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020.
     
  • Tanaka, Yuki. Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
     
  • Tanaka, Toshiyuki. Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation. London: Routledge, 2002.
     
  • Uneo, Chizuko. Nationalism and Gender. Translated by Beverly Yamamoto. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2004.
     
  • Yoshimi, Yoshiaki. Comfort Women. Sex Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II. Translated by Suzanne O'Brien. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
     
  • The Truth of the Japanese Military "Comfort Women." Seoul: Northeast Asian History Foundation, 2007.
     
  • United States Congress House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment.  Protecting the Human Rights of Comfort Women: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, First Session, February 15, 2007.
     
  • War Crimes on Asian Women: Military Sexual Slavery by Japan During World War II: The Case of the Filipino Comfort Women. Manila: Asian Women Human Rights Council, 1998.
     
  • Ward, Thomas J. and William D. Lay. Park Statue Politics: World War II Comfort Women Memorials in the United States. U.K.: E-International Relations, 2019.
  • Ahmed, Afreen R. "The Shame of Hwang V. Japan: How the International Community Has Failed Asia's 'Comfort Women'." Texas Journal of Women & the Law 14, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 121-149.
     
  • Arakawa, Maki. "A New Forum for Comfort Women: Fighting Japan in United States Federal Court." Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, vol. 16 (2001): 174-200.
     
  • Argibay, Carmen M. "Sexual Slavery and the "Comfort Women" of World War II." Berkeley Journal of International Law 21, no. 2 (2003): 375-389.
     
  • Asian Women's Fund, "The "Comfort Women" Issue and the Asian Women's Fund." Tokyo: Asian Women’s Fund, 2004.
     
  • Askin, Kelly D. "Comfort Women: Shifting Shame and Stigma from Victims to Victimizers." International Criminal Law Review 1, no. 1/2 (January 2001): 5-32.
     
  • Barkan, Elazar. "Sex Slaves: Comfort Women and Japanese Guilt." The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, (2000). 
     
  • Berndt, Caroline M. "Popular Culture as Political Protest: Writing the Reality of Sexual Slavery." Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 177-187.
     
  • Boling, David Alan. "Mass Rape, Enforced Prostitution and the Japanese Military army: Japan Eschews International Legal Responsibility?" Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 32, no. 3 (1995): 533-589.
     
  • Chang, Mina. "The Politics of an Apology: Japan and Resolving the 'Comfort Women' Issue."  Harvard International Law Review 31, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 34-37.
     
  • Chou, Chih-Chieh. "An Emerging Transnational Movement in Women's Human Rights: Campaign of Nongovernmental Organizations on "Comfort Women" Issue in East Asia." Journal of Economic & Social Research5, no. 1 (2003): 153-181.
     
  • Chuh, Kandice. "Discomforting Knowledge: Or, Korean "Comfort Women" and Asian Americanist Critical Practice." Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 1 (February 2003): 5-23.
     
  • Chung, Chin Sung. "The Origin and Development of the Military Sexual Slavery Problem in Imperial Japan."Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 219-253.
     
  • Cumings, Bruce. "Why Memory Lingers in East Asia." Current History 107, no. 701 (September 2007): 257-262.
     
  • Dolgopol, Ustinia. "Women's Voices, Women's Pain." Human Rights Quarterly 17, no. 1 (February 1995): 127-155.
     
  • Cumings, Bruce. "Why Memory Lingers in East Asia." Current History 107, no. 701 (September 2007): 257-262.
     
  • Dolgopol, Ustinia. "Women's Voices, Women's Pain." Human Rights Quarterly 17, no. 1 (February 1995): 127-155.
     
  • Dudden, Alexis. "We Came to Tell the Truth." Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (December 2001): 591-602.
     
  • Frühstück, Sabine. "Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II." Feminist Review, no. 82 (2006): 137-138.
     
  • Hata, Ikuhiko. "The Flawed U.N. Report on Comfort Women." Japan Echo 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 66-73.
     
  • Hayashi, Hirofumi. "Government, the Military and Business in Japan's Wartime Comfort Woman System." Japan Focus (January 2007).
     
  • Hayashi, Hirofumi. "Structure of Japanese Imperial Government involved in Military Comfort Women System." Nature People Society: Science and the Humanities 33 (July 2002).
     
  • Hayashi, Hirofumi. "The Japanese Movement to Protest Wartime Sexual Violence." Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (December 2001): 572-580.
     
  • Hayashi, Hirofumi. "Survey of the Japanese Movement against Wartime Sexual Violence." Peace Studies Bulletin 20 (June 2000).
     
  • Hayashi, Hirofumi. "Japanese Comfort Women in Southeast Asia." Japan Forum 10, no. 2 (September 1998): 211-219.
     
  • Hein, Laura. "Savage Irony: The Imaginative Power of the Military Comfort Women in the 1990s." Gender and History 11, no. 2 (July 1999): 336-72. 
     
  • Hsu, Yvonne Park. "'Comfort Women' from Korea: Japan's World War II Sex Slaves and the Legitimacy of their Claims to Reparations." Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 2, no. 1 (Winter 1993):  97-129. 
     
  • Kang, Hyun Yi. "Conjuring "Comfort Women": Mediated Affiliations and Disciplined Subjects in Korean/American Transnationality." Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 1 (February 2003): 25-55.
     
  • Kim, Chin and Stanley S. Kim. “Delayed Justice: The Case of the Japanese Imperial Military Sex Slaves.” Pacific Basin Law Journal, vol. 16 (2), (1998): 263–280.
     
  • Kim, Hyun Sook. "History and Memory: The 'Comfort Women'Controversy." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 73-106.
     
  • Kim-Gibson, Dai Sil. "They Are Our Grandmas." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no.1 (Spring 1997): 255-274.
     
  • Ladino, James. “Ianfu: No Comfort Yet For Korean Comfort Women And The Impact Of House Resolution 121.” 15 Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender, 333 (2009). Available at: http://cardozolawandgender.com/uploads/2/7/7/6/2776881/15-2_ladino.pdf
     
  • Ling, Cheah Wui. “Walking the Long Road in Solidarity and Hope: A Case Study of the 'Comfort Women' Movement's Deployment of Human Rights Discourse,” 22 Harvard Human Rights Journal 63 (2009).
     
  • Matsui, Yayori. "Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery: Memory, Identity, and Society." East Asia: An International Quarterly 19, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 119-142.
     
  • Mendoza, Katharina R. "Freeing the 'Slaves of Destiny': The Lolas of the Filipino Comfort Women Movement." Cultural Dynamics 15, no. 3 (November 2003): 247-266.
     
  • Min, Pyong Gap. "Korean 'Comfort Women':  The Intersection of Colonial Power, Gender, and Class." Gender and Society 17, no. 6 (December 2003):  938-957.
     
  • Morris-Suzuki, Tessa and Peter Rimmer. "Virtual Memories: Japanese History Debates in Manga and Cyberspace." Asian Studies Review 26, no. 2 (June 2002): 147-164.
     
  • Nakahara, Michiko. "'Comfort Women' In Malaysia." Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (December 2001): 581-589.
     
  • Nozaki, Yoshiko. "Feminism, Nationalism, and the Japanese Textbook Controversy over 'Comfort Women'."  In Feminism and Antiracism:  International Struggles for Justice, eds. France Winddance Twine and Kathleen M. Blee. New York: New York University Press, 2001.      
     
  • Nozaki, Yoshiko. "The 'Comfort Women' Controversy: History and Testimony." The Asia-Pacific Journal  3, no. 7 (July 6, 2005).   
     
  • Park, Won Soon. "Japanese Reparations Policies and the 'Comfort Women' Question."  Positions:  East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (Spring 1997:  107-134.  
     
  • Park, You-me. "Comforting the Nation: 'Comfort Women,' the Politics of Apology and the Workings of Gender."  Interventions 2, no. 2 (July 2000): 199-211.
     
  • Piper, Nicola. "Transnational Women's Activism in Japan and Korea: The Unresolved Issue of Military Sexual Slavery." Global Networks 1, no. 2 (April 2001): 155-170.
     
  • Sancho, Nelia. "The 'Comfort Women' System during World War II:  Asian Women as Targets of Mass Rape and Sexual Slavery by Japan." In Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Ronit Lentin. London: Zed Books, 1997. 
     
  • Sand, Jordan. "Historians and Public Memory in Japan." History & Memory 11, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1999): 116-128.
     
  • Seaton, Philip. "Reporting the 'Comfort Women' Issue, 1991-1992: Japan's Contested War Memories in the National Press." Japanese Studies 26, no. 1 (May 2006): 99-112.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "In/fertility among Korea's "Comfort Women"Survivors: A Comparative Perspective." Women’s Studies International Forum 29, no. 1 (January 2006): 67-80.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "Women's Sexual Labor and State in Korean History." Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (Winter 2004):  170-177. 
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "Aspiring to Craft Modern Gendered Selves: 'Comfort Women' and Chôngsindae in Late Colonial Korea." Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 2 (June 2004): 175-198.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "Japan's National/Asian Women's Fund for 'Comfort Women'."  Pacific Affairs 76, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 209-233.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "Japan's Responsibility toward Comfort Women Survivors." Japan Policy Research Institute Working Paper 77 (May 2001).  Available at: http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp77.html
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "Prostitutes versus Sex Slaves: The Politics of Representing the 'Comfort Women'." In The Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, eds. Margaret Stetz and Bonnie Oh. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001: 69-87.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "Centering the Korean "Comfort Women" Survivors." Critical Asian Studies 33, no.4 (2001): 603-608.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "Human Rights and the 'Comfort Women'." Peace Review 12, no. 1 (March 2000): 123-129.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "From Imperial Gifts to Sex Slaves: Theorizing Symbolic Representations of the 'Comfort Women'." Social Science Japan Journal 3, no.1 (2000): 59-76.
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "The Problem of "Comfort Women": The Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, Class, Ethnicity, and the State." In Cross-Cultural Communication East and West in the 90s. eds., Bates L. Hoffer and John H. Koo. San Antonio, TX: Institute for Cross-Cultural Research, 1998: 83-87
     
  • Soh, C. Sarah. "The Korean "Comfort Women": Movement for Redress." Asian Survey 36, no. 12 (December 1996): 1227-1240.
     
  • Song, Youn-ok and Melissa L. Wender. "Japanese Colonial Rule and State-Managed Prostitution: Korea's Licensed Prostitutes." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 171-217.
     
  • Thoma, Pamela. "Cultural Autobiography, Testimonial, and Asian American Transnational Feminist Coalition in the "Comfort Womenof World War II" Conference." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 21, no. 1/2 (2000): 29-54.
     
  • Totsuka, Etsuro. "Commentary of a Victory for "Comfort Women": Japan's Judicial Recognition of Military Sexual Slavery."  Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 1999.
     
  • Ueno, Chizuko. "The Politics of Memory." History & Memory 11, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1999): 129-152.
     
  • Ueno, Chizuko. "The Japanese Responsibility for Military Rape During World War II." Asian Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 102-107. 
     
  • Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. "Comfort Women: Beyond Litigious Feminism."  Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 2 (summer 2003): 223-258.
     
  • Watanabe, Kazuko. "Trafficking in Women's Bodies, Then and Now: The Issue of Military 'Comfort Women'." Women's Studies Quarterly 27, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 1999): 19-31.
     
  • Watanabe, Kazuko. "Trafficking in Women's Bodies, Then and Now." Peace & Change 20, no. 4 (October 1995): 501-514.
     
  • Watanabe, Kazuko. "Militarism, Colonialism, and the Trafficking of Women: 'Comfort Women' Forced into Sexual Labor for Japanese Soldiers." Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 26, no. 4 (October-December 1994): 2-17.
     
  • Wit, Katherine J. "Comfort Women: The 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes Trial and Historical Blindness." The Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History, vol. 4, no.1 (September 2016): 17-34.
  • Brandeis, Gayle. The Book of Dead Birds. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.
     
  • Genry-Kim, Keum Suk. Grass. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2019.
     
  • Keller, Nora Okja. Comfort Woman. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
     
  • Kim, Soom. One Left: A Novel. Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020.
     
  • Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999.
     
  • Lee, Jing-Jing. How We Disappeared: A Novel. New York, NY: Hanover Square Press, 2019.
     
  • Park, Therese. A Gift of the Emperor. Duluth, MN: Spinsters Ink, 1997.