True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women
Keith Howard, ed.
Cassell Global Issues Series, 1995
Between 100,000 and 200,000 women were subjected to sexual enslavement by the Japanese military from the early 1930s until the end of World War II. Despite this, successive Japanese governments have denied full responsibility and have offered no reparations to the predominantly Korean victims. In recent years, advances in human rights and women’s rights in Korea have encouraged surviving “comfort women” to break through longstanding cultural taboos surrounding chastity, shame, and defilement, and to speak publicly about their experiences.
This volume presents nineteen firsthand accounts from survivors, documenting the coercion, abductions, sexual violence, and false imprisonment they endured under the Japanese military system. Originally published in Korean by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan—an organization founded in 1990 to seek recognition and reparations—these testimonies provide powerful insight into one of the most devastating yet silenced aspects of twentieth-century wartime history.