Japan Forces Korean Women Into Wartime Sexual Slavery
A system that began in Shanghai in 1932 spreads across the Japanese empire, with most victims from Korea
Quick facts
- System began
- 1932, Shanghai
- Ended
- 1945, with Japan's surrender
- Primary victim population
- Korean women and girls (majority), also Chinese and others
- Recruitment method
- Most commonly deceit (false job offers)
What happened
Beginning in Shanghai in 1932, the Imperial Japanese military established "comfort stations," a euphemism for a system of sexual slavery, which spread to Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, and other Japanese-occupied territories as the empire expanded. Comfort stations were initially staffed by women who voluntarily came from Japan, but as Japan's military campaigns widened in the late 1930s, the army turned to coercing local women, especially in colonized Korea and Taiwan. Japanese or local brokers, operating on the military's behalf, recruited forty to fifty young women or girls at a time, most commonly through deceit: false promises of factory, nursing, or kitchen work lured daughters of poor Korean families, some as young as twelve, who did not learn the true nature of the work until they reached a comfort station. Survivor testimony, corroborated by official Japanese military documents including regulations governing comfort station operation, describes women forced to serve dozens of soldiers a day without pay, under military-issued rules covering medical inspection schedules and fees.
Why it matters
Historians describe the comfort women system as the largest documented case of government-organized human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history, and it remains an unresolved diplomatic issue between Korea and Japan, with survivors and advocacy groups still seeking formal apology and reparation decades after the war ended.
How we know
The system's operation is documented by surviving Japanese military records, including officers' diaries and formal comfort-station regulations, and by extensive survivor testimony collected by historians and human rights researchers, which corroborates the official documents' account of military organization and control.
Sources
- U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment. Protecting the Human Rights of Comfort Women (Congressional Hearing, 110th Congress) · Primary source (author-declared)govinfo.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- History.com Editors. The Brutal History of Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’ (2023) · Reputable sourcehistory.com · The domain "history.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Association for Asian Studies (Education About Asia). Teaching about the Comfort Women during World War II and the Use of Personal Stories of the Victims · General sourceasianstudies.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match).
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