Military Comfort Women System (Jugun ianfu) 1932-1945
It was a systematic and carefully planned operation - ordered and executed by the Japanese government.
Young girls and women were either sexually enslaved or mass raped by Japanese soldiers throughout the war front. It is estimated that some 200,000 females from 9 countries including occupied China, Korea,Taiwan,the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, East Timor, Micronesia were conscripted to be the soldiers’ sexual slaves. They were held in prison-like brothels, often gang-raped on a daily basis, by ten or more soldiers. They were drawn from areas the Japanese considered populated by racially inferior peoples - including Dutch women. Korean comfort women were referred to as chosenppi (Korean vagina). Some were young girls of 11 or 12 years old kidnapped from schools throughout the vast Asia Pacific region occupied by the Japanese forces and shipped as military supplies. Many were recruited by coercion and deception using Teishintai (devoting of one’s entire being to the cause of the Emperor). Most became sterile from the repeated rapes. Those who became pregnant or infected with a sexually transmitted disease were given a shot of a drug referred to as "Number 606. The Japanese government insisted that sexual violence and rape was unavoidably part of war but finally admitted involvement when in 1992, Professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Chuo University found wartime documents in the Library of the National Institute for Defence Studies confirming that the Japanese military had indeed operated comfort stations. However, the Japanese government as a whole continues to deny the full nature and extent of its responsibility for the atrocities. Today, the thoroughly patriarcha Japanese social system continues to treat women and young girls as commodities. Corporate fringe benefits in Japan includes “sex tours” of Southeast Asia. Sex trafficking is rampant It was another one of the great unremedied injustices of World War II. There are no museums, no graves for the unknown comfort women, no education of future generations, and no judgment days for the victims of Japan's military sexual slavery. Many of the women who have come forward to fight for justice have died unsung heroes.
| 
