All events · The World Wars

The Japanese Military 'Comfort Women' System

1932–1945 · East & Southeast Asia

Confinement Sexual Violence

Confined

100,000

Estimates of the number of women held in the comfort stations range from about 20,000, the figure argued by the Japanese historian Hata Ikuhiko, to 200,000 or more, the figure used by Korean and Chinese researchers and by campaigners; figures around 50,000 to 100,000 are common in the intermediate scholarship. Most were Korean, with large numbers of Chinese and smaller numbers of Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, Burmese and Dutch women; the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation records 200 to 300 European women forced into prostitution in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesian victims of sexual violence numbering between 22,234 and 60,000 in different estimates. The wide range reflects the destruction of Japanese military records in 1945 and disagreement over what counts as coercion.

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

From the early 1930s, and on a large scale after 1937, the Japanese armed forces set up 'comfort stations' at bases across China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, staffed by women recruited through deception, debt, official pressure or outright abduction and held under military regulation. On 4 August 1993 Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a statement acknowledging that the military had been directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of the stations, that recruitment was largely by private agents but often against the women's will, and that they had lived in misery under a coercive atmosphere; the statement extended apologies and remorse. In 1996 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, reported on the system as military sexual slavery and recommended state compensation. Japan created the Asian Women's Fund in 1995 to make payments from private donations with government support, an arrangement many survivors rejected as a way of avoiding state legal responsibility. A Japan-Republic of Korea agreement of December 2015 declared the issue resolved finally and irreversibly and provided a one-billion-yen Japanese contribution to a Korean foundation; the foundation was dissolved by Korea in 2018 and the dispute continues, with Seoul courts reaching opposing conclusions on Japan's sovereign immunity in 2021.

Parties

The Japanese armed forces established and regulated brothels in which women, most of them Korean and Chinese, were held for sexual servitude

Disputed

Japan's government acknowledges military involvement and has apologised through the Kono Statement while disputing the term 'sexual slavery', the estimate of 200,000 victims and claims of systematic forcible abduction by officials; Korean, Chinese and many international bodies characterise the system as military sexual slavery and hold that Japan's legal responsibility is unsettled.

The denominator

No single denominator exists. The women were taken from colonial Korea and Taiwan, occupied China, the Philippines, the Netherlands Indies, Burma and elsewhere, so there is no one population from which the system drew. The numerator itself is contested: Japanese scholars' estimates range from about 20,000 (Hata) to 50,000-200,000 (Yoshimi), and no register of the system survives.

Where the baseline comes from

Comfort women — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No count of deaths exists. Women died of disease, violence, suicide and abandonment in war zones, and many did not return home, but the destruction of records and the shame that kept survivors silent for decades make any figure speculative. The harm of the system was primarily prolonged sexual violence and confinement rather than a countable death toll.

Documented forms of violence

Sexual ViolenceArbitrary DetentionForced LabourTorture

The military's role in establishing and regulating the stations, the methods of recruitment and the confinement of the women are documented in surviving Japanese military and police records cited in the Kono Statement, in the Batavia trial records and in the survivor testimony collected by the UN Special Rapporteur.

Formal findings

Government of Japan (Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono) (1993) — Acknowledged in the statement of 4 August 1993 that the Japanese military was directly or indirectly involved in establishing and managing comfort stations, that women were in many cases recruited against their will and lived in coercive conditions, and extended apologies and remorse — source
United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Special Rapporteur on violence against women (1996) — Reported in 1996 that the comfort stations constituted military sexual slavery in violation of international law and recommended that Japan accept legal responsibility and pay compensation to survivors — source
International Military Tribunal for the Far East and Allied national tribunals (1948) — The Batavia court-martial of 1948 convicted Japanese officers of forcing Dutch women in Java into prostitution; the Tokyo tribunal recorded mass rape by Japanese forces as a war crime — source