Northeast Asian History Network

This is what a U.S. Army officer said in an interrogation report after arresting a brothel owner and comfort women near the Burmese borders in August 1944. Since establishing the first comfort station in Shanghai in 1932 after the Battle of Shanghai, the Japanese military indeed built military brothels everywhere they went. It was intended to prevent sexually transmitted disease among the soldiers and thus improve morale. In addition, it was designed to reduce the cases of local women being raped by the soldiers while keeping military secrets from leaking outside.
The Asia-Pacific War waged by the Japanese Empire for 15 years encompassed such wide areas. For this reason, comfort stations were also established in widespread locations throughout Asia and the Pacific islands. The type of the comfort stations and the way they were run differed depending on the time and location. It was not easy to put together and describe the overall size and features of the comfort stations by time and location. One reason for the difficulty was that there is not much extant primary evidence left as the Japanese military destroyed most of the official documents before and after its defeat. Another reason is that the comfort stations were built by all different entities and recruitment was often accomplished confidentially.
For this reason, it was not easy for us to get a big picture of the Japanese comfort station system and its victims. Many Koreans tend to view the scheme only in terms of what Korean comfort women went through.
The comfort station map makes it easy for the reader to grasp the breadth of the scheme at a glance. It was created by the meticulous process of gathering Japanese official documents and the testimonies of victims, former soldiers, and bystanders. Official documents include materials from the Japanese military and government, records from the Tokyo Trials and from the war crimes tribunal on Class B and C criminals, and Allied Forces documents. As for the victims’ testimonies, it is a collection of court testimony records, scholarly books, and interviews with them. Testimonies by former Japanese soldiers were based on war records, military documents, veteran groups’ records, and other books. Bystanders’ testimonies include those from soldiers who were not clients of brothels, nearby residents, and brothel managers. By compiling data with clearly traceable sources, this is rare collection of materials that makes it possible to understand the Japanese comfort station system.
The map was created by the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo, with sponsorship by the Northeast Asia History Foundation in Korea. The Women's Active Museum on War and Peace was opened on August 1, 2005 by renting an office in a university in Tokyo. VAWW-NET Japan is an exhibition space created with funds left by Yayori Matsui, the former chairperson of the Violence Against Women in War-Network Japan. Matsui led The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery in 2000 as a Japanese representative. She died in 2002 after proposing the establishment of a museum as a way to resolve the comfort women issue. As an institution that focuses on action, the museum put forward the following five principles: First, displays must focus on sexual violence from the viewpoint of gender justice; second, it must be made clear who is responsible; third, the museum must be the locale for action to realize a peaceful future without violence; fourth, it must be a grassroots movement away from government power; and fifth, its activity must be truly international and without national boundaries. The comfort station map whose first-stage production was completed in 2008 is a compilation of the research and investigation efforts by activists at the museum.
The map encompassed all areas where Japanese forces were stationed during the war, including Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Malaysia, Thailand, Guam, Burma, and Vietnam. A description of each area is made in the introductory part so that readers can get a big-picture understanding of the scale of comfort station operations as well as the situation in each region before and after the war. Each region is again divided into sub-areas, with official documents and testimonies compiled for each sub-area for the reader’s convenience. This is intended to help the reader understand comfort station operations by time period and location. The photos provide impeccable source data as historical evidence proving the atrocities committed by the Japanese military. Finally data sources used to produce the map are provided in an easy-to-read format. These are valuable basic source materials for use in publicizing the truth about the Japanese comfort women issue.