Humanities Honors Program

Comfort women were sex slaves forcibly taken and used by the Japanese imperial army during WW2. These women were often poor and uneducated. These women were taken from many places across Asia, however, I specifically will focus on Korean comfort women. Comfort women were women who were used as sex slaves by the Japanese army. This is where the controversy starts. Japan refuses to state they were sex slaves but rather prostitutes. This is the controversy when engaging in discussion about comfort women. I am studying why it is considered a controversy versus a tragedy. Other works focus on the tragedy of comfort women, why it happened or what allowed it to happen. However, it does not focus on why on an international-scale we allowed people and a whole nation, Japan, to deny that these women were sex slaves. Finding translations, government documents, and first hand testimonies were important in understanding the reason why this tragedy is posed as a controversy. After researching, it was discovered that due to colonization, sexism, language, racism, and the historical circumstances around Korea after the second world war ended is what allowed these women’s lives to be contested. The hope is to broaden the understanding of these women’s experiences and how Japan was not the only offender in failing them and hurting them.