Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone

Hata Ikuhiko, professor emeritus of Nihon University, is a leading Japanese historian who has extensively researched Japan’s modern history, including the second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. He has authored numerous books, including Hirohito: The Showa Emperor in War and Peace and Nanking jiken (Nanking atrocity). Hata’s awards include the Kikuchi Kan Prize (1993), the Mainichi Publishing Cultural Award (2014) and the Seiron Award (2015).

• List of IllustrationsList of Tables Map of East Asia and the Pacific … OneThe Comfort Women Issue “Explodes”… TwoJapan’s Licensed Prostitution System … ThreeIn Manchuria and on the Battlefields of China… FourAlong the Pacific Front … Five“Battle Zone Sex” Around the World … SixPersonal Stories of the Comfort Women … SevenThe Confabulations of Yoshida Seiji … EightFrom the Kono Statement to the Coomaraswamy Report … NineSpread of Misconceptions about Comfort Women to the International Community … TenMerits and Demerits of the Asian Women’s Fund … ElevenFive Points of Contention: Q&A … TwelveComfort Women in the Battle Over History … ThirteenThree-point Suite: The Facts About South Korea’s Comfort Women, 1945-2015 … Afterword by Hata IkuhikoAppendixes 1. Statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei, August 4, 1993 … 2. United States Department of War, Report APO 689 … 3. Requesting Correction of Factual Errors in McGraw-Hill Textbook … Bibliography

This is a must-read for anyone curious to know how the transnational feminist topic of “comfort women,” sex workers for the WWII Japanese military, transformed into a focus of anti-Japanese nationalism in Korea today. Hata reveals the unearthing of Korean former “comfort women” by Japanese and South Korean activists in the 1990s and their creation of the master narrative that Japanese authorities forcibly abducted young Korean women and used them as sex slaves in battle zones. Countering this globally-disseminated half-truth, Hata places the “comfort women” in the universal problem of sex in the military and clarifies the link between “comfort stations” and prewar Japanese licensed prostitution. Hata’s exhaustive research points to the uncomfortable truth that profiteering Korean and Japanese handlers lured destitute young women with false job offers and victimized them as “comfort women.”