SOCIAL SCIENCE / HUMAN RIGHTS

COMFORT WOMEN SPEAK

During World War II, an estimated 200,000 girls and young women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial military, which was authorized by the highest levels of Japan's wartime government. This system resulted in the largest, most methodical and most deadly mass rape of women in recorded history.

Japan's Kem pei tai political police and their collaborators tricked or abducted females as young as eleven years old and imprisoned them in military rape camps known as "comfort stations," situated throughout Asia. These "comfort women" were forced to service as many as fifty Japanese soldiers a day. They were often beaten, starved, and made to endure abortions or injections with sterilizing drugs. Only a few of the women survived, and those that did suffered permanent physical and emotional damage.

Little was known about the true scope of this crime against humanity until 1991, when after almost fifty years of silence, seventy-four-year-old Kim Hak-soon bravely told the world of her experiences as a comfort woman. Her testimony gave others the strength to tell their stories. The Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW) carefully transcribed and translated the stories of nineteen survivors, which are now presented in this book.

These courageous women have shared their experiences to document a crime that must never be repeated. They seek a formal apology and reparation from Japan's government for the horrors it imposed on them. Thus far, that government has responded with gestures that many survivors regard as a new and more subtle form of the same degradation they have faced throughout their lives.

This is not simply a history book. Comfort Women Speak documents the lives of nineteen courageous women who continue to fight to bring to account one of the most powerful governments in the world.

"One cannot mark out one testimony being more powerful than the others—they are accumulated shock, and one is moved not only by each individual testimony, but by their collective courage and endurance....The drama, the tragedy, is here for the taking..."
—William Witherup, Pacific Reader

"As the first volume in a series on science and human rights issues, these testimonies make a powerful case for the apologies and reparations that the Japanese government has yet to grant ....[A] moving document, whose text is complemented by articulate photographs by Soon Mi Yu."
—Publishers Weekly

"An important oral history...."
—South China Morning Post

This is the first book in the new Holmes & Meier series, Science and Human Rights. Christopher Simpson, editor of the series, is an associate professor specializing in information literacy at American University's School of Communication. He has authored several books concerning genocide, international human rights laws, and national security.