Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War

by George L. Hicks

Book Overview

In 1938 the Japanese Imperial Forces established a "comfort station" in Shanghai. This was the first of many officially sanctioned brothels set up across Asia to service the needs of the Japanese forces. It was also the first comfort station where women, many in their early teens, were coaxed, tricked, and forcibly recruited to act as prostitutes for the Japanese military. Using official documents and other original sources never before available,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393316947
• ISBN13: 9780393316940
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A History Lesson Everyone Should Learn

It is not a easy book to read; it sure will make many of people in today's materialized society to realize how lucky they are. This book should be included in our text book to teach our new generation that freedom and liberity is not FREE and there is always a price to pay. If the Japanese government is not so sensitive and being over-protective about the issue, they should use this book as one of their text book in learning the mistake in their past, and hopefully they won't make the same mistake again in their new generation. People can find more info on another good book about the topic, "Comfort Women" by Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Suzanne O'Brien. I have the same comment there.

A Difficult Read...

... but one that folks do need to read. This book was written back in the year 1994 when the horrific legacy of the comfort women was almost unknown to the public at large. Now 8 years later the world is better informed thanks to such authors as Nora Okja Keller.Hicls did a wonderful ob writing and researching this book. He starts off with a general history of prostitution throughout war, and also a histoty of the attrocties aimed at women during war. He then gives a good overview of how the comfort stations were set up throughout the japanese dominated parts of Asia. He goes into detail of how the army, navy, government, and private folks set up the comfort stations, how professional prostitutes joined the comfort stations. How young girls mainly from Korea, but also from other countries such as Taiwan, the Philipines, Indonesia, and others were tricked o become comfort women with promises of money and food.Hicks' book is full o interviews with comfort women so the reader gets first hand accounts of what life was like in a Comfort Station. How the women were treated, how many men each woman or girl has to service in a single day, and living conditions of the comfort women.The last 100 pages or so of the book deals with the various groups who were determined to get an apology and monetary compensation out of the Japanese government. It took a very long time just to get the Japanese to admit that the Korean comfort women were not all willingly becoming prostitutes, but that corcion was used instead. good. but hard book to read

Well-researched analysis

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the World War II atrocities commited by the Japanese Imperial Army. Most scholarly literatures dealt with the Holocaust, or the massacres committed by both the German and Japanese army. There was little literature on the forced prostitution or the rape of Asian women during World War II. Hicks gives a very detailed analysis of the Comfort Women, in parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia.Japanese prostitutes were initially recruited to provide "services" to the Japanese army but that proved insufficient as the war expanded and the number of soldiers increased. Soon, the Imperial Army began to employ South Korean prostitutes but that proved insufficient too. Soon, young women, from South Korea, and other Asian countries, such as Malaysia, were coerced, or kidnapped to become sex slaves to the Army. They were sometimes lead into believing that they would work in factories where they could earn decent livings but only to realize (after they had left homes) later, that they would be "serving" these men, sometimes, 10-30 times a day.The most gruesome part of the book was the personal accounts of these young women. They ranged from 12-18 years old, and one lady, Madame X from Malaysia was gang raped in front of her family before being transported to a comfort station where she had to serve a lot of men. These women, faced the danger of disease, malnutrition or just the possibility of being killed at the battlefields. If they refused to perform, they would be severely beaten and sometimes killed. Sometimes, the army would also arranged for them to perform sex at the frontlines, where the pillboxes were transformed into comfort rooms. One would think that everything would be back to normal after the war had ended. After the war, these women had to bear the psychological effects of the war. Some were terrified of men and sex and most were unable to reproduce. This is a well-researched book, that provides insights into the lives of these comfort women. It shows the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army and how these women suffered both physically and psychologically.

A Truly Important Book

I cannot beleive that one could misinterprete a book so blindly as review-Dave. After reading the book I cannot find it possible that many of these women were willing to perform their duties as comfort women. If you were a child between the age of 12-18, which many of these children/women were, I highly doubt they were aware of what their realy purpose was. The book sites many incidences where women were deceived with the promise of factory jobs. Many were kidnapped from their familys and taken by force. Chastity is such an important value in many Asian societies and I find it unlikely that these women were willing participants. The Japanese continue to limit information about their war crimes and this book is an important reference to remind people of the oppression of women enslaved during the war. Overall, while it is a difficult book to read due to the subject matter it is well documented book. Mr. Hicks detail in covering the different countries occupied by Japan and the stories told by various comfort women in each area gives you insight that women all over Asia were exploited. The book does also sight that Allied forces were involved at the end of the war and Mr. Hicks tries to point out the fault of other who participated besides the Japanese. Another point of this book is to bring awareness to Asian Women's Rights in the future and to remember the women who suffered in the past to help prevent suffering of women forced into prostitution now and in the future.

Wow! What a great written book.

This is not only one difficult subject to write about; but it also must have been difficult to get people to talk about. It was a black mark not only on the japanese army, but also the entire japanese way of fighting the second world war. Thanks to a great job of writing this sensitive issue, this author has done a fantastic job of writing this book. It is interesting, hard to put down and scary that this could have not only happened, but been officially condoned by the entire japanese military system. I thought this book was great, in every aspect.