Comfort Women

Well researched and documented. Bravo to Yoshimi for making the necessary and human move towards truth. The Japanese have failed to acknowledge their many war crimes and this is a step towards balance. I'm stunned by the one star reviews here... so obviously by Japanese nationals who refuse to admit their country's atrocities. Shame on them..Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking is an important work as well. Green earth books - great seller... book arrived in very good condition and quickly.

The seminal work that makes the case for the involvement of the Japanese government and military in the demand, setting up, and "staffing" of the comfort stations. Yoshimi has researched this well and carefully lays out his case. This book is a slam-dunk case and a must read.

Great! Exactly what I wanted!

Great

I found the font difficult to read. Perhaps others might like an electronic version where they might change the font and its size to suite their taste.

Thank You. Interesting Book.

I have done some research on this subject and, frankly, I find it difficult to take sides. This book, unfortunately, has not helped.There is quite a lot of debate about this subject in Japan. It is a fascinating bit of history, but the data is scant and people on both sides of the argument are shrill and sloppy. Nobody seems to have taken the trouble to sort the facts from the rumors or the testimony from the hearsay. Both sides seem to believe that their own outrage is enough evidence for everyone.Both sides agree to this much: People being sold off for sexual service were commonplace in East Asia in the early half of this century. Poor families frequently sold off thier daughters to brothels. The Japanese army employed manys such brothels to service their soldiers and provided coupons for use in such establishments. Brothels under contract with the army were called "comfort houses" and the women were called "comfort women". Such "comfort houses" existed in Japan proper, Korea, Taiwan, China and all across Japanese occupied Asia.These "comfort houses" served three main purposes. 1) To prevent Japanese soldiers from raping local women, 2) to control the spread of veneral disease among the Japanese troops, and 3) to prevent espionage using local women.The big argument is, were any of the women systemically kidnapped by the Japanese army to serve in these brothels?On this question, nobody seems to agree with anybody. I used to believe that there must have been systemic kidnapping by the Japanese army as a matter of course. It seemed, everybody said so. When I started looking at some Japanese sources, I found some arguments to the contrary, but I did not change my mind. It was true that many of the evidence against Japan were either misrepresented or unreliable, but the Korean argument that the hard evidence must have been purposely destroyed by the Japanese army sounded more convincing to me. It was also true that some of the most famous ex-comfort women frequently changed their testimony or were outright wrong about wartime events, but I let it slide since these women were old and not the best educated. There were also some notable forgeries and liars who, as it turned out, were being paid big money to testify against the Japanese (often by the Japanese media themselves), but that was to be expected when you had such a sensational media frenzy.Then I learned about the Korean woman who sued the Japanese postal office for her wartime savings. She saved up the money from her pay as a comfort woman in Burma. To their credit, the Japanese postal office searched through their files and found that she had indeed made 12 deposits between June 1943 and September 1945 totalling 26145 yen in gold-backed money. 26145 gold standard yen equals roughly 1 million US dollars today. Also, there is an American military report that puts the average monthly income of the comfort women at 1000-2000 yen, at a time when the Japanese conscript was making 150 yen in a *year*. This was the turning point for me. Lots of people today would willingly sell themselves into sexual service for half a million dollars a year. If that was the actual average income, there would be no need to kidnap anybody, especially when there were plenty of brothels where women could earn a lot less.Yoshimi's book is one of the best researched on this subject. But the fact is, he did say that he was mistaken about the forced kidnapping. He admitted later that he could find no hard evidence that stood up to scrutiny.Anyway, I advise potencial readers to approach this topic with caution. No matter which side you take, there will be people who will hysterically hate you for it. Trying to take the middle ground will make you the enemy of people on both sides, because each side believes that EVERYTHING they believe is the TRUTH, even when it is patently not. Trying to sift the facts from the overblown accusations is a frustrating enterprise. In the end, it gets very political and very race oriented. And it will ruin your day many times over.

My father was an intelligence officer in the Navy during WWII and was involved with debriefing a number of fairly senior Japanese officers during the war because he spoke Japanese reasonably well. One of the things that came out time and again is how the military systematically destroyed records because they feared that members of the military would be turned over to Chinese and Korean forces for trial.The true depth of the abuses of the Japanese military vanished with those documents forcing us to use mostly oral sources to discover the truth. However the oral stories from around the Pacific Rim are largely the same: with a few notable exceptions young women were kidnapped and forced in to sex slavery.Unlike the German government the Japanese government has never accepted their crimes. I suppose it's natural to be ashamed of so much cowardice and cruelty but it means that this wound will always blacken the whole nation of Japan, long after the criminals are all dead.Why say all this? Because so much of this book relies on oral histories (even the best Japanese documents are often letters home that describe the brothels rather than official documents). The apologist cling to their desperate plea of "almost no official documents" as if somehow a government letterhead spelling out the crimes is better proof than a thousand tearful stories from a dozen nations that match so well that an organized system of sex slavery is clearly what existed.Reading this is not easy and you may come away with a bias against the Japanese. Remember that many nations have committed dark acts and yet went on to do great and good things. It is not the purpose of this book to condemn a nation, merely to condemn the criminal cowardice of the Japanese Army of that time.One day Japan will embrace that truth, and on that day they will have their honor back.

But there is nothing comfortable about the way these women from all over Asia were used by the Japanese Military during the war, May I also add that it was not just WW2 but in their war against Korea and China before the war of the world ever came about. A cruel and bitter look into the sordid side of a war, especially where women and children are concerned. Brilliant book though the subject doesn't shine one bit.

A good peep into history