Reaction #7: Comfort Women

Why were the Korean Comfort Women “silent” so long? To answer this question, one thing you will need to think about is how much women’s “worth” is tied to their status as virgins or “sexually pure” and how women who are not “pure” are shamed in societies. You also need to reflect on how rape has been characterized as simply an “unfortunate consequence” of war—this is not true, of course; rape does not “just happen.”

Why could the words and actions of Japanese officials and government be interpreted as attempts to further silence them?

The story of the Korean “Comfort Women” is a saddening one in that they were swindled into a path in which they were continually abused. They were in nearly all circumstances tricked or taken against their will to commit these acts as “services.” Their bodies were in a sense brutally tortured in what the women had to undergo that caused great physical and psychological pain. The women were pushed to their breaking point but had nobody to turn to in their time of need; they were sometimes convinced suicide was their only way out.

Women from all over southeast Asia were pulled away from their families with promises of work or at least being told they would be helping out in some way or fashion. It was unbeknownst to them that they would be used as property and abused by the military to satisfy the soldiers. These women often fought back and were often beat badly; in addition, families who may look for these young women would often fail in their endeavor or worse, be attacked.

These women were abused day in and day out as countless men violated them no matter what they said or how hard they fought they were used. They were literally powerless and were in most aspects a mere slave looked at as property to be used however the owner saw fit. In these much more conservative societies, purity is seen as a necessity and anything other is a disgrace to yourself and the family name. These women were also often impregnated by the large number of men that violated them, in which they would be given drugs that would violently react with the body to expel the embryo and likely cause unknown internal damages. Another number of women were given the same treatment when contracting any kind of sexually transmitted disease. A number of these women became sterilized and had little to no chance at being able to live normal lives after being freed from bondage.

The women tortured in this were often so stressed or emotionally damaged that they had nowhere to turn but thoughts of suicide and a number of them did take their own lives. The women would look for any kind of chemical or drug, any kind of way out of the daily turmoil and did what was necessary. The ones that survived carry the nightmares in their memory and for obvious reasons hate to re-live those moments.

The saddest part of this history is that nobody was able to admit their mistake despite years of reflection. Nobody’s morality was bothered and many of the soldiers didn’t even comprehend the damage they were dealing. The Japanese government attempted to hide and cover up any kind of knowledge to save itself from any kind of embarrassment, but such large-scale disrespect for life could never be hid from the people searching for answers. While the Japanese government may try and silence the women by becoming that overbearing power that requires its people to be patriotic, there are many that stand up against the atrocities that were committed in some of the darkest times of their history.