True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (Cassell Global Issues Series)

Between 100,000 and 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military between the early 1930s and 1945. Yet successive post-war Japanese governments have refused to acknowledge what took place and no reparations have been made to the mainly Korean victims. Recent developments in human rights and women's rights in Korea have led to the surviving Comfort Women to overcome traditional taboos of chastity, defilement and shame to speak out for the first time. This book contains 19 exclusive first-hand testimonies from surviving Comfort Women, which portray the coercion, violence, abduction, rape and false imprisonment they suffered at the hands of the Japanese military. The Comfort Women's stories were originally published in Korean by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (formed in 1990 to campaign for recognition and reparation for the surviving Comfort Women).