State, Sex, and War: The Case of Japan’s Comfort Women
Hello, everyone. I want to begin by asking you to think about something truly profound and unsettling. Imagine a war, a conflict that brought unimaginable destruction and suffering across continents. Now, imagine a specific crime committed during that war – a crime so horrific, so widespread, that it affected hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet, for decades after the war ended, this crime was largely unspoken, unacknowledged, almost erased from public memory. Today, we're going to tackle a subject that is, without doubt, one of the most sensitive and contentious issues in modern history: the Japanese military's "comfort women" system during the Asia-Pacific War. To begin, what comes to mind when you hear the term "comfort women?" Between 1931 and 1945, an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 women were mobilised, deceived, coerced, or forced into providing sexual services for the Imperial Japanese Army across East and Southeast Asia. These numbers, ...