What is Comfort Women?

www.theatlantic.com

“As survivors have testified, many targets of this brutal system of sexual slavery were not “women,” but girls of 13 or 14”

Margaret D. Stetz, a professor of women’s studies at the University of Delaware, is co-editor of “Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II.”

Comfort women, the term represents the women who were raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II, was mostly girls who “had not even begun menstruating when they were shipped as human cargo to battlefronts across Asia and subjected to daily rape” (Margaret D. Stetz).

On December 28, 2015, South Korea and Japan made agreement on Comfort women. Japanese government paid $8.3 million to the existing comfort women, and gave them apologize. But this is still a problem remaining on both country. The Korean comfort women and also other Koreans are not accepting the apology from Japan and the agreement from last year. The main reasons are the issue of Japanese History Textbook, Japanese lawmaker Yoshitaka Sakurada called victims prostitutes, continued denial of wartime sex slavery of Japanese Government.

“Japanese government's report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women late last year. In a statement, the South Korean government urged Japan not to do anything that undermines their settlement of the sex slavery issue last year” (Action for Peace).