The Story of a “Comfort Woman”
May 22nd, 2009
Memoir of comfort woman tells of ‘hell for women’: Sobering tale of one woman’s experience as a “comfort woman” for Japan during WWII. There was a strategic – albeit twisted — military purpose to this system.
Japan established its first "comfort stations" in China in 1932 to serve as a steam valve for the troops, preventing rapes that would generate local resentment and resistance, and to slow the spread of venereal diseases through medical supervision of the brothels.
[…] "I became, in name and reality, a slave," she wrote in her little-known memoir, "In Praise of Mary." "On Saturdays and Sundays, there would be a line and men would compete to get in. It was a meat market, with no feeling or emotion. Each woman would have to take 10 or 15 men."