page_title: History of Korea
section_title: Comfort women
hierarchical_section_title: History of Korea / Modern history / Comfort women
caption_attribution_description: English: Comfort women crossing a river following soldiers. 日本語: 兵士のあとから河を渡る慰安婦 한국어: 병사의 다음에 강을 건너는 위안부
context_page_description: The Lower Paleolithic era in the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria began roughly half a million years ago. The earliest known Korean pottery dates to around 8000 BC, and the Neolithic period began after 6000 BC, followed by the Bronze Age by 2000 BC, and the Iron Age around 700 BC.
  The Korean peninsula has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, based on the discovery of stone tools and other objects, but the connection to the Korean people today is not clear. Since the sea level was about 130 meters lower than at present from the Last Glacial Period about 100,000 years ago to about 8000 B.C., most of the East China Sea was land, but around 4000 B.C., the sea level rose to about 4000 B.C., and most of the coastline was submerged under the sea. Some studies suggest that the Korean Peninsula was briefly connected to the Japanese Archipelago during the Last Glacial Period by a land bridge formed by drifting sand in the Tsushima Strait.
context_section_description: During World War II, many ethnic Korean girls and women were forced by the Japanese military to become prostitutes under the disguise of being hired for a job such as a seamstress, and were forced to provide sexual service for Japanese soldiers by agencies or their families against their wishes. These women are called "comfort women" with the euphemism. The Governor-General of Korea cracked down on taking in ethnic Korean foster-daughters by Chinese.
  According to an interrogation report by U.S. Army in 1944, comfort women were in good physical health and highly paid prostitutes but this report was taken from questionable sources. They were able to have periodic checkup once a week and receive treatment in case of spreading disease to the Japanese soldiers and not for their own health. IWG surveys in 2006 showed that none of evidence proved that the imperial soldiers raped comfort women or treated like "sex slave" but these are false as the report was made by the Japanese themselves.
  An Byeong-jik, a Professor Emeritus at Seoul National University denied coercive mobilization of these Korean by the Japanese military but this was also information taken from a Japanese diary which also had false information, showing the daily diary written by a Korean businessman.
  Asian Women's Fund claimed that during the World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army recruited anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of women from occupied territories to be used as sex slaves, euphemistically referred to as comfort women. Yoshimi Yoshiaki advocated that possibly hundreds of thousands of girls and women, mainly from China and the Korean Peninsula but also Southeast Asian countries occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army, as well as Australia and the Netherlands, were forced to serve as comfort women. According to testimonies, young women were abducted from their homes in countries under Imperial Japanese rule. In many cases, women were lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants. In some cases propaganda advocated equity and the sponsorship of women in higher education. Other enticements were false advertising for nursing jobs at outposts or Japanese army bases; once recruited, they were incarcerated in comfort stations both inside their nations and abroad.
  From the early nineties onward, former Korean comfort women have continued to protest against the Japanese government for apparent historical negationism of crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army, and have sought compensation for their sufferings during the war. The issues over comfort women were planned to be settled finally and irreversibly in an agreement made by the South Korean and Japanese governments in 2015. However, the agreement, made by the conservative Park Geun-hye administration, proved to be highly unpopular in South Korean society, as the agreement was viewed as denying the Japanese government of direct responsibility for the historical issue. The subsequent Moon Jae-in administration withdrew from the agreement. Similar differences in perspective and interpretation on the responsibility of Japan for war crimes committed during World War II remain a thorny issue between South Korea and Japan today.
caption: Comfort women crossing a river following soldiers.
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