Abstract
Comfort women (慰安婦)1 were young women who were forcibly, and often violently, taken as sex slaves by the Japanese army during 1932–1945. It is estimated that up to 200,000 women were forced to serve as comfort women. 2 They were primarily Asian women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. A smaller number of European women from the Dutch East Indies also became comfort women against their will. 3
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Notes
Chung Hyun Kyung, “Your Comfort versus My Death: Korean Comfort Women,“ in War’s Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes against Women, ed. Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2000), 13–25.
See Theresa Park, A Gift of the Emperor (Duluth: Spinsters Ink Books, 1997). In this fictional story, Park describes how comfort women were considered a gift.
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© 2013 Hwa-Young Chong
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Chong, HY. (2013). Broken Bodies of Korean Comfort Women. In: In Search of God’s Power in Broken Bodies. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331458_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331458_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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