Comfort Women

Comfort Women’ was the term used to disguise the use of women as sex slaves to the Japanese military during the Pacific (Second World) War. It happened throughout the South Pacific region that Japan controlled, including Korea. Some of the Korean women have been particularly courageous and outspoken about what happened to them and have formed a group fighting for recognition of the crimes committed against them and for compensation from the Japanese government. In other countries there has not been this level of openness and organisation. It was for this reason that I chose to work in South Korea as I would be able to meet, photograph and talk to some of these women as they had already stepped forward to testify in court.
What a sacrifice that is: to stand up in public, as an old woman, having kept the traumas of your past hidden until this time and tell how, for years, you had been systematically raped and abused by the troops of an invading army. Yet it is a tribute to the support they have had in the new South Korea that they are now generally considered with great respect and sympathy.
We will never know how many ‘Comfort Women’ there were as most are now dead, and only a few of those remaining have been able to face publicly acknowledging what happened to them over 50 years ago. These women are some of the oldest surviving slaves.

Jang Jum Dol was 14 and on the way to do laundry when she was taken by a Japanese man and told she was going to a factory to make money, but she was tied up in a house with an 11 year old girl and then taken with some other girls to Manchuria. She tried to escape and was captured and beaten and kept as at a sex station with a wire fence around it. She had three children there and two of them died, the surviving girl had a weak heart. She had to continue as a sex slave. When she came back to Korea with her daughter after the war she was so poor she had to sleep in the streets.

Chris Steele-Perkins,"Comfort Women"; Magnum Photos, 2009.