Korean comfort women during Japanese occupation of Korea - Essay Example

ge of these women volunteers as Japan rapidly expanded its control over Asia, to such a point that local women in colonized areas had to be coerced to serve in the so-called comfort stations (Yoshimi 100). Most scholars agree that the number of these women is somewhere around 200,000. It is believed that women from Korea comprise 51.8% of that estimated number (KCIS, “Comfort Women,” par 8). The Japanese began setting up comfort stations in its colonies beginning in 1932 with various methods of recruitment, as told by comfort women survivors (Mitchell 503).

As previously mentioned, they were mostly volunteers until scarcity pushed the military into coercion of women within their occupied territories. Soh enumerates that victims were either abducted forcibly from their homes or promised to be sent to factories as workers, only to be imprisoned in military brothels (“Japan’s Responsibility,” par. 1). Suzuki further adds that recruitment by Japanese soldiers could be as arbitrary as rounding up some random women at gunpoint or raping before bringing them to comfort stations (“Japan’s Comfort Women,” par 5).

However, local human traffickers were also responsible for such acts, Suzuki clarifies. The purpose of establishing comfort stations was threefold. First, and the most obvious, is to provide comfort to soldiers who were away from their families, not knowing if they could return home alive (Hicks 502). At the time, prostitution in Japan was legal and the military may have seen it logical to bring the practice in their colonies, given the sheer number of men employed for the mission. Second is to prevent the spread of venereal diseases, and the soldiers from randomly raping women in occupied territories – an act that might aggravate resistance against them.

Third, as revealed by the Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, is to appease dissatisfied frontline soldiers and prevent military uprising (100).. Yoshimi explains that the soldiers’