The Brutal History of Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’
Between 1932 and 1945, Japan forced women from Korea, China and other occupied countries to become military prostitutes.
Lee Ok-seon was running an errand for her parents when it happened: a group of uniformed men burst out of a car, attacked her and dragged her into the vehicle. As they drove away, she had no idea that she would never see her parents again.
She was 14 years old.
That fateful afternoon, Lee’s life in Busan, a town in what is now South Korea, ended for good. The teenager was taken to a so-called “comfort station”—a brothel that serviced Japanese soldiers—in Japanese-occupied China. There, she became one of the tens of thousands of “comfort women” subjected to forced prostitution by the imperial Japanese army between 1932 and 1945.
The full story is available on the podcast above.
