Paper Abstract
1084. Tetsuo Arima & J. Mark Ramseyer, Comfort Women: The North Korean Connection, 08/2022.
Abstract: Through its "comfort women" framework, the Japanese military extended its domestic licensing regime to the brothels near its overseas bases. It needed strenuous health standards to control venereal disease. These "comfort stations" recruited their prostitutes (we discuss women recruited from Korea and Japan) through variations on the indenture contracts that the brothels had used domestically. Some women took the jobs because they were tricked by fraudulent recruiters. Some took them under pressure from abusive parents. But the rest seem to have taken the jobs for the money.
The notion that the comfort stations were anything else dates from the 1980s. In 1983, a Japanese writer claimed to have led a posse of soldiers to Korea and conscripted women at bayonet-point. In fact, the Japanese author had made up the story. By the end of the century, historians and journalists (in both Japan and South Korea) had determined that he had fabricated the entire memoir. In the meantime, however, an apparently corrupt organization close ties to North Korea took control of the comfort-women movement. Steadily, it inflamed the ethno-nationalism within South Korea and stalled rapprochement with Japan.
All this took place while North Korea steadily developed its nuclear weapons arsenal. Given the close ties between North Korea and the organization running the comfort women movement, that may be the point. Under pressure from the South Korean left, however, the government continues to launch criminal prosecutions against scholars who point out the genesis of the movement in the fabricated memoir.