Japan's Comfort Women Book Review

In Japan’s Comfort Women, subtitled the Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US occupation, the author Yuki Tanaka unearths a topic largely undiscussed throughout history. Published by Routledge in 2002, Tanaka goes into depth about the history of the exploitation of thousands of women used as comfort women, a euphemism for sexual slavery, for Japanese soldiers. The book is broken up into six chapters, including an epilogue, which focus on the different areas regarding this topic. With the help of diary entries, photographs, and official documents, Tanaka aimed to provide evidence that supports his arguments. Throughout the novel, Tanaka uses this evidence to prove that comfort women did exist, Japanese allied soldiers also used comfort women, …show more content…
His first argument was that comfort women existed. In order to prove this, he provided numerous testimonies, one being from a Filipina women named Maria Rosa Henson. In 1992, Henson “came forward and revealed her painful past as a comfort woman” (47). She even encouraged more Filipina women to come forward and “the testimonies of 51 women were collected” (48). In these testimonies, the different methods of procuring comfort women were revealed and it proved the fact that “at many places in the Philippines the Japanese troops directly secured comfort women” (48). Another piece of evidence provided was an “extract from the memoirs written by a former NCO, Nakamura Hachirō” (64). Hachirō writes “I was ordered by my commander to set up a comfort station. I consulted with a medical officer who was assisting in the settlement of our troops in this area and decided to establish the facility” (64). This memoir proved that the Japanese military established comfort stations in the Dutch East Indies after the invasion. Tanaka also provides an image of a Javanese comfort woman in Timoa Island, found in an Australian War