The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War

Most categories of atrocity committed by Japanese troops during WWII were prosecuted at the 1946 Tokyo war-crimes trials. One major category was ignored, however: the thousands of women, mostly Korean, who were coerced into sexual slavery for the pleasure of the Imperial Army. Hicks (Hong Kong Countdown) begins his stark report with a historical survey of wartime sexual exploitation of women, then narrows the focus to the ``comfort women'' system developed by the Japanese. The copious testimony of victims is shockingly graphic. The author reviews the progress of a class-action suit brought by surviving comfort women in Tokyo District Court in 1991: the Japanese government has admitted complicity, but no apology or compensation has been tendered. This significant addition to ``the poor record of mankind to womankind, especially in war,'' properly approaches the subject as a human-rights issue tied to the rise of feminism in Asia. Photos. (Aug.)