Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military : Includes New United Nations Human Rights Report (Science and Human Rights Series, 1)

During World War II, an estimated 200,000 girls and young women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial military, which was authorized by the highest levels of Japan's wartime... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0841914133
• ISBN13: 9780841914131
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Holmes & Meier Pub
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 10.5"

Customer Reviews

Japan's other "forgotten" Holocaust

Having lived in Japan for twenty-three years, I have seen too much whitewashing and denial by the Japanese government whenever there's any attempt by outside scholars or journalists to report on wartime atrocities carried out by the Japanese Imperial Army against its former colonial or imperial subjects. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prevented Japan's national television station NHK from broadcasting even a one-hour documentary about the heinous comfort stations and Japan's brutal wartime system of sex slavery and serial rape. The sex slaves were twice victimized. First by Japanese soldiers in the field who looked upon these enslaved women and children as nothing more than "masturbation machines", the diseased or broken "machines" were taken out and disposed of with a gunshot to the head. After Japan's half-hearted surrender in l945, the thousands of 'liberated' sex slaves were victimized again by the total whitewashing or denial of these atrocities by postwar Japan. Shinzo Abe and his ilk are no better than those Europeans who deny the Holocaust when they deceitfully suggest that the women forced into Japan's wartime hell of sex slavery were just "common prostitutes", which I have heard in Japan a number of times. Abe is certainly just a very common politician, bought and paid for. Part of the problem has also been America's Eurocentric focus for far too long. The crimes against these former sex slaves were all but ignored during the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in the late l940's. Justice delayed is justice denied. Thankfully the U.S. House of Representatives saw fit to offer the last surviving sex slaves some measure of justice by passing the sex slave Congressional Resolution this past week (Aug. 1st, 2007). The Resolution soundly condemns Japan's wartime involvement in mass serial rape and sex slavery on a scale that has never before been seen in the annals of mankind's inhumanity. The Resolution states in no uncertain terms that Japan must make a very formal apology to the last surviving sex slaves for the suffering and inhumane brutality inflicted upon them during the long war years (Japan began invading Asia in l931!). And most importantly, the Resolution wants Japan to include accurate accounts of the sex slave atrocities in the nation's Ministry of Education high school history textbooks. High school students in Japan learn little or nothing about WWII, except Hiroshima. This is by design. The government wants all Japanese to think of themselves as victims of "white man's colonialism" and that Japan fought WWII to "liberate" all of Asia from the yoke of western imperialism. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malayasia, Indonesia, and even Vietnam are fed up with Japan's revisionist lies and self-serving distortions. I am a former English teacher at Japan's elite Waseda University. Students at that school admitted to me that they never learn about "greater East Asian War" because there is no time during the academic year to include such info