4 ideas
Many testimonies describe girls recruited with false promises of factory work, nursing jobs, or wages to support their families, while others describe outright abduction. Poverty, limited schooling, and colonial rule made a paid job away from home believable and made refusal or complaint dangerous. The deception also let the system later be framed as private, voluntary commerce rather than military coercion.
Survivors describe stations attached to army units, with soldiers queuing, time and ticket systems, medical checks for venereal disease, and transport alongside troop movements. These routines show that sexual enslavement was organized and supplied as logistics, like rations or ammunition, rather than arising from individual soldiers' misconduct. The bureaucratic order is the evidence of institutional responsibility.
Survivors who returned home often hid their past for decades because patriarchal norms that prized female chastity treated them as disgraced, not wronged. Many lived with poverty, infertility, illness, or no marriage, and some never went home at all. Seen this way, the harm continued long after the war, and the society that received them shared in keeping the crime invisible.
When one survivor spoke publicly in 1991, others came forward, and their collected accounts contradicted the Japanese government's claim that the state had no involvement. Consistent first-person testimony from many women, recorded systematically, served as historical evidence where official documents had been destroyed or withheld. Speaking also reversed the stigma: the women stopped being hidden objects of shame and became witnesses demanding acknowledgment and reparation.