Dayi Comfort Women

Although comfort women are typically discussed within the context of World War II, the Japanese had begun their usage prior to the war during 1932, but it didn’t reach it’s full scale until WWII. The first ‘formal’ comfort station, the ‘Dayi Saloon’ was established in Shanghai, China in 1932. The Dayi had inhabited multiple two story buildings. It originally contained mainly Japanese comfort women., but in the late 1930s as the war was picking up Korean comfort women were taken there. As the war expanded, comfort stations were established wherever troops were stationed (Qiu). Comfort stations were located throughout Japan and it’s occupied territories, which included China, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia and Burma. There were two types of comfort

They also did this to lessen the amount of anti-Japanese sentiments that many locals of the occupied territories harbored, which often increased when Japanese soldiers raped many local women. Japan had also thought that the establishment of comfort stations would help to keep their soldiers from contracting venereal diseases thus keeping them healthier and reducing medical expenses, although this did not always prove to be the case as STDs continued to be a problem within the military. The final reason for the establishment of comfort stations was purely for the pleasure of Japanese military personnel (Argibay). Timothy Brook theorized that part of the reason rape was so widespread among the Japanese military was because women “stood for the body of the nation” and that the act of rape was a “gesture of conquest” and an act of humiliation to Chinese

Documents such as “Matters Concerning the Recruitment of Women to work in Military Comfort Stations” by a member of the Japanese War Ministry in 1938 were sent to Japanese forces in China addresses the recruitment of comfort women was for “the honor of the army”, but does not mention anything about having a women’s consent prior to recruitment or the recruitment of minors (Argibay). This shows how the Japanese government and military just thought of the young women and girls they were forcing into sexual slavery as military necessities, not as human beings. The Japanese preferred the women they recruited to be virgins, as they would not have any STDs (Fukushima). This was one of the reasons they enlisted many Korean women. In China, Japanese soldiers would sometimes immediately kidnap good-looking women and force them to become comfort women (Qiu). They did not recruit many Japanese women to become comfort women because they believed that if a soldier had a female family member forced to be a comfort women, it would destroy their trust in the government and army, so the few Japanese women who were in comfort stations were typically prostitutes (Yoshimi). The Japanese followed a policy called “minzoku massatsu” or “expunging the ethnicity” with many Chinese and Korean comfort women. This meant depriving the