While descriptions of comfort women occasionally appeared in memoirs and literary texts in Japan, most of the victims and former Japanese military men remained silent about the issue. In the 1970s, two pioneering books on the subject were published, one by Senda Kakō, a Japanese journalist and non-fiction writer, and the other by Kim Il Myon, a Korean resident in Japan.1 In addition, three personal stories of former Japanese and Korean comfort women were published in Japan.2 Memoirs of former Japanese officers, who describe their wartime involvement in establishing the comfort stations, have also been published.3 Yet the issue failed to attract wide public attention until, in the 1980s, a coalition of Korean and Japanese women’s groups elevated it to the status of a political movement within the global context of feminist and grassroots politics.4 The South Korean Church Women’s Alliance initiated action to condemn sexual violence against women, defining it as a basic human rights issue, and Professor Yun Chong-ok, who had engaged in years of research on the comfort women issue, started to work with some concerned Japanese scholars.5The Japanese government initially denied any involvement with comfort women and dismissed the request for an investigation when Motooka Shōji, a Socialist Party member of the Japanese National Diet, raised the issue at a budget committee meeting on 6 June 1990.
