Her Life: Yesterday and Today of Comfort Women Issue

We dig up the truth about the comfort women issue!

Is comfort women issue just a war crime that happened during the war 80 or so years ago?

Who forced the ‘comfort’ and who was it for?

Records and testimony collected from comfort women experts in US, Philippines, China, and other countries.

Soon we will no longer have witnesses, so it is time to take a clear look at the current status of the historical issue.

In 2020, John Mark Ramseyer of Harvard University Law School published an article titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War” in “International Review of Law and Economics” where he claimed that comfort women were not drafted by Japanese army during the second world war in the Asia Pacific region, and that women voluntarily contracted for prostitution and went to the battlefield. This incident clearly shows us that the comfort women issue that happed during the Pacific war and was raised more than 30 years ago is still a matter of discussion and in international spotlight.

We think we understand the comfort women issue, but not always clear about the understanding of the issue. This book attempts to examine the issue in a new light. The issue is a war crime that occurred during the war that happened more than 80 years ago, as well as current issue that we continue to discuss.

The author is a historian who researched how to educate about comfort women in the US. She wants to tell the readers why the comfort women issue is still a problem and something that we should continue to work on and how we should proceed from here. She also interviewed with people who are deeply involved in the movement and education of comfort women to shed various and new views on the issue and what we should look forward to in the future.

Majored in history at Yonsei University and graduated with master’s degree. Graduated with doctorate degree in Korean History at Columbia University. She stayed as a researcher at Columbia University and works as a professor at New Jersey City University. She participated in special internship program at Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College that focused on war crime and comfort women during the second world war in Asia. This led to her studies in research and education of comfort women issue. Recently, as California world history curriculum for 10th graders now includes comfort women issue, so she is focused on developing the curriculum and publishing papers based on it.

● Look at comfort women issue as not just war crime but universal human rights issue.
● In order to expand the view from just Korea, interviews were conducted with actual activists around the world.
● Plans for the times when there would be no more witnesses.
● Provide educational plan for educating on comfort women issues at schools.