When New York-based visual artist Lee Chang-jin read an article in The New York Times about 'comfort stations' - organised rape camps set up by the Japanese military in Asia during the second world war - some years ago, she was surprised she had not heard about them before. The article led her to three years of field research in Asia and a multimedia artwork designed to document the stories of the victims and bring the comfort stations to public attention.
Then in 2007, US congressman Mike Honda introduced Resolution 121 in the House of Representatives. 'That resolution asked the Japanese government to apologise to former comfort women, which is something it has never done,' says Lee.
In her testimony to the House, one former comfort woman said Japanese soldiers had raped her 50 times a day. 'I was shocked,' says the Korean-born Lee. 'I wondered how anyone could survive that. I decided that the stories of these women, who are now getting old, should be documented while there was still time.'
During the second world war, Japanese soldiers were dying of sexually transmitted diseases caught from Japanese prostitutes who followed them as they invaded Asia. So the Japanese military set up official rape camps in occupied territories. They kidnapped and imprisoned young girls and forced them to have sex with Japanese soldiers. As many as 200,000 young women, some as young as 12, were abducted and raped on a daily basis.
The comfort stations were rarely mentioned after the war, although evidence found in 2007 revealed that some documents about the atrocity were made public at the Tokyo war crimes trials in 1946. Most of the women were too ashamed to speak themselves, particularly as prevailing cultural attitudes in Asia often held women responsible for sexual abuse. The issue was buried until 1992, when a group of comfort women decided to speak out in South Korea. There has been a demonstration outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul every Wednesday since 1992, demanding an official admission to the sex crimes and an apology to the victims.
Comfort women in China, Indonesia and the Philippines also began to speak out. Testimonials written by survivors appeared. Museums such as South Korea's Museum of The Japanese Army's Sexual Slavery were founded to document the women's suffering. But to this day, the Japanese government still refuses to admit to the existence of the rape camps, or apologise to the victims for their treatment.