During World War II, the Japanese held as many as 200,00 women as sex slaves, mostly from China and Korea. For the first time actual photos and videos of some of these women are made available to be seen. Some of the sex slaves were made to have sex with as many as 50 Japanese soldiers a day. Japan has apologized for their actions but the former slaves say the apology didn’t go far enough. Many of those women were left sterile because of the regular injections of medicine to ward off STDs.
The world’s first ever footage of Korean sex slaves used by Japanese soldiers during WWII has emerged.
Grainy black and white footage from 1944 shows seven bare-footed women outside a brick house said to be a military-run brothel in occupied China as it was liberated from the Japanese by Allied forces.
One woman in a dirty blouse is seen talking to a Chinese officer, others stare nervously at the ground and one, who appears to be pregnant, gently touches her bump.
Until now, photographs and accounts from survivors – labelled ‘comfort women’ by Japanese forces – have been the only records of Korean sex slavery.
But after a two year trawl through US archives, researchers uncovered footage which appears to show sex slaves at Songshan, Yunnan Province, as US-China Allied Forces reclaimed Songsan from the Japanese.
A team from Seoul University and Seoul Government matched the footage outside the building to pictures and identified the women by their clothes and facial appearance.
SungKongHoe University professor Kang Sung-hyun, who participated in the study, said: ‘Their appearance, such as the bare feet, suggest they were enslaved.
‘Due to a long-standing dispute over Japan’s wartime sexual slavery, it became crucial to come up with evidence.
‘This video clip will strengthen the admissibility of evidence behind wartime sex slavery.’
Professor Kang said the footage was discovered at the US National Archives and Records Administration where it had been gathering dust for some 70 years.
The clip tied in with wartime records showing a dozen sex slaves being captured in Songshan by the allied forces in September 1944.
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