100 Books Like Comfort Women

The novel One Left begins when the elderly protagonist hears a TV report on the last surviving Korean “comfort woman.” She is in fact also a comfort station survivor, one who has remained silent and hence unknown to the public. At the age of thirteen, she was kidnapped into a Japanese military comfort station in northeast China. The protagonist's thoughts flash back and forth between her present-day life and the wartime horrors, the details of which are drawn from  real survivors’ testimonies. “Fifteen men a day was normal,” she recalls, “but on Sunday fifty men or more might come and go from a girl.” “If a girl got pregnant, her uterus was removed fetus and all as a preventive measure.” It is a difficult read, but necessary, moving, and profound. 

Born in Java of the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Jan Ruff-O’Herne was the first European “comfort woman” to speak out. She was interned in Ambarawa prison camp with her mother and two sisters when Japanese troops invaded Java in 1942, and forcibly taken to the military comfort station at Semarang two years later. Jan’s depiction of her happy family life before the war and the atrocities she suffered at the prison camp and the military brothel form an unforgettable contrast. Equally unforgettable is her resilience in the face of extraordinary brutality and her courage in breaking the silence around "comfort women" at an international public hearing on Japanese war crimes in 1992. Her book offers a strong message of hope for peace and reconciliation.

“Lolas” is the Tagalog word for “grannies,” referring to the aged women who survived Japanese military sex slavery in WWII. Lolas’ House skillfully weaves the heartrending first-person accounts of sixteen Filipina “comfort women,” snatched away from their homes and repeatedly violated by Japanese soldiers, with the riveting narratives of M. Evelina Galang, an American writer and professor of Filipina descent, who traveled with the Lolas to the sites of their abduction, protested with them at the gates of the Japanese Embassy in Manila, and became their trusted friends in documenting their stories. Galang says she “cannot rest until the stories are told.” I feel the same way. This book gives a powerful voice to the Filipina “comfort women.” 

This is one of those graphic novels where the drawing style completely matches the harrowing events of being a comfort woman (cw rape) for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Maybe I’m biased as a Korean-American who gets emotional watching Asian elders suffering before my eyes, but every five pages, I have to stop and take a deep breath.

I learned so much in this book than what we were ever taught in the American education system. It’s a gift to have the story of a real former comfort woman told like this. I’ll treasure this book forever.

This book is a must-read for any serious student of the Santo Tomas story. It might need to be requested by Interlibrary Loan, but they are worth the wait. I believe that this books put the reader "on the ground" because of the skill of Hartendorp's writing and research, as well as his personal knowledge of the detainees in the camp (and others like it). This book also contains experience that comes with reflection over time, containing interviews with people who survived camp life for several years after their period of captivity that is especially valuable because they were able to place their experience into a later and larger context, such as the resumption of peaceful relations with Japan.

Oral history sources have always been central to my work, both as an author and a documentary-maker. Cook’s account of the experiences of ordinary Japanese people during the Second World War is one of the best. It is both powerful and a lesson about the utter tragedy of war.

At last (2015) there is a balanced and carefully researched study of a central figure in the modern history of Japan and the war in the Pacific. The substantial utilization and integration of Japanese sources enhances the work but does not lead to any distortion of the real picture.

The Nobel-prize winning laureate has written many more famous books dealing with the human condition, most notably The Remains of the Day and Never Let me Go, but this is, to my mind, his best rumination on humanity's familiar ache. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a flawless book and similarly themed, but there is something about the post-war regrets, delusions, and self-justifications of the aging Japanese artist Masuji Ono that just slay me and make me want to weep. Ishiguro is of course the king of unreliable narrators, so I don't want to give away the big reveal here, but how denial of the truth and self-delusion can misdirect us in life, is at the core of this masterful insight into the human condition.

Naoko Shibusawa’s modern classic addresses a historical puzzle with huge repercussions: how did Americans go from viewing Japanese people as irredeemable enemies, to the point of justifying nuclear warfare and internment camps during World War II, to constructing them as vulnerable, willing, and dependable allies soon after Japan’s surrender?

Theories about “maturity” at the intersection of race and gender provide the answer. Despite its title, this book says little about the historical figure of the geisha – except in its use in postwar American cartoons that reimagined Japan as a compliant ward.

This monograph remains a huge inspiration for my work—I just love how deftly Shibusawa connects culture and politics. 

Takashi Fujitani offers a surprising historical narrative, telling the story of Korean soldiers in the Japanese army alongside that of Japanese-American soldiers in the United States during World War II. What is striking here is how total global war pushed both the United States and Japan to similar policies toward minority populations. Both abandoned more “vulgar” forms of racism (explicit discrimination) for what Fujitani calls a “polite racism,” where minority groups were now deemed as capable of cultural assimilation. But what really is inspiring is that Fujitani juxtaposes two wartime enemies—the United States and Japan—to show just how similar they actually were.