The system that sexually enslaved thousands of Asian “comfort women” did not emerge on the margins of Imperial Japan’s war in China. It grew at the center of the occupation itself. By the late 1930s, as Japanese troops advanced deeper into China, military commanders were already confronting the consequences of mass sexual violence by soldiers: furious civilian populations, collapsing intelligence networks, and growing resistance. In internal communications, rape was described not as a moral catastrophe but as a strategic liability. The solution, devised inside the occupation bureaucracy, was not restraint but regulation. What followed was the construction of a continent-wide system of military sexual servitude, administered through formal chains of command, extending from northern China to Southeast Asia.
The earliest documentary traces appear during the first years of the full-scale war with China. Japanese military papers from 1937–1938 show that field commands were authorized to establish “comfort facilities” alongside other logistical services for troops. A 1938 directive issued under the North China Area Army explicitly linked sexual violence by soldiers to growing anti-Japanese sentiment among Chinese civilians and warned that such behavior threatened military operations. The recommended countermeasure was not punishment but the installation of controlled sexual facilities for troops. In this framing, women’s bodies became a tool of pacification, folded into occupation policy.
Once authorized, the system was quickly bureaucratized. Comfort stations were not informal brothels tolerated at the edges of war; they were regulated institutions embedded in military administration. Orders governed where stations could be opened, who could use them, at what times, and under what conditions. Fees were standardized. Usage schedules were organized by unit and rank. Military doctors were assigned to conduct regular inspections, ostensibly to control venereal disease among troops. Station operators were required to submit reports to local military authorities. In occupied Chinese cities, comfort stations often appeared close to garrisons, rail hubs, or command posts, functioning as semi-official extensions of the military presence.
Recruitment of women was formally outsourced to civilian intermediaries, but this outsourcing was itself tightly supervised. Japanese government acknowledgements issued decades later concede that recruiters acted “in response to the request of the military,” with police and administrative authorities facilitating travel permits, transport, and border crossings. In China, Korea, and later Southeast Asia, recruitment frequently involved deception, coercion, debt bondage, or outright abduction. Even where intermediaries were nominally private, the conditions that made large-scale recruitment possible—wartime displacement, occupation violence, and the authority of the Japanese military—were structural and systemic.
As Japan’s war expanded, the comfort system followed. In the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, Japanese military administrations established comfort stations soon after the 1942 invasion. Here, the bureaucratic nature of the system becomes especially visible. Military Administration Bureaus issued written regulations governing comfort stations, including requirements for hygiene, accounting, and reporting. In some areas, local authorities were instructed to assist in procuring women. Survivors’ testimonies and postwar investigations indicate that women from across the region—Javanese, Sundanese, Dutch, Chinese, and others—were confined to stations serving specific units, often under armed guard, with little or no freedom of movement.
Singapore provides another stark example of how quickly the system was institutionalized. After the city fell in February 1942, Japanese forces established comfort stations for army and navy units alike. Regulations mirrored those used elsewhere: controlled schedules, fixed prices, mandatory medical examinations, and strict surveillance. The stations were integrated into the broader occupation apparatus, alongside censorship offices, police forces, and intelligence units. Far from being hidden or rogue operations, they were known to military administrators and treated as a routine aspect of troop management in a conquered city.
Across occupied Asia, the daily functioning of comfort stations followed similar patterns. Soldiers were issued rules for use. Women were subjected to repeated sexual access under coercive conditions. Medical checks were imposed not for the women’s welfare but to protect military readiness. Movement was restricted. Punishments for resistance could include violence, confinement, or transfer to more remote postings. While local variations existed, the core structure remained consistent, indicating centralized planning rather than isolated misconduct.
The Japanese state’s postwar position long sought to minimize this reality by emphasizing the role of private brokers. Yet the scale, regularity, and geographic spread of the system make such claims untenable. Comfort stations appeared wherever Japanese forces established long-term control: in China’s occupied cities, in colonial Southeast Asia, in Pacific islands transformed into military bases. This consistency required authorization, coordination, and enforcement. It required orders, paperwork, medical oversight, and policing. In short, it required a bureaucracy.
International investigations, including those conducted under the United Nations in the 1990s, have characterized the comfort women system as military sexual slavery, precisely because coercion was structural, not incidental. Women were trapped by the convergence of military power, administrative control, and wartime chaos. Japan’s own 1993 government statement acknowledged that the military was directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of comfort stations and that coercion occurred in many cases, particularly in recruitment.
Seen from China outward, the comfort women system reveals something fundamental about imperial warfare. It was not an aberration caused by undisciplined soldiers; it was an institutional response to occupation. Faced with resistance, anger, and instability, military planners chose regulation over restraint, bureaucracy over accountability. Women’s bodies became logistical assets, administered like supplies, moved along transport routes, and consumed in the name of order.
The legacy of this system still shapes regional politics and memory today, not only because of the suffering inflicted, but because of what it exposes about modern war. The comfort stations were not accidents of history. They were designed, implemented, and defended by an empire that believed control could be engineered—even over intimacy—through paperwork, policing, and force.
I’m not going to soften this with euphemisms. What the Japanese military regime did to women across occupied Asia during the Second World War was a crime against humanity. Not a “tragic by-product” of war. Not a cultural misunderstanding. Not the excesses of a few bad soldiers. It was organized, bureaucratic, systematic sexual enslavement. And calling it by its proper name matters, because anything less lets power off the hook.
But here’s the part that makes people uncomfortable: this was not an isolated horror, unique to Imperial Japan, sealed off safely in the past. Asian women did not suddenly become safe from coercion once the war ended. In post-war Korea and Japan, women were again pressured—by poverty, occupation economies, state neglect, and male entitlement—to provide “comfort” to soldiers, this time under different flags. The uniforms changed. The logic did not.
And that logic is older, broader, and uglier than any single army. Gang rape has been used as a weapon of war on every continent. From Europe to Africa, from South Asia to the Middle East, from Latin America to the Pacific, sexual violence has been deployed to punish, terrorize, dominate, and humiliate communities. It is not accidental. It is strategic. It sends a message: we own your bodies, your women, your future.
This is why reducing the comfort women system to “the mentality of some generals” is dangerously misleading. The problem is patriarchy—armed, institutionalized, and protected by silence. Patriarchy that treats women’s bodies as resources to be managed in wartime. Patriarchy that frames sexual access as a male entitlement, even in the middle of mass death. Patriarchy that believes discipline can be maintained not by restraint, but by supplying victims.
When armies plan sexual access the way they plan food rations or ammunition, that is not cultural failure. It is structural violence. When states outsource abuse to intermediaries and then pretend their hands are clean, that is not historical complexity—it is cowardice.
Remembering the comfort women is not just about honoring survivors or demanding accountability from Japan. It is about recognizing a recurring pattern that still hasn’t been dismantled. As long as militaries are male-dominated, as long as nationalism feeds on women’s bodies, as long as war is imagined as a space where normal rules don’t apply, sexual violence will keep resurfacing with different names and uniforms.
History is not warning us gently. It is shouting. And if we keep pretending these crimes belong only to the past, we are guaranteeing they will return.