The story of comfort women — the women and girls subjected to sexual slavery by the Japanese Army during the Second World War — was the focus of a symposium at the University.

The symposium, featuring a filmed testimony from the survivor of a Japanese military ‘comfort station’, was organised by Department of History PhD student Sachiyo Tsukamoto.

The plight of comfort women remained secret until the early 1990s when survivors broke their silence.

Sachiyo said: “Comfort women were recruited into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army between 1931 and 1945. I only heard about their story when I was enrolled in a Tokyo branch of a US-affiliated university in 2007.”

She said her views of the war had been shaped by her family’s experience in Nagasaki, where the atomic bomb was dropped on 9 August 1945.

Sachiyo said: “As a second generation ‘Hibakusha’ — survivor of the atomic bomb — I had always thought of our country as a victim and not a perpetrator of wartime atrocities.”

But she says the story of the comfort women changed her life. Sachiyo said: “I’ve learned now that every country has a negative, dark side, to its history and it is time to bring these stories out into the open so the same mistakes cannot be made again.”

One survivor tells how she was forced to ‘service’ up to 30 soldiers every day. She added that some of the ailing comfort women were dumped into a river and drowned.

Sachiyo said: “I think their suffering was beyond imagination. Their life was so cruel.”

Last summer, Sachiyo met survivors in South Korea when she took part in a study tour organised by Toronto ALPHA (Association for Learning and Preserving the History of World War Two in Asia). Flora Chong, the keynote speaker of the symposium, is the co-chair of Toronto ALPHA.

Sachiyo said: “This issue is a very, very sensitive subject. One extremely brave Korean survivor broke the silence in 1991 and unearthed this controversial issue. But this issue isn’t restricted to Japan. Violence against women is an appalling human rights violation but it happens in peacetime in countries across the world.

“I hope the symposium will deepen our understanding of this human rights issue.”

Watch Sachiyo talk about her research: http://tiny.cc/ComfortWomen