Rangoon, Burma. 8 August 1945. A young ethnic Chinese woman who was in one of the Imperial Japanese Army's "comfort stations" is interviewed by an Allied officer Comfort women were women and girls forced into a prostitution corps created by the Empire of Japan. The name "comfort women" is a translation of a Japanese name ianfu (慰安婦). Ianfu is a euphemism for shōfu (娼婦) whose meaning is "prostitute(s)".
Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 from some Japanese scholars to as high as 410,000 from some Chinese scholars, but the exact numbers are still being researched and debated. A majority of the women were from Korea, China, Japan and the Philippines, although women from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and other Japanese-occupied territories were used for military "comfort stations". Stations were located in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, then Malaya, Thailand, Burma, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and French Indochina.
According to testimony, young women from countries under Japanese Imperial control were abducted from their homes. In many cases, women were also lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants. Once recruited, the women were incarcerated in "comfort stations" in foreign lands. A Dutch government study described how the Japanese military itself recruited women by force in the Dutch East Indies. It revealed that a total of 300 Dutch women had been coerced into Japanese military sex slavery.