Kindred spirits

“I HEARD we are all going to a shoe factory,” says one of the terrified teenage girls in the film hopefully, huddled on the floor of a train bound for north-eastern China in 1943. In pastel linen dresses, and recently taken from their homes by soldiers of the Japanese imperial army, the captive girls will soon be beaten and raped repeatedly in a “comfort station”, one of the hundreds of military brothels that were set up to cater to soldiers in Japanese-occupied territory during the second world war.

Up to 200,000 women, mainly Korean and Chinese, but also including many South-East Asians and a few Dutch and Australians, were enslaved. It remains a source of deep resentment for South Korea, and has long been at the heart of its troubled relations with Japan. There the shrill voices of historical revisionists, who dispute that women were coerced—there were, after all, also volunteers from Japan and elsewhere—have grown louder in recent years. And then not all South Koreans acknowledge that much of the recruitment was carried out by Korean community leaders and unscrupulous operators.