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A Continuum of Violence: Karayuki-san, Comfort Women, and Sex Tourism in Japan 
Jessica Zhu, Stanford ’24 

 
 
 
Abstract: From the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, thousands of Japanese women were trafficked 
to foreign countries and employed at brothels. Called "karayuki-san," they were the foundation 
of Japan’s pre-World War II economic expansion into Singapore and Southeast Asia, fueling 
growth both in their new countries and at home. This network of karayuki-san brothels across the 
Asia Pacific made it easy for the Japanese government and military to then, during World War II, 
set up the notorious system of comfort women and comfort stations. In Japan’s post-war 
economic boom, sex again became a central part of growth and development, with corporate sex 
tourism causing investment in the sex industry of hot springs resorts to skyrocket, which has in 
turn contributed to increased rates of sex trafficking in Japan. This paper argues that these three 
periods of history form a continuum of Japanese society using sexual violence against women as 
a means to an end. From the pre-war karayuki-san brothels to the comfort stations of World War 
II to the hot springs resorts today, Japan has continuously used women as collateral damage: 
sexual exploitation of, and violence against, women has been seen as a “necessary evil” for 
national development, justified in the name of furthering Japan’s growth and power. 
 
Content warning: This paper discusses sexual violence. Readers are advised to take this into 
account before proceeding. 
 
 



 

At nineteen years old, Kikuyo Zendo left her home in Okayama, Japan. She was the 
youngest of eight children and had first traveled there to live with an older sister after their 
parents’ early deaths. The Zendos were poor: half worked as farmers, the other half as 
merchants. So when a woman who wove straw mats with Kikuyo’s sister told her about a job 
working at a hotel in Kobe, Kikuyo followed her, hoping to make some money. But when they 
arrived in Kobe, there was no hotel. Instead, a man named Egawa drove her, her sister’s friend, 
and around five or six other women to a pier, where they boarded a ship. From there, they were 
taken first to Singapore, then to Malaysia, where they were forced to work at a “station,” or 
brothel. “I was tricked, all of us were,” Kikuyo recounted decades later as a woman in her 70s. 
“We were all in tears as we got off the boat. But we knew they wouldn’t let us go home. It didn’t 
help if we fought or cried. There wasn’t any hope of going home” (Imamura, 1975). The master 
of the station told Kikuyo that she owed a debt of 600 dollars to the sailors who had hidden her 
on their boat. The money earned from each of her clients was split 60:40 between her and the 
master, but saving up enough to buy her freedom was impossible. Kikuyo was trapped 
(Imamura, 1975). 

From the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, thousands of Japanese women like Kikuyo were 
trafficked to foreign countries. The Japanese public called them karayuki-san: “Kara” meant 
China or “foreign countries,” so “karayuki-san” first came to designate those who worked abroad 
during the Meiji Restoration. But job opportunities for Japanese men were limited in foreign 
countries, so the majority of those traveling abroad were women, many of whom were trafficked 
to or employed at Japanese brothels. The term “karayuki-san” thus took on a new meaning: 
Japanese women who went to work abroad as prostitutes (Hirakawa and Shimizu, 1999, p. 19-
20). Some went voluntarily, others tricked and trafficked like Kikuyo. But for all, it was never a 
wholly free choice — even those who travelled abroad voluntarily often did so under immense 
economic pressure. These women were the foundation of Japan’s pre-World War II economic 
expansion into Singapore and Southeast Asia, fueling growth both in their new countries and at 
home by increasing the demand for and consumption of Japanese goods abroad. Japanese 
scholars Hitoshi Hirakawa and Hiroshi Shimizu refer to this era as “the karayuki-led economic 
advance,” paying tribute to the ways in which karayuki-san were essential for, and at the 
vanguard of, Japan’s nascent economic development. 

This network of karayuki-san brothels across the Asia Pacific made it easy for the 
Japanese government and military to then, during World War II, set up the notorious system of 
comfort women and comfort stations. Around the year 1932, after Japanese units were first 
dispatched to Shanghai for an assault known as the First Shanghai Incident, military comfort 
stations began to be established in China by the Japanese navy. The army soon followed in their 
footsteps with its own comfort stations, citing a number of objectives: preventing soldiers from 
sexually assaulting and raping local women, reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases 
among its troops, and improving military discipline (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 43-47). At these stations, 
women who were trafficked from Japan and Japan-occupied territories like Korea and China 



 

were raped and abused by military soldiers and officials, often for long hours, suffering extensive 
physical and mental health problems. Decades after the war’s formal close, the legacy of comfort 
women still haunts Japanese and Asian collective memory, casting an uncomfortable shadow 
over efforts of transitional justice and reconciliation between Japan and the countries that it 
occupied during World War II. Since the 1990s, former comfort women have started to speak 
openly about their memories of exploitation and violence, and dozens have filed lawsuits against 
the Japanese government to demand compensation and an official apology. Reactionary and 
nationalist movements have flared up in response, defending Japan’s history and asserting that 
the country committed no war crimes during World War II, rendering an apology unnecessary. 
To date, the Japanese government has still not issued an apology or provided reparations that 
survivors have deemed satisfactory. 

In Japan’s post-war economic boom, sex again became a central part of growth and 
development. Prostitution and trafficking scholar Caroline Norma writes that for the past few 
decades and still today, “[w]hite collar Japanese working men are internationally renowned for 
their corporate sex tourism and after-hours client-entertaining in sex industry venues” (Norma, 
2019, p. 1). At many companies, for example, financially subsidized and often mandatory 
business trips called ian ryokou, shaiin ryokou, shokuba ryokou, or shanai ryokou take 
employees to hot springs resorts every year. These resorts are hubs of prostitution: in 1991, they 
were so popular that ian ryokou were the most common reason for which people traveled within 
the country (Norma, 2019, p. 100-101). According to the testimonies of some wives, hostesses 
and prostitutes are “foisted upon” the men at these hot springs and are unrefusable due to peer 
pressure from coworkers and superiors (Norma, 2010, p. 103). Sex tourism abroad is also 
prevalent: the number of Japanese men travelling abroad doubled between 1987 and 1992 to 
reach 12 million, with one survey reporting that one in five admitted to having bought sex with 
women abroad (Matsui, 1993). This increase in corporate demand for prostitution, and the 
institutionalization of ian ryokou, have caused investment in the sex industry of hot springs 
resorts to skyrocket, which has in turn contributed to increased rates of sex trafficking in Japan, 
sometimes of underage girls (Norma, 2019, p. 104). 

This paper argues that these three periods of history form a continuum of Japanese 
society using sexual violence against women as a tool for national development, with women 
being trafficked and raped to support Japan’s political and economic advancement. From the pre-
war karayuki-san brothels to the comfort stations of World War II to the hot springs resorts of 
the 60s and today, Japan has continuously used women as collateral damage: sexual exploitation 
of, and violence against, women has been seen as a “necessary evil” (when it is even considered 
an evil), justified by the government and by the public in the name of furthering Japan’s growth 
and power. With the karayuki-san, it was economic development in Singapore and Southeast 
Asia; with the comfort women, it was military success in the Greater East Asia War; and with 
sex tourism, it is corporate fraternity and economic growth. 



 

This continuum is specifically characterized by the intention of using violence against 
certain targeted classes of women as a “safety valve” for the redirection of both male violence 
against broader groups of women, and also male discontentment and frustration about their own 
exploitation — a legitimization of certain kinds of violence that attempts to prevent violence in 
other places. Race and class are also deeply interwoven into the fabric of this trend, with 
impoverished Japanese women being trafficked at higher rates, and with imperialism and racism 
causing Japanese men to view women in China, South Korea and Southeast Asia as inferior, less 
pure and more inherently sexual — thereby justifying their subjugation. The history of these 
three phenomena are inextricable from one another, each stage laying the foundation for the next, 
together building a patriarchal and violent society. 

 
Karayuki-san: Broken then Betrayed (c. 1970 - 1940) 

 
“From the late 1800s to early 1900s, there were tens of thousands of women who were 

smuggled in. They carried out their role as the front troops of Japan, helping the economy and 
cooperating in war. Only to be betrayed.” 

— Shohei Imamura, narrating in his film “Karayuki-san, The Making of a Prostitute” (Imamura, 
1975) 

 
Karayuki-san led the way for Japan’s accelerating economic expansion into Singapore 

and Southeast Asia. An estimated 6,000 worked in Southeast Asia during the peak of their 
activity in the early 1900s, with around 600 in Singapore alone. Many other early Japanese 
immigrants to these new regions were also often in “improper trades” connected to the karayuki-
san, such as brothels and sex trafficking. For instance, out of just 1,835 Japanese residents in the 
Strait Settlements in 1906, 852 were karayuki-san and 113 were brothel keepers (Hirakawa and 
Shimizu, 1999, p. 20). As these migrants settled down in their new homes, they catalyzed a 
domino effect of economic growth fueled by demand for Japanese goods: “[the karayuki-san] 
needed Japanese foods, Japanese beverages, Japanese clothes, and many other Japanese goods. 
Their demand was met by the queer Japanese sundry-goods stores … As the Japanese goods 
were also sold to non-Japanese customers by such stores, they became widely known. The 
prosperity of [Japan’s] Southeast Asian trade today … was in fact developed by these sundry-
goods retailers, behind whom there was a shadow of the Japanese prostitutes” (Koji and 
Michinori, 1919, p. 101-2). The success of the Japanese sundry stores also led to the growth of 
retail and wholesale shops, shipping and warehouse companies, and banks, which in turn 
generated yet more economic growth and development (Hirakawa and Shimizu, 1999, p. 22). 
Aside from sundry stores, karayuki-san also invested their money into plantations in Southeast 
Asia, typically rubber estates, which bolstered local economies. The bulk of their earnings, 
though, was remitted back to Japan in support of their families, leading to domestic economic 
growth as well (Hirakawa and Shimizu, 1999, p. 20). The contribution of karayuki-san to Japan’s 



 

economy was so powerful that when Chinese immigrants launched a boycott against Japanese 
goods in response to rising competition between China’s and Japan’s light manufacturing 
industries, the karayuki-san were included in the boycott because of the strong perception that 
“they were at the front of Japan’s overseas development” (Imamura, 1975). The role of the 
karayuki-san in Japan’s public consciousness was perhaps best encapsulated by Iheji Muraoka, a 
self-proclaimed pimp boss, who said that “[t]he ex-convict abductors must make the women 
work hard. They are to send money to the women’s family twice a year. It will help their parents. 
The government will collect tax from them. Ex-convicts will be rich and rehabilitated. Women 
can pay duty to their parents. And our homeland will become wealthy” (Imamura, 1975). 

Japan’s economic success prior to World War II was, therefore, impossible without the 
karayuki-san. They immigrated overseas first, encouraged Japanese business in their wake, 
invested in local economic development in Southeast Asia and sent earnings back home to their 
families. But as Japan continued to modernize and grow, the karayuki-san turned into a source of 
national embarrassment. In 1892, for instance, a petition sent to the Japanese government from a 
samurai and 36 other emigrant laborers in Thursday Island, Australia asked for karayuki-san to 
be expelled from the island, complaining that “due to the people (women and men) involved in 
prostitution our migrant labourers (dekasegi-in) are at times called ignorant dark skinned savages 
or subjects of a country of prostitutes” (Mihalopoulos, 1993, p. 43). Sasaki Shigetoshi, the 
samurai, continued that the prostitution of the karayuki-san put Japan at a state of 
“underdevelopment,” hindering the country’s progress toward modernization and Westernization 
(Mihalopoulos, 1993, p. 44). Of course, the demand was partly incited by the racist attitudes of 
other Australian inhabitants; but rather than defending the karayuki-san, Japanese immigrants 
abandoned them instead, relegating the women to collateral damage in the pursuit of a better, 
more “Western” international reputation. 

As embarrassment of the karayuki-san grew amongst Japanese nationals abroad, the 
Japanese government caved to its people’s demands: in 1920, the Acting Japanese Consul-
General, Yamazaki Heikichi, abolished the system of licensed prostitution of karayuki-san in 
British Malay (Hirawaka and Shimizu, 1999, p. 27). Suddenly out of a legal job, the karayuki-
san found themselves stuck: there were few options for alternative work, they didn’t have the 
money to return home and their government had provided them with no compensation or support 
after the outlawing of their occupation. Many had been trafficked unwillingly or pressured to 
travel abroad, but they still relied on their employment as karayuki-san for survival. “Our 
homeland sucked up the women’s profits,” Imamara said in his documentary, “then banned 
them, claiming them indecent for the nation.” Many karayuki-san died without ever stepping foot 
in Japan again; their graves are often not even marked with stones, but with pieces of wood 
(Imamara, 1975). 

This paper argues that the willingness to leave the karayuki-san behind stemmed largely 
from the marginalized populations that made up the women who went abroad. Like Kikuyo 
Zendo, most karayuki-san came from impoverished families in rural Japan. As Japan 



 

industrialized and urbanized, those living in poor fishing and farming villages found themselves 
facing a deadly combination of extreme agrarian poverty, overcrowding, and falling levels of 
productivity (Warren, 1989, p. 4). During the Tokugawa period, increasing rates of taxation also 
forced peasants in areas of rural southern Japan such as Amakusa and Shimabara to turn over 50 
percent of their harvests to the government. Even after the Meiji Restoration, taxation remained a 
burden that forced many peasant-farmers off of their land (Warren, 1989, p. 5). One of the only 
ways to escape these worsening conditions, especially for daughters who had few occupational 
choices, was to leave Japan and work abroad (Warren, 1989, p. 4). In an anonymous interview, 
for instance, a former karayuki-san recalls stowing away on a ship bound for Singapore at 16 
years old, working upon arrival at a brothel to support her sick father and siblings. Every day, up 
to 49 clients came. “I'd do it in the late morning, from 9 a.m.,” she said. “It would go on until 
around 3 a.m. at night. I cried and cried” (Miyazaki, 2020). 

Across rural Japan but especially in those villages of Amakusa and Shimabara, which 
were closest to the Chinese mainland and to the port of Nagasaki, young women were thus often 
forced to migrate, or were sold by their parents into prostitution. In a patriarchal society where 
female infanticide was common, and where women had no say legally or socially in family 
matters, peasant families viewed “the exchange of a daughter, who was regarded as an object to 
be invested in or sold,” as a worthy transaction that gave them “the only guarantee of a possible 
future” (Warren, 1989, p. 6). While some, like Kikuyo, willingly left home themselves — though 
they were often lied to about the jobs that they were chasing — many were also trafficked by 
their families as a result of both agrarian poverty and patriarchal norms. The line between who 
was trafficked and who had voluntarily travelled abroad was blurry; class and gender intersected 
deeply in the tragedy of the karayuki-san. 

First the honored vanguard of Japanese expansion and then the embarrassment that was 
left behind and forgotten, karayuki-san embodied the exploitation of women as collateral damage 
in the path of national progress. Despite being initially praised by the public for their 
contributions to Japan’s growth, they were tossed aside immediately once they were not only no 
longer useful, but also threatening to Japan’s public image as a modern and Westernizing power. 
Stranded in foreign countries with no hope of returning home, the karayuki-san were among the 
first victims of this trend in Japanese history: one that exploited violence against women as a tool 
for national progress. 

 
Comfort Women: Rape, a ‘Wartime Benefit’ for Japan (c. 1932 - 1945) 

 
“The military leaders there assume that the soldiers’ sexual desires are impossible to restrain 
and set up comfort stations so that the soldiers will not rape Chinese women. Rapes, however, 

are committed quite frequently.” 
— First Lieutenant Hayao Torao, writing in a report for the Japanese military (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 

68) 



 

Her story was an eerie echo of Kikuyo’s. It was 1943, and Mun Pil-gi was an 18-year-old 
girl living in Japan-occupied Korea. Although she had entered school at age nine, her father had 
withdrawn her and burned all her textbooks, raging that “women who study become foxes.” So 
Mun stayed at home, doing housework, spinning thread, and helping her parents with the fields 
and store that they owned. Still, she longed to study. So, when a Korean man told her that he 
could take her to a place where, he promised, she could go to school and earn a lot of money, she 
went with him. Like Kikuyo, Mun never reached that alluring place. When she got off of the 
truck that had taken her from her village, she found herself in Pusan, where she was put on a 
train to northeastern China and forced to work in a military comfort station there (Yoshiaki, 
1995, p. 104-5). 

Problems abounded for the Japanese military as they launched their invasion into China: 
soldiers were raping local women, sexually transmitted diseases were spreading among the 
troops due to the use of civilian brothels, and the wretched conditions of the army’s barracks 
were stirring up discontent. The solution that was reached borrowed from the memory and 
legacy of the karayuki-san. A system of “comfort stations,” military-run brothels where women 
from Japan and Japan-occupied territories were trafficked to, was designed by the Japanese 
military to provide sexual “comfort” to soldiers and to improve military discipline. 

The Japanese government’s intention of using sexual violence against comfort women as 
a deterrance for sexual violence against local Chinese women, a twisted attempt to reduce anti-
Japanese sentiment, again reflects the relegation of certain subjugated populations of women to 
“collateral damage” for the greater national good. Okabe Naosaburö, who was Chief of Staff 
of the North China Area Army from November 1944 until the end of World War II, wrote in his 
“Written Notification of Warnings on the Treatment of the Local Population by Military Units 
and Personnel” that “the trigger causing such potent anti-Japanese sentiment [in occupied parts 
of China] is the widespread diffusion of news about rapes committed by Japanese military 
personnel in various areas,” citing the formation of several Chinese self-defense organizations 
that were seeking revenge for Japanese crimes, particularly rapes, through violence and even 
murder (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 54-55). Notably, the military’s motivation behind preventing the rape 
of local women was not to protect them, but to reduce anti-Japanese sentiment among occupied 
peoples, which stood in the way of their imperial goals. First Lieutenant Hayao Torao explicitly 
confirmed this in his report “Phenomena Particular to the Battlefield and Policies Toward 
Them,” which stated that “[t]he essential purposes of these stations are to … prevent rapes that 
damage the honor of the Imperial Army” (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 67). Ironically, but perhaps 
predictably, the comfort stations did not even reduce rapes of local women: there were no 
occupied areas in which rapes stopped, even when comfort stations were available to soldiers 
(Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 66). Japanese scholar Yoshimi Yoshiaki writes that “[i]t is impossible to 
prevent rape on the one hand while officially sanctioning sexual violence on the other,” noting 
also that the lack of severe punishments for soldiers who committed rapes contributed to this 
prevalence of sexual violence (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 66). Nevertheless, the Japanese government’s 



 

attempt to reduce rapes of local women by allowing soldiers to instead rape selected groups of 
women reflects the assumption that women’s bodies can be traded and exploited in the name of 
the greater good, in this case military success, just as rural families sold their daughters into 
prostitution for economic gain during the age of the karayuki-san. The military’s goal of 
reducing anti-Japanese sentiment also illustrates the ways in which women were sacrificed for 
the sake of national advancement: like how the karayuki-san were exploited for economic 
expansion and then left behind once they came to be seen as an embarrassment, the rape of 
comfort women was justified in the name of supporting Japan’s occupation of China and 
furthering its global power. 

Reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), too, was another objective 
which comfort women were sacrificed for. The long hospitalization and recovery periods for 
STDs at the time — 91 days for gonorrhea and 76 from syphilis — presented serious issues for 
both the stationed troops and the domestic Japanese government, as infected soldiers who 
returned home would spread the STDs there (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 69). Soldiers were thus 
prohibited from going to civilian brothels, where it was supposed that most STDs originated; 
instead, comfort stations were established as an alternative that the military thought it could 
better control and regulate with proper hygiene rules and practices (Yoshiaki 70). But, as with 
the aim of reducing rapes of local women, this endeavor failed as well. Almost all comfort 
women became infected with STDs, an issue that First Lieutenant Hayao Torao attributed, at the 
time, to the recruitment and trafficking of women who were already prostitutes in Japan or Korea 
to the comfort stations. But Yoshiaki counters that “[w]hether the comfort women brought to 
China were a source of infection or not is highly debatable. Women with no history of 
prostitution should be seen as victims who were infected {by troops} rather than as sources of 
infection” (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 71). Since many comfort women were trafficked through 
deception and violence or were sold by their parents, it is likely that the spread of STDs in the 
stations originated from already-infected soldiers, rather than from the women brought to China. 
Many comfort women were also selected from the local Chinese civilian population. Regardless 
of where the STDs originated, though, the philosophy behind using comfort stations to reduce 
their spread was still inherently exploitative: given the vast population of soldiers who were 
already infected, it was inevitable that the comfort women would become infected as well. 
Despite this fact, the military threw the trafficked women in harm’s way to protect and 
strengthen their soldiers. The health of the comfort women, on the other hand, was given little 
thought: an oral history testimony from a woman stationed at the Shijiazhuang comfort station 
recalls that Chinese girls still in school were rounded up — “their genitals were still 
underdeveloped, so they became torn and infected. There was no medicine except something to 
prevent sexually transmitted diseases and Mercurochrome. They got sick, their sores became 
septic, but there was no treatment” (Kaneda, 1998). For both the personal health of the troops, 
and the efficacy and cohesion of the military, comfort women were sacrificed as collateral 
damage with no regard for the health consequences that they themselves suffered. 



 

Perhaps most emblematic of this idea was the military’s final objective in designing this 
violent system: to provide “comfort” to their soldiers, giving the stations their notorious name. In 
waging its aggressive war, Japan required that its soldiers remain in the field for long periods, 
living in bleak conditions that gradually incited anger and frustration among the troops. Their 
human rights were violated, and they lived under the heel of strict commanding officers who 
exercised harsh and arbitrary discipline (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 73). As a result, officers began to 
lose control over their soldiers, with one staff officer in the 11th Army complaining that “they 
were unable to assert their authority over older enlisted men” (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 74). To 
ameliorate this crisis, military doctors advised that wholesome comfort and entertainment 
facilities such as libraries, theaters and gyms be built; instead, the system of comfort facilities 
was established to offer soldiers “sexual comfort” from the wretched realities of their everyday 
lives. This goal was explicit and primary above others: the second article of the comfort station 
regulations of the 3rd Independent Mountain Artillery Regiment stated that the comfort stations 
were built to “pacify and moderate the troops’ brutal temperament and to aid in the promotion of 
military discipline,” and stations were brought even to areas where there were few civilians and 
thus few local rapes and little threat of STD transmission (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 73). In pursuing 
this objective, the military was somewhat more successful than it was with the former two. One 
soldier stationed in China recounted that at the comfort stations, he and the other men “would be 
holding down [their] penises as [they] ran in … They all wanted to be freed from the stress of the 
singular experience of having walked the line between life and death … [They] thought there 
was no sense of fulfillment that burned so intensely as this” (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 74). Rape even 
became seen as a “wartime benefit” among the Japanese military. In the military tribunals that 
were set up to prosecute Japanese war crimes after World War II, many on trial for rape said that 
prior to departing for China, they were told by returning soldiers that sex was one of the good 
things about the war, and that this caused incoming soldiers to be “seized with the desire to rape” 
(Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 191). Whether this desire was released upon local civilian women or women 
in comfort stations was seemingly immaterial to them. In giving the soldiers access to sex with 
women as compensation for their harsh living conditions, the military thus furthered the idea that 
men’s suffering, especially when tied to the state and its aims, should be prioritized over 
women’s suffering to the point that violence against women was justified if in service of aiding 
men. Evidently, these societally held notions added to the historical continuum of sacrificing 
women and using sexual violence against them for national objectives. The system of comfort 
women was viewed as a “necessary evil” among the Japanese military, reflecting that even 
though they recognized the brutality that was faced by the women trafficked to the brothels, they 
felt that it was more important to prioritize the furthering of Japan’s invasion of China. 

Like with the karayuki-san, the economic class of the comfort women played an 
important role in their exploitation. Agents in occupied territories took advantage of widespread 
poverty to convince young girls into going with them to seek better employment opportunities 
elsewhere. In Korea, for example, Japan’s colonial policies meshed with an already patriarchal 



 

culture to make receiving an adequate education impossible for women: a 1930 survey found that 
only eight percent of Korean women were literate, compared to 36 percent of men. Tricked by 
promises of good work in places like “factories,” many girls went willingly with Japanese agents 
to escape their oppression at home (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 105). Sometimes, the crushing cruelty of 
poverty also meant that even if the young women themselves did not want to go with the agents, 
they would be sold into service by their parents, who were often also deceived about the true 
nature of the work that their daughters would be doing. One Japanese couple called the 
Kitamuras, for example, worked as comfort station operators and bought 22 Korean women in 
1942 for sums of between 300 and 1,000 yen to the girls’ parents. The women and their families 
were told that the work would encompass tasks such as visiting the wounded in hospitals and 
rolling bandages; the enticement of “plenty of money, an opportunity to pay off the family debts, 
easy work, and the prospect of a new life in a new land” was often too alluring to be turned 
down. Many comfort women were thus sold into the system by their own parents, their fates 
sealed by the trap of poverty — a cruel echo of the karayuki-san’s origins too (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 
105-6). 

Race and imperialism also played large roles in determining which populations of women 
were targeted for trafficking. The poverty in Korea that enabled many women to be exploited 
was heavily shaped by Japan’s colonial policies, which kept women uneducated and 
impoverished. Knowing this, Japanese agents purposefully targeted Korean women: since Korea 
was considered a colony of Japan, international law that banned human trafficking was 
inapplicable there, as well as in Taiwan (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 157). Because the same could not be 
said of mainland Japan, most comfort women trafficked from Japan were chosen from prostitutes 
already working in brothels, since this made it easier for the military to sidestep the international 
treaty that forbade the buying and selling of women and children — technically, the prostitutes 
were not being “sold” (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 100). In contrast, “all of the Korean girls are said to 
have been tricked into going along” (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 102). While this disparity does not mean 
that the trafficked Japanese women were any more or less victimized in comfort stations than 
Korean women, it does reflect how imperialism impacted which specific groups of women were 
targeted in different places. Women trafficked in China, too, faced the impact of imperialism. 
The Japanese military enlisted local Chinese leaders to help them in gathering up women, hoping 
for cooperation with occupied villages and territories. But these occurrences were typically 
coerced: it was impossible to defy army orders, and Japanese garrisons claimed that the women 
were needed for the safety of the village. Many of the rounded-up women were thus not 
prostitutes, but instead local women brought to the comfort stations by force and without their 
consent (Yoshiaki, 1995, p. 120). Ironically, this meant that to reduce the rapes of local women, 
the Japanese military hand-picked several local women to be raped themselves. 



 

A rhetoric of Japanese racial supremacy supported this trafficking of Korean and Chinese 
women. After contact with the West first introduced the concept of race to Japan in the late 
nineteenth century, political leaders used it to amass support for a variety of nationalist aims 
(Fukurai and Yang, 2018, p. 533-534). Legal scholars Hiroshi Fukurai and Alice Yang write that 
in World War II, this manifested in “the killing of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians 
such as women, children and babies during the Nanjing massacre; the exploitation of Chinese, 
other Asians, and Allied POWs as laboratory subjects in biochemical human experiments by 
Unit 731 military doctors; the brutal suppression of indigenous resistance against the puppet state 
Manchukuo in China,” and of course — “the systematic sexual enslavement of nearly 200,000 
Asian women and the establishment of comfort stations throughout Asia,” among other atrocities 
(p. 534). 

The plight of both the Korean and Chinese trafficking victims demonstrates how racism 
and imperialism influenced how Japan chose which women to target. Imperial policies and 
power made it easy for women in occupied territories to be exploited, and views held by many 
Japanese people about racial superiority meant that it was easy to sacrifice the humanities of 
Korean and Chinese women for the sake of Japanese men and the Japanese nation’s progress. 
The devastation of the comfort women thus grants clarity to both the use of sexual violence 
against women in service of national goals, and the ways in which race and class were 
intertwined with this exploitation. 

 
Post-War and Modern Sex Tourism: Corporate Compensation (c. 1960 - Present) 

 
“The imperative to exchange sex for survival, or its possibility whether real or not, rules 

women’s inequality, hence women’s lives, worldwide. In prostitution, virtually all of women’s 
and girls’ options are precluded except for this one, making her consent to it, or choice of it, 

fraudulent and illusory.” 
— Catharine MacKinnon, feminist legal scholar 

 
Tanaka Michiko was 20 years old when she was first trafficked into a Tokyo geisha 

house. There, she was forced to strip by the owner of the house until, one day, she found herself 
facing obscenity charges levied against her by the police. She then returned to her hometown of 
Nagano, where, after a failed suicide attempt, she saw no choice but to become a hot springs 
resort geisha out of economic destitution. At this new geisha house, Tanaka was held in debt 
bondage, earning no money during the first four months of her work because it was all taken 
from her as board and debt repayment. She was forced to strip for groups of men and was raped 
by customers even during menstruation and after contracting syphilis. This sexual violence 
occured every night for a couple of months, making her so physically tired that she began to 
inject methamphetamine in order to stay awake. As her health deteriorated, Tanaka eventually 
ran away with one of her customers (Norma, 2019, p. 106). 



 

Though it is unclear whether the customers who raped Tanaka were on ian ryokou trips, 
the hot springs resort where she worked was exactly like the ones frequented by those corporate 
getaways. It is likely that many men on ian ryokou do come into contact with prostitutes, since 
the trips are the primary drivers of both sex industry investment in hot springs areas, and human 
trafficking to them (Norma, 2019, p. 106). Thousands of women and girls were, and continue to 
be, kidnapped and brought to these resorts, many underage or debt-bonded like Tanaka. In 1963, 
for example, police found six underage girls being prostituted at a hot springs resort in Ibaragi 
(Norma, 2019, p. 104). Violence abounded at these resorts: other than the inherent sexual 
violence of rape that the trafficked victims suffered with each new customer, many hot springs 
geisha were also injured or killed by patrons, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. Newspaper 
reports show that in 1969, a geisha was strangled to death by a male guest, and that in a separate 
incident, four men were charged with sexual assault for the gang rape of a bar hostess during an 
ian ryokou trip that had been sponsored by the men’s employer (Norma, 2019, p. 105). One 
interviewed woman recalled a primary school friend who had died at age 17 from the health 
consequences of an STD that she had contracted after being trafficked to a hot springs resort in 
Sapporo, where she was forced to work for three years (Norma, 2019, p. 100). Thousands of 
young Japanese women still fall victim to the commercial sex industry today: around 170,000 
junior high and high school girls are currently engaged in prostitution, and around 300 cafes 
employing 5,000 teenage girls nationwide let older men chat with girls in school uniforms for 
about 50 dollars per hour (Campbell, 2019). 

Here, again, the violent sexual exploitation that the women of these hot springs face is 
seen as secondary to the objective of the ian ryokou: increasing corporate bonding and fraternity, 
which then drove economic progress. The trips were so institutionalized and celebrated in 
Japanese corporate culture during the early decades of high-speed growth that British journalist 
Lesley Downer described them as the “ultimate bonding experience,” as business associates 
could “bathe together, eat together, get drunk together … and sleep all together in one big tatami 
[mat] room” (Norma, 2019, p. 103). Other than simply improving company relationships, these 
trips also used their unique atmospheres to dissolve traditional workplace hierarchies, allowing 
employees to bond with their superiors and escape from the typically stringent rules of corporate 
life. In a highly capitalist and economically exploitative society that extracted massive amounts 
of labor from its workers, these trips came as a welcome break. Many men, especially those who 
had lived in poverty during World War II, said in interviews that they should “work like crazed 
animals,” “give up one’s life for one’s work,” “expect death at work,” and “die on the job in 
fulfilment of true Japanese manhood” (Norma, 2019, p. 55). Though these expectations were 
deeply entrenched in Japanese society post-World War II, it was still inevitable that the 
economic exploitation of employees would incite discontent and resentment among workers. In 
response to these economic conditions, the compensation thesis was developed by feminist 
analyses of the global sex industry’s post-war explosion to posit that “Japanese men were 
supplied with women in prostitution as ‘comfort’ to compensate for having been made into 



 

‘corporate slaves’ in the years of high growth” (Norma, 2019, p. 24). Like during World War II, 
when sexual violence against comfort women was used to mollify soldiers about their poor 
living conditions, post-war Japanese men’s access to hot springs resorts and other similar 
establishments also served as a “safety valve” for men’s anger about capitalist exploitation in 
corporate Japan. Norma writes that “[a]s a result of their acquiescence to group-based corporate 
prostitution practices, and therefore participation in male bonding across the worker-
management divide, these men forewent the class-based solidarity needed to wage resistance to 
corporate domination” (p. 25). The next stage of the historical continuum that this paper 
identifies is thus clear: sexual violence against women employed at and trafficked to hot springs 
resorts was overlooked because their exploitation helped corporate Japan sustain itself through 
increasing fraternity among male employees and through diverting anger about economic 
exploitation toward sexual violence and “comfort.” The geisha and hostesses who suffered at 
these resorts were simply collateral damage in the broader objective of Japan’s post-World War 
II high speed growth. 

The legacy of karayuki-san and comfort women is even more explicit in another facet of 
post-war Japan’s corporate culture: sex tourism to locations like South Korea and Thailand. In 
the early 1970’s, it became common for Japanese white-collar men to prostitute South Korean 
women as hostesses, or kisaeng, either during business trips or as part of bonuses awarded as 
prizes for reaching sales targets. In 1971, for instance, Japan accounted for 41.5 percent of South 
Korea’s tourists, encompassing nearly half a million people by 1973. These were 94 percent 
male, and according to a survey done by the South Korean Ministry of Tourism, 80 percent of 
them cited “kisaeng parties” as what was most impressive about their trips to Korea. A 1973 
newspaper article estimated that 5000 kisaeng were working each night in Seoul, and that there 
were 200,000 nationwide who were being prostituted by foreign men, overwhelmingly Japanese, 
as part of sex tourism into the country (Norma, 2019, p. 131). Given that South Korean women 
made up the largest proportion of trafficked comfort women during World War II, the historical 
context of this phenomenon cannot be ignored. The kisaeng party trips were underscored by 
ideas that “Korean women were racially and economically subordinated to Japanese men” 
(Norma, 2019, p. 133), a conception built in part through South Korean women’s subjugation at 
comfort stations, which sacrificed their health and well-being for Japanese men’s sexual pleasure 
and the Japanese military’s imperial success. In Thailand, the historical impact of the karayuki-
san is also clear. Japanese men are today the leading international consumers of commercial sex 
in Southeast Asia, with 720,000 traveling to Thailand in 2003 alone (Yokota, 2006, p. 1). A 
survey of interviews conducted with several of these men reveal how deeply feelings of racial 
superiority run in the exploitation of Southeast Asian women. More than half of a group of 30 
respondents said that they felt a feeling of intense freedom while traveling in Thailand that made 
them eager to explore “exotic” things (Yokota, 2006, p. 8). Most also said that Thai women were 
more desirable than Japanese women, and that they were willingly engaged in prostitution and 
enjoyed their work (Yokota, 2006, p. 9). Some also identified a “sense of superiority” to 



 

Southeast Asian women who were “economically, racially, and socially of lower class than 
Japanese men … Some respondents appeared to regard Thai women as sexual commodities” 
(Yokota, 2006, p. 9). These sentiments demonstrate how Thai and Southeast Asian women are 
objectified and exotified, seen as inherently more sexually promiscuous and thus less “pure” than 
Japanese women. It is not a coincidence that modern sex tourism centers around the same places 
where karayuki-san first migrated prior to World War II. The memory of those women, who 
were also sexually exploited in foreign lands, contributes to the idea that Japanese men are 
sexually “freer” in regions of Southeast Asia, and that the people of those areas are inherently 
more sexual than women of mainland Japan. 

Modern sexual practices of corporate Japan form the next step in the historical continuum 
that this paper identifies. Access to sex with women is awarded to men in return for loyalty to 
and participation in corporate Japan, reflecting the notion that sexual violence against women is 
a “necessary evil” for the advancement of Japan’s economy. Women like Tanako, whose mental 
and physical health are devastated by the violence that they suffer through, are sidelined in favor 
of national progress. 

 
Conclusion 

For at least the past century, Japan’s economic and military progress has relied on the 
subjugation of women. Sexual violence against certain groups of women, targeted for their race 
and class, has been explicitly used in the pursuit of various national goals. The historical 
continuum that encompasses the karayuki-san, comfort women, and modern sex tourism reflects 
Japanese conceptions of women’s bodies as disposable—willingly traded and exploited in return 
for economic growth or military success. These three eras in history cannot be viewed in 
isolation from each other; the underlying philosophies behind each one built and reinforced the 
frameworks that allowed the following ones to exist. Preventing the cycle from continuing thus 
requires not just an uprooting of patriarchy, but also the dismantling of class-based and racial 
oppression, which intersect with gendered violence to relegate specific populations of women to 
the bottom of the social hierarchy.  



 

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