1930s-1945 Across Asia, ‘comfort women’ from countries including Korea, China and the Philippines were forced to work in Japanese military brothels. The fight for victim compensation has erupted periodically over recent decades, principally affecting relations between Tokyo and Seoul.

China In contrast to its treatment of the Rape of Nanking, Beijing’s official narrative of the second world war pays little attention to the plight of the comfort women, perhaps partly because of the social stigma attached to such servitude.

South Korea The issue of comfort women continues to resonate in South Korea, however. Today, as on every Wednesday since 1992, people will gather by a statue of a young girl outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul and call on Tokyo to atone fully for forcing thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery during the second world war.