Footage shows comfort women

SEOUL — South Korea has released rare video footage of Korean women forced to work in Japanese military brothels during World War II, the first time moving images have been shown of the comfort women.

A research team from Seoul National University found the footage, which was filmed in 1944 by a US soldier, in the United States National Archives after a two-year hunt.

“South Korea has not had its own data on comfort women and (has) been relying on Japanese and American data,” said Kang Sung-hyun, an academic on the team. “It is crucial for us.”

The 18-second blackand-white clip shows seven women lined up outside a brick house, being questioned by Chinese soldiers. The women were found by US-China allied forces in China’s Yunnan province, the research team said.

Su Zhiliang, director of the “comfort women” research center at Shanghai Normal University, said that about 400,000 women in Asia were forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during the war.

South Korean experts said that there may have been as many as 200,000 Korean victims.