Students who attend public high schools in California in the U.S. will learn about Japan’s sex slavery during World War II starting 2017, according to Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun and the California Department of Education.

A public document released online by the CDE on Dec. 17 stipulated that “students can learn about the on-the-ground realities of fighting on the Pacific front by learning about ... the intense brutality of fighting due to racialized understandings that Japanese had toward American soldiers and vice-versa.”

The document also stated that “comfort women,” a euphemistic term for sexual slaves, were “taken by the Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during the war,” and that “‘comfort women’ can be taught as an example of institutionalized sexual slavery, and one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century.” 

The report also stated that although estimates on the total number of such victims vary, “most argue that hundreds and thousands of women were forced into these situations” by the Japanese during the war. According to the CDE website, the specific document is for the Modern World Chapter of the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools’ grade 10 students.

Sankei Shimbun, the Japanese daily, said that California is the first U.S. state to include a section about Japan’s sex slavery in their public education curriculum. Although the CDE website does not specify, the Japanese paper reported that the U.S. state will finalize the revised proposal for the new curriculum in May next year, after reviewing public opinions on the matter.

Scholars estimate up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China, were forced to work as sex workers for Japanese soldiers during the war. Despite Seoul’s repeated demands for an apology and legal compensation for the victims, Tokyo has repeatedly claimed that all reparations were settled in the 1965 South Korea-Japan Normalization Treaty. Of the 238 registered Korean victims of Japan’s wartime crimes, 192 had died as of this month, with 46 survivors remaining.

In January, major U.S. publishing company McGraw-Hill rejected a request by Japan’s foreign ministry to “make changes” to specific passages in a history textbook about women sexually enslaved by the Japanese during World War II. When acknowledging it had contacted the New York-based publishing house in December last year, Tokyo said in a statement the textbook included “grave errors and descriptions that conflict with our nation’s stance,” according to the Japan Times.


By Claire Lee(dyc@heraldcorp.com)