Introduction
In Alden Speare’s (1986) words, "migration can be involuntary when a person is physically transported from a country and has no opportunity to escape from those transporting him”. Literature on forced migration often focuses on asylum seekers and refugees, but there are other groups of displaced persons. This paper will look at trafficked people, particularly on Korean comfort women during the Imperial Japan times, from the years 1931 to 1945. Comfort women are females who were forced into sexual slavery during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, to provide sexual services to the Japanese Imperial Army troops so to improve the morale of Japanese soldiers (Lynch, 2009). The focus is placed on Korean comfort women as 80% of comfort women in Japan are Koreans (Soh, 1996). It was estimated that 160,000 Korean women were coerced into sexual slavery (Lee & Crowe, 2015). This research aims to investigate the impacts of forced migration on the lives of Korean comfort women.
This paper postulates that the impacts of forced migration on the lives of Korean comfort women spans across three areas. Physically, Korean comfort women suffer from violence and injuries, sexually-transmitted diseases, as well as infertility. Mentally, they suffer from severe mental distress and lifelong trauma. Lastly, from the social aspect, Korean
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Usually, a daughter of a poor farmer would be solicited by a labor dealer and are promised employment in factories. The true nature of work will only be discovered when she is taken into a comfort station and raped by Japanese soldiers. This system had targeted young daughters of poor peasant families, knowing that it was relatively easy to trick them due to their disadvantaged economic positions (Tanaka,