‘Comfort women’ is the term used for the women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces in occupied countries and territories before and during the Second World War. It is not a term the women themselves chose, and it does not describe what happened to them in any accurate way. It is instead the language the system itself used, and it survives in English today because it became the standard way of referring to this history in historical, legal and political discussion, including debates over apologies and compensation from the Japanese government.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘comfort women’?
The English phrase is a direct translation of the Japanese word ianfu. Scholars trace the origin of that word to the Japanese army itself, which adopted it as a deliberate softening of a reality it wanted to hide. The term did not describe the women’s actual situation; it disguised it, presenting forced sexual slavery in language borrowed from the idea of providing comfort or relief to soldiers.
This kind of naming, where an institution invents a mild or bureaucratic term for something brutal, is a recognised pattern in military and administrative language, and ‘comfort women’ is one of the starkest examples of it. The word was carried into English as a direct calque of the Japanese original, rather than being coined independently by English speakers, which is why it reads so awkwardly against what it actually refers to. Once the historical record of the system began to be documented and discussed internationally in the later twentieth century, the term was retained in English-language scholarship, journalism and diplomacy largely because it had already become the fixed name for the subject, even though many historians and survivors’ advocates have noted how misleading the wording is.
Because the phrase originated as an official euphemism rather than as a description coined by outside observers, using it today usually comes with an implicit acknowledgement of that history. Writers and historians will often use the term while explicitly noting that it obscures rather than reveals the nature of what the women endured, treating the phrase itself as part of the story rather than a neutral label for it.