The photograph trembled in her hands, not from Pauly, though.
At 98 years old, Kiko Matsumoto had earned the right to shaky fingers.
No, this trembling came from somewhere deeper.
From a memory that had lived in her bones for 79 years, hibernating through decades of silence, waiting for someone to finally ask the right questions.
“They asked if we were virgins,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
The young historian sitting across from her leaned forward, digital recorder blinking red between them.
We thought they were being kind, making sure we could go home with our honor intact, making sure we could still marry.
She looked up from the photograph, and her eyes, clouded with age, but sharp with memory, fixed on something beyond the small Tokyo apartment’s walls, beyond the present-day traffic humming outside, beyond the decades that separated that girl in the photo from the woman she had become.
We were so naive.
The photograph showed 30 women in mismatched clothing, some still wearing remnants of Imperial Army nurse uniforms, others in borrowed American shirts.
too large for their thin frames.
They stood in three rows outside a quonet hut.
Okinawa sun harsh and unforgiving behind them.
Spring 1946.
Most were smiling or trying to relief evident in every face.
They were going home.
They had survived the war.
They had answered the Americans questions.
Soon they would see their families again.
What the photograph could not show was what those women did not yet understand.
that their embarrassment, their careful answers about virginity and virtue, their confusion at such personal questions had become evidence, that their innocence was being weaponized for justice, that they were not being processed for repatriation, they were building a case against evil.
But before we understand what really happened in those interview rooms, before we comprehend the weight those questions carried, if you value these stories, these voices that will soon be gone forever, please take a moment to subscribe to this channel.
Ko died in March 2024.
She was the last.
There is no one left to tell this story but us.
And these women deserve to be remembered.
Let us go back back to August 1945 when the world changed in ways most people understood and in ways that would take decades to comprehend.
The emperor’s voice came through radiostatic high and formal.
Speaking in classical Japanese, so archaic that most listeners could barely understand the words, but they understood the meaning.
The war was over.
The unthinkable had happened.
Japan had surrendered.
In a makeshift barracks on Okinawa, 47 women heard that broadcast in silence.
Some cried, some sat motionless, faces blank with shock.
A few actually smiled.
Relief overwhelming shame.
They had survived.
Against all odds, against all expectations, they had survived.
The barracks had once been a school.
American forces had converted it quickly, roughly into a holding facility for female prisoners of war.
The walls still showed children’s drawings underneath fresh paint.
Mathematical equations lingered on a chalkboard no one had bothered to erase.
It smelled of disinfectant and tropical humidity and too many bodies in too small a space.
Ko Tanaka sat on her cot, knees drawn to her chest, trying to process what surrender meant.
She was 19 years old, the youngest of five daughters from a farming family in Fukuoka.
She had volunteered for the Imperial Army Nurse Corps 2 years earlier, believing she was answering a sacred call, believing she would tend to heroes and return home to honor and gratitude.
Instead, she had spent 18 months in field hospitals that were more butchery than medicine, watching boys die from wounds that should have been treatable, from infections that antibiotics could have cured if they had any antibiotics.
From simple despair, she had held their hands as they cried for mothers who would never know where their son’s bodies were buried.
She had written letters she knew would never be delivered because the boys died before she finished writing them.
And now the war was over and she did not know if she felt relief or shame or simply exhaustion so profound that no other emotion could penetrate it.
Kiko Chan the voice was gentle but firm.
Yuki Nakamura, 28 years old, career nurse, married to a man who had disappeared in the Philippines and was almost certainly dead, though no one had confirmed it.
She had become the unofficial mother of the younger nurses.
The one who distributed their meager rations fairly, who settled disputes, who kept them functioning when functioning seemed impossible.
We will go home soon, Yuki said, sitting beside her on the narrow cot.
The Americans are not cruel.
They feed us.
They give us medicine.
Soon we will be processed and sent home.
Ko wanted to believe her.
Wanted to trust that the Americans, who they had been taught were demons who would rape and torture and parade them through streets as trophies, were actually just men who wanted to finish the bureaucracy of war and go home themselves.
Across the barracks, Sachiko Wadonabi was writing in a small notebook, her educated hand forming characters with the precision of someone who had attended Tokyo Medical School before the war.
At 24, she was sophisticated in ways the rural girls were not, had read books they had never heard of, spoke English, learned from textbooks, and a missionary teacher who had left Japan in 1941 when war became inevitable.
Her fiance had died at Euima.
She had received the notification 3 months before Japan surrendered.
He had been 26.
They were supposed to marry after the war.
She kept his last letter in her uniform pocket, the paper soft from being folded and unfolded countless times.
He had written about cherry blossoms, about the spring they would see together, about children they would name after his parents.
He had been incinerated by a flamethrower, though the official letter did not say that.
It said he had died honorably serving the emperor.
It did not say that his death was meaningless, that he had fought for an island that would be American anyway, that he had burned alive screaming for water that would never come.
Sachiko wrote in her notebook to keep from thinking about that.
She wrote about the weather, about the food the Americans served them, about the other nurses.
She did not write about her fianceé.
Some wounds were too deep for paper.
In the corner, Madori Kamura sat sketching in a diary she had kept since the war began.
21 years old from Osaka, daughter of an art teacher, she had joined the nurse corps because every young woman was expected to serve somehow.
She had thought she might paint the war, capture something true about it.
Instead, she had learned that some truths could not be captured, only survived.
Her diary was filled with faces.
the nurses she served with, the soldiers she had treated, the ones who lived and the ones who did not.
She drew because it was the only way she knew to make sense of chaos, the only way to hold on to something solid when everything else was slipping away.
These four women, different as they were, had become bound by shared experience, by the unspoken things they had all seen and chosen not to discuss, by the knowledge that they had survived when so many had not, and that survival came with its own complicated weight.
They did not know sitting in that converted school barracks in September 1945 that they were about to become part of something larger than themselves.
That their words would echo through history, that their embarrassment would become evidence, that questions about their virginity would help convict men of war crimes.
They thought they were simply waiting to go home.
Lieutenant Margaret Chen arrived on a Tuesday afternoon carrying a clipboard and folders and an expression that revealed nothing.
She was Chinese American, 30 years old, daughter of immigrants who had fled Shanghai when the Japanese invaded in 1937.
Her mother had been in Nanjing when it fell, had seen things that she never spoke about, but that lived in her eyes every day.
Chen spoke Japanese fluently, formally with the accent of someone who had learned it from textbooks rather than streets.
When she addressed the assembled nurses, her voice carried authority without cruelty.
You will be interviewed individually over the coming days, she said.
This is standard documentation procedure for repatriation.
You will be asked questions about your service, your assignments, your experiences.
Answer truthfully.
You are not accused of any crimes.
This is simply for our records.
The women listened, some with relief, some with lingering anxiety.
Repatriation.
The word meant going home, seeing families, returning to lives interrupted by war.
The process will begin tomorrow morning, Chen continued.
You will be called in alphabetical order.
The interviews will be conducted in English and Japanese.
A stenographer will be present to record your answers.
Do you have questions? Silence.
Japanese women did not ask questions of authority figures, especially not American authority figures who held their futures and folders on clipboards.
Chen nodded curtly and left.
That night, the barracks hummed with nervous speculation.
What would they ask? Would they inquire about medical procedures? About where they had served? About what they had witnessed? The younger nurses worried they might not have the right answers, might say something that would delay their return home.
Yuki tried to calm them.
Just tell the truth.
Be respectful.
The Americans are thorough people.
They document everything.
This is just their process.
Ko lay awake in her cot, listening to the other women’s breathing, the rustle of bodies trying to find comfort on thin mattresses, the distant sound of American soldiers laughing somewhere outside.
She thought about her family’s farm, about her mother’s cooking, about sleeping in her own bed instead of on military cs, about a life where death was not a constant presence.
She thought the questions would be simple.
Name, age, service record.
She thought she would answer them, receive her papers, board a ship back to Japan.
She had no idea that the questions would be about her body, about her virginity, about whether officers had forced her into sexual service.
She had no idea that her answers would become part of a massive documentation project, that they would help prove the existence of a systematic program of sexual slavery, that her innocence would illuminate someone else’s victimization.
She thought the Americans were being bureaucratic.
She did not know they were building evidence for the greatest war crimes trial in history.
Ko’s interview began at 9 in the morning.
The room was small, institutional, a desk and three chairs and nothing else.
Lieutenant Chen sat across from her, the stenographer to the side, fingers poised over typewriter keys.
The machine looked enormous to Ko, mechanical and foreign and somehow intimidating.
Chen opened a folder.
Inside, Ko could see papers with her name, service number, assignment history.
The Americans were indeed thorough.
Ko Tanaka Chen said, reading from the file.
Age 19, volunteered for Imperial Army Nurse Corps, March 1943, assigned to field hospitals in Okinawa, July 1943 through August 1945.
Is this correct? Yes, Lieutenant.
And your medical training consisted of what? 6 months instruction, basic nursing procedures, wound care, surgery assistance, disease management.
The stenographers’s fingers clacked against keys, recording every word.
The sound filled the silence between questions.
Where exactly were you stationed? Ko listed the hospitals.
There had been four, each worse than the last.
Each understaffed and undersupplied, each filled with men dying from wounds that peace would have made meaningless.
Chen made notes, asked follow-up questions about dates, locations, commanding officers, standard information, exactly what Ko had expected.
Then the questions changed.
Were you a virgin before your military service? Ko’s face went hot.
The question was so unexpected, so personal that for a moment she could not process it.
In Japan, such things were not discussed, certainly not with strangers, certainly not with foreign military officers.
But Chen’s face remained neutral, professional, waiting for an answer.
And Ko had been raised to respect authority, to answer questions when asked, to be polite and compliant.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Did you remain a virgin throughout your service?” “Yes,” her face burned.
“Why were they asking this? What did her virginity have to do with repatriation? Were you ever forced to engage in sexual activities? No.
The word came out sharper than intended.
She softened her voice.
No, Lieutenant.
I was a nurse.
Medical duties only.
Did any officers make sexual demands of you? No.
Did you witness other nurses being coerced into sexual service? Ko paused.
She thought of rumors she had heard, whispers about certain facilities, things the older nurses mentioned and then fell silent about, but she had never seen anything directly.
No, Lieutenant Chen made a note.
The stenographers’s fingers continued their rhythmic clacking.
The sound seemed unnaturally loud in the small room.
Were you aware of comfort stations operating near your assignments? Comfort stations? The phrase made Ko’s stomach tighten.
Everyone knew what that meant, even if they did not speak it aloud.
Buildings where women serviced soldiers.
The military called them comfort stations, as if comfort had anything to do with what happened inside.
I I heard they existed, Ko said carefully.
But I never worked in one.
I was assigned only to hospitals.
But you knew they existed? Yes.
Did you ever see women who worked in comfort stations? Had she? Ko tried to remember.
There had been buildings near one hospital separate from the medical facilities, guarded.
She had heard screams from them at night.
She had asked Yuki once what they were.
Don’t ask, Yuki had said.
It’s not for us to know.
And Ko, 19 years old and overwhelmed by her own duties, had not asked again.
I may have seen some, she said quietly.
But I did not know them personally.
Chen nodded, made another note.
Thank you, Miss Tanaka.
That will be all for today.
Ko stood, legs unsteady.
She had expected the interview to feel like an interrogation, but instead it had felt like what? Like confession? Like testimony? She did not have words for it.
She returned to the barracks confused and embarrassed.
The other women gathered around her immediately.
What did they ask? How long did it take? Was it difficult? Ko struggled to explain.
They asked about my service, about assignments and dates.
And then they asked personal things about virginity, about whether I was forced into into sexual service.
Silence greeted this revelation.
Finally, Yuki spoke.
They must check for health reasons or perhaps for marriage eligibility.
Americans are very concerned with morality.
The other women nodded, accepting this explanation because it made sense within their understanding of how the world worked.
They did not know that 50 mi away in an office building in Naha, American military prosecutors were assembling evidence for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
They did not know that their testimonies about not being coerced would help prove that other women had been.
They did not know that their confusion was valuable precisely because it was genuine.
They thought the Americans were being kind in their strange foreign way, making sure the nurses could return home with honor, making sure their reputations remained intact.
They did not know they were witnesses to systematic war crimes.
That evening, in an office across the base, Lieutenant Chen sat with Major Robert Finch and Captain Sarah Williams, reviewing the day’s interviews.
Finch was 45, a Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer who had spent the last year building cases against Japanese military leaders.
Williams was a medical examiner whose job was to verify physical evidence of systematic sexual violence.
“What did you get today?” Finch asked, spreading transcripts across the desk.
Chen flipped through her notes.
“Five interviews, all claimed they were military nurses, not coerced into sexual service.
All maintained they were treated as medical professionals.
” “That’s what we need,” Finch said.
“The distinction, the defense will argue the comfort women system was just prostitution, individual choices, women seeking profit.
We need to prove it was separate from legitimate military nursing, that it was systematic, organized from the top.
Williams leaned back in her chair.
These nurses are proof that the military knew the difference.
They had professional female medical staff.
They chose to create a separate system of sexual slavery.
It wasn’t confusion or battlefield chaos.
It was policy.
Chen looked at the transcripts, at Ko’s embarrassed admissions about virginity, at her confusion about why such personal questions mattered.
The girl was 19 years old.
She had thought she was being processed for repatriation.
She had no idea her words would be read aloud in a courtroom, that they would become evidence in trials that would execute men.
Did you tell them what this is for? Finch asked.
No, sir.
Per protocol.
Unbiased testimony requires that witnesses not know the scope of the investigation.
Good.
Continue tomorrow.
We need at least 30 testimonies to establish the pattern.
Chen nodded, but something sat heavy in her chest.
Protocol made sense.
uncoached testimony was more powerful, more credible.
If the nurses knew they were testifying about war crimes, they might shape their answers consciously or not.
They might exaggerate or minimize.
They might let their own feelings about the war color their memories, but there was something that felt like deception in not telling them, something that felt like using their innocence as a weapon.
Permission to speak freely, sir? Finch looked up.
Granted, these women think we’re helping them go home.
They think the questions are routine.
They’re embarrassed but compliant because they believe we have their best interests at heart.
We do have their best interests at heart, Lieutenant.
We’re documenting crimes committed against women, against hundreds of thousands of women, some of whom were 14 years old, some of whom were raped 30 times a day and then discarded when they couldn’t work anymore.
These nurses testimony will help convict the men who designed that system.
But they don’t know that, sir.
No, they don’t.
and that’s what makes their testimony valuable.
Finch’s voice softened slightly.
I understand your discomfort, Lieutenant, but we’re not hurting these women.
We’re using their truth to get justice for women who can’t testify because they’re dead or too traumatized or were never taught to read and write.
Is that exploitation? Maybe.
But it’s also necessary.
Chen looked at Ko’s transcript again, at the simple, honest answers, at the confusion that came through even in typed text.
“Dismissed, Lieutenant,” Finch said.
“Get some rest.
Tomorrow we continue.” Chen gathered her papers and left.
In her quarters, she sat alone with the transcripts spread around her.
On her desk was a photograph of her mother, taken before Nonjing fell before the invasion, before the massacre that killed 200,000 people in ways so brutal that Chen still could not read the full accounts without feeling physically ill.
Her mother had been one of the survivors.
She did not speak much about it, but sometimes late at night, Chen would hear her crying, would hear her whisper names of people who no longer existed.
This was why Chen had volunteered for this assignment.
Why she had spent months interviewing comfort women survivors, listening to testimonies so horrific that she had nightmares about them.
Why she pushed herself to document every detail, no matter how painful.
Because silence was the final victory of evil.
Because if no one remembered, if no one testified, if no one built the case, then all those women died without even the small cold comfort of justice.
But looking at Ko’s transcript at this naive girl who thought Americans were checking her virginity to ensure she could marry, Chen felt the weight of what they were doing.
The moral complexity of using someone’s innocence without their knowledge.
She would continue tomorrow.
She would interview more nurses.
She would ask personal embarrassing questions and maintain a neutral face while they answered.
She would gather evidence that would help execute men and imprison others.
And she would do it without telling the witnesses what their words truly meant.
Because Major Finch was right.
It was necessary.
But that did not make it feel clean.
The interviews continued for three days.
One by one, the nurses were called into that small room with its desk and chairs and the relentless clacking of the stenographers’s typewriter.
One by one, they answered questions about virginity and coercion and facilities they had glimpsed, but never entered.
One by one, they returned to the barracks with confusion written across their faces.
But it was Sachiko Watanabe who first understood what was really happening.
She had always been the observant one, the educated one, the woman who read between lines and noticed patterns others missed.
Her medical school training had taught her to diagnose not just from what patients said, but from what they didn’t say, from the silences and hesitations and things they tried to hide.
She applied that same diagnostic skill to the interviews.
On the fourth day, when Lieutenant Chen called her name, Sachiko walked into the interview room with her notebook tucked under her arm.
She had spent the previous night writing, analyzing, connecting pieces of information that individually meant nothing, but together revealed a shape she was beginning to recognize.
Chen went through the standard questions.
Name, age, service history.
Sachiko answered automatically, her mind working on the larger puzzle.
Then came the personal questions.
Were you a virgin before military service? Yes.
Did you remain so throughout your service? Sachiko paused.
Chen looked up from her notes, waiting.
Lieutenant, Sachiko said carefully.
May I ask a question? Chen’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered in her eyes.
Surprise, perhaps, or weariness.
You may ask this interview.
It’s not for repatriation processing, is it? The stenographers’s fingers stopped midkeystroke.
The silence in the room became something tangible, heavy with unspoken truths.
Chen set down her pen with deliberate slowness.
What makes you say that? The questions are too specific, too focused on a particular aspect of military life.
You’re not asking about general conditions or medical procedures or even combat exposure.
You’re asking exclusively about sexual coercion and comfort stations.
You’re building a specific narrative.
Sachiko leaned forward slightly.
And you’re Chinese.
Your family fled Shanghai, didn’t they? I can hear it in the way you pronounce certain characters.
You have personal reasons for this work.
Chen’s face remained professionally neutral.
But Sachiko saw her fingers tighten slightly on the pen.
You’re documenting war crimes.
Sachiko continued.
The International Military Tribunal, the comfort women system.
You need our testimony to prove it was systematic, separate from regular military nursing.
Our statements that we weren’t coerced prove that others were.
Our professional treatment highlights their enslavement.
The silence stretched for long seconds.
Finally, Chen spoke.
I cannot discuss the scope of ongoing investigations.
But I’m correct.
Chen met her eyes.
Off the record, she gestured to the stenographer who lifted her hands from the keys.
Yes, you’re correct.
Sachiko felt something settle in her chest.
Not surprise exactly.
She had known, but confirmation carried its own weight.
We thought you were being kind, she said quietly, checking our virtue so we could return home with honor.
We were so naive.
Your testimony is valuable precisely because it’s uncoached, Chen said.
If I had told you from the beginning what this was for, you might have shaped your answers consciously or not.
This way, your confusion is authentic.
Your innocence is genuine.
It makes the testimony more powerful.
More powerful for what? Executions? For justice? For women who were 14 years old and told they’d work in factories.
For girls who were raped until they couldn’t walk, for thousands of women whose voices were stolen.
Your voice isn’t stolen, Miss Watonabe.
You have the privilege of choosing whether to use it.
Sachiko thought of the screams she had heard on certain nights near certain buildings.
The trucks she had seen arriving with young women who looked confused and frightened.
The separate facilities with guards and locked doors.
She had known something was wrong.
They had all known, but knowing and acknowledging were different things.
You should be asking different questions, Sachiko said.
Chen tilted her head.
What do you mean? You’re asking if we were coerced.
We weren’t.
But you should ask what we saw, what we heard, what we knew, and chose to ignore.
You’re treating us as witnesses to our own treatment.
We’re witnesses to theirs.
Chen picked up her pen again.
Tell me what you saw.
And Sachiko did.
She told about the field hospital in northern Okinawa, where a separate building stood 300 m from the medical facility.
About how it had guards even though it wasn’t listed as a military installation.
About the trucks that arrived on Thursday nights.
How they carried women who looked too young and too frightened.
about the screams that carried across the distance on certain winds.
She told about being ordered to deliver medical supplies to that building once, how she had knocked on the door and a sergeant had answered, taken the supplies without letting her inside, but she had glimpsed through the doorway, had seen a hallway with numbered doors, had seen a girl, maybe 15, sitting on the floor with her head in her hands.
The girl had looked up, their eyes had met for perhaps 2 seconds before the sergeant closed the door.
Sachiko had never spoken to that girl, had never asked questions, had delivered the supplies and returned to her hospital and told herself it wasn’t her concern.
What happened to her? Chen asked quietly.
I don’t know.
I left that posting 2 weeks later.
I never saw her again.
Will you testify to this in a tribunal? Such thought of her dead fiance, of his letters about honor and duty and serving the emperor.
He had believed in what they were fighting for, had died believing Japan was righteous and their cause just.
But righteousness didn’t rape 15-year-old girls.
Justice didn’t lock women in buildings with numbered doors.
If I testify, Sachiko said slowly, my family will know I spoke publicly about these things.
In Japan, women don’t discuss sexual matters to testify about virginity, about prostitution, about what I witnessed.
I bring shame to my family.
My fiance’s family will see me as dishonoring his memory by speaking against Japan.
I understand, Chen said.
That’s why the choice is yours.
But if we don’t testify, those girls get no justice.
We have other evidence.
Your testimony strengthens the case, but it’s not the only piece.
Sachiko looked at the stenographer at her hands poised over the typewriter keys, ready to record whatever came next.
She thought about silence and complicity and the weight of knowing things you pretended not to know.
I’ll testify, she said.
Ask me your questions.
That night, Satiko gathered the women in the barracks.
All 47 of them, ranging from Ko’s 19 years to the oldest, a woman named Tomoko, who was 35 and had served as a nurse since before the war began.
The overhead lights buzzed, casting harsh shadows across faces that had seen too much and understood too little.
Sachiko stood in the center of the room, feeling the weight of 46 pairs of eyes on her.
I spoke with Lieutenant Chen today,” she began, not as interviewer and subject, as two women who understand ugly truths.
The room was silent except for the buzz of lights and the distant sound of American voices outside.
“The Americans aren’t processing us for repatriation.
They’re gathering evidence for the Tokyo Tribunal, for war crimes trials, the silence shattered, gasps, exclamations, questions, overlapping questions.
” Sachiko raised her hand and waited for quiet.
We’re not accused of crimes.
We’re witnesses.
Witnesses to what? Yuki asked, though her voice suggested she already knew the answer to what we all knew but never spoke about, the comfort stations, the women who weren’t nurses, the girls who screamed at night, the buildings we walked past, the things we pretended not to see.
Someone in the back began crying, others sat frozen, faces blank with the shock of having the unspoken finally spoken aloud.
Ko stood up, her young face confused and frightened.
“But we didn’t do anything wrong.
We were just nurses.
That’s exactly the point, Sachiko said gently.
We show the distinction.
We had a choice.
They didn’t.
We proved the comfort women system was separate, systematic, intentional.
Midori, quiet as always, spoke from her corner.
They asked if we were virgins because they need to prove we weren’t forced.
Our dignity proves their degradation.
Sachiko nodded.
Exactly.
Every question about whether we were coerced, every detail about our professional treatment, every confirmation that we chose to serve as nurses, it all builds evidence that the comfort women were something else entirely, that it wasn’t individual soldiers hiring prostitutes.
It was systematic sexual slavery administered by the military.
The crying woman in the back spoke through her tears.
I didn’t see anything.
I don’t know anything about comfort stations.
Then you have nothing to testify to.
Sachiko said, “This is voluntary.” Lieutenant Chen made that clear.
We can refuse.
We’ll still be sent home.
But if we refuse, someone asked, then we live with our silence again.
The word hung in the air again because they had already chosen silence once.
When they heard screams and didn’t investigate.
When they saw trucks of young women and didn’t ask questions.
When they suspected horror and chose ignorance.
Haruko, the woman who had served near the comfort station in Manuria, stood slowly.
She was 26, thin to the point of gauntness, with eyes that held memories she would never fully escape.
“I’ll testify,” she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands.
“I saw everything.
I know what happened in those buildings.
I brought medical supplies to treat injuries that shouldn’t exist.
I saw girls who were 14 years old.
I heard them crying for their mothers.
I watched soldiers laugh about it.” Her voice cracked, but she continued, “I did nothing to help them.
I was ordered not to interfere, and I followed orders because I was afraid.
Afraid of being disciplined.
afraid of being sent to a comfort station myself.
I saved my own skin and let them burn, she looked around the room at the faces of women she had lived with for months, had shared rations with, had comforted and been comforted by.
Those girls had no voice, it was stolen from them.
If my testimony, if my shame, if my family’s dishonor can give them even a small measure of justice, then I have to do it.
I have to speak because I didn’t speak then when it might have mattered.
At least I can speak now.” One by one, women began to stand.
Some immediately, their faces set with determination.
Others slowly wrestling with the decision.
Not everyone stood.
Some remained seated and no one judged them for it.
This was a choice, and choice was a luxury the comfort women never had.
Yuki stood looking down at Ko.
You don’t have to, child.
You saw nothing.
You’re too young to carry this weight.
But Ko stood too, her legs shaking.
I heard things.
I didn’t ask what they were because I didn’t want to know.
But not knowing was still a choice.
I chose ignorance.
That means something, doesn’t it? Sachiko counted silently.
30 women standing, 17 still seated.
Both groups with valid reasons for their choices.
I’ll tell Lieutenant Chen tomorrow, Sachiko said.
Those who want to testify, she’ll schedule formal statements.
Those who don’t, no one will force you.
No one will judge you.
But even as she said it, she knew it was a lie.
They would all judge themselves.
The ones who testified would carry the shame of speaking publicly about things Japanese women were taught never to discuss.
The ones who stayed silent would carry the weight of another silence added to their first.
There were no good choices here, only different kinds of weight.
Midori sat in her bunk later that night, writing in her diary by the light of a smuggled candle.
Her hand moved across the page, forming characters that captured what words alone could not.
We thought they were being kind, asking about our virginity to ensure we could marry, to protect our honor, how naive we were, how deliberately, necessarily naive.
Lieutenant Chen needed our confusion, needed our innocent answers, uncontaminated by knowledge of their purpose.
She needed us to be genuine in our lack of coercion so our testimony would prove others genuine coercion.
Our privilege, and it was privilege, even in war, even in defeat, was being weaponized against those who had no privilege at all.
Our choice highlighting their lack of choice, our dignity illuminating their violation.
Is this exploitation? Using our naivity for a purpose we didn’t understand? Or is it justice? Finding tools wherever they exist to build a case against evil? I don’t know.
I may never know.
But I do know this.
Tomorrow I will tell Lieutenant Chen, “Yes, I will testify.
Not because I saw much.
I didn’t.
But because my not-seeing was still a seeing.
My not knowing was still a knowing.
And if the girl I might have been, the innocent 19-year-old who volunteered for nursing duty believing in honor and service, if she can speak now about what she chose not to understand, then maybe that matters.
Maybe our shame is the price we pay for their justice.
Maybe it’s not enough, but it’s what we have.
She closed the diary and looked across the darkened barracks.
Ko was crying quietly in her bunk.
Yuki sat with her, one hand on the girl’s shoulder, saying nothing because there was nothing to say that would make this easier.
Haruko lay with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, seeing things no one else could see.
Sachiko was writing letters she would never send to a man who was dead, trying to explain why she was about to speak against everything he had died believing in.
Tomorrow they would become witnesses.
Would step into that small room with its desk and typewriter and speak truths they had spent years avoiding.
Would answer questions about virginity and coercion and buildings with numbered doors.
Would build piece by piece a case against a system that had destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives.
They would do it without fully understanding the scope, without knowing that their testimonies would be read aloud in a tribunal where military leaders sat in the dock facing execution, without comprehending that their embarrassed answers about sexual history would become evidence in one of history’s greatest war crimes trials.
They would do it because Lieutenant Chen had asked.
Because refusing felt like another silence they couldn’t afford, because somewhere women who had been raped at 14 deserved someone to speak for them, even if the speaking came 70 years too late.
They would do it knowing their families would be ashamed, knowing Japanese society would judge them for discussing sexual matters publicly, knowing their marriage prospects, already damaged by serving in a defeated military would be destroyed entirely.
They would do it anyway.
Because shame, it turned out, came in many forms.
The shame of speaking, the shame of silence, the shame of survival when others didn’t, the shame of knowing and doing nothing.
They were choosing which shame they could live with.
The interviews took two weeks.
Lieutenant Chen worked methodically through the 30 women who had agreed to testify, documenting their stories with the precision of someone building a case brick by brick.
Some testimonies were brief.
Women who had served in remote hospitals could only confirm they themselves had not been coerced into sexual service.
Others took hours, days.
Women like Haruko, who had witnessed things that required careful documentation.
Haruko answered every question, her voice growing quieter as the hours passed, but never stopping.
She described trucks arriving on Tuesday and Friday nights.
Women inside, mostly Korean, some Chinese, 14 to 25 years old, told they would work in factories, earn money for their families.
She described bringing medical supplies to the comfort station.
A sergeant met her at the door, wouldn’t let her inside initially.
When he finally admitted her, he walked her quickly down a hallway lined with numbered rooms.
The doors had numbers, Haruko said barely above a whisper.
1 through 20.
Some were open.
I saw a girl in one room sitting on a narrow bed, wearing a thin robe, bruises on her arms, on her throat.
When she looked at me, her eyes were empty.
Not sad, not afraid, just empty, like something inside her had been extinguished.
The sergeant said the medical supplies were for the facility doctor, not for treating the girls individually, unless they were too injured to work.
“Too injured to work,” Chen repeated, writing.
“Those were his exact words?” “Yes.
” Haruko delivered the supplies to the doctor’s office and left without asking questions.
Two weeks later, she saw a body carried out wrapped in canvas.
Another nurse told her there was a crematorium behind the building.
Sometimes the girls got diseases or injuries too severe.
They were disposed of quietly.
Disposed of, Chen wrote, like equipment that had broken beyond repair.
The stenographers’s fingers never stopped moving.
Page after page of testimony that would later be read in a tribunal that would make military officers shift uncomfortably that would become evidence for executions.
By the time all 30 testimonies were complete, Chen had hundreds of pages organized by category.
Women who saw nothing, women who heard rumors, women who witnessed directly.
Taken individually, the testimonies were fragments, but assembled together, they formed a comprehensive picture of systematic sexual slavery that operated across multiple countries, involved thousands of women, administered directly by the Japanese military.
Major Finch reviewed the transcripts with satisfaction.
Combined with Korean and Chinese survivor testimonies, this builds an irrefutable case.
But Captain Williams saw something else.
These nurses will pay a price.
Their families will be ashamed.
They’ll be unmarriageable.
They’re sacrificing their futures for this.
They’re choosing to sacrifice.
Finch corrected.
That’s what makes their testimony powerful.
Chen said nothing, but she thought of Ko’s confused face.
Sachiko’s deliberate choice, Haruko’s shaking hands.
These women had thought they were answering routine questions for repatriation, then learned the truth and chose to continue anyway.
But that choice came with costs that would ripple through the rest of their lives.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East convened in Tokyo in April 1946.
The courtroom was imposing, designed to project the weight of international justice, judges from 11 nations, prosecutors presenting evidence in multiple languages, defendants in the dock, former military leaders who had commanded armies and made decisions affecting millions.
The nurse’s testimonies were read into the record.
Haruko’s testimony about Manuria, Sachiko’s account of numbered doors.
Kiko’s simple statement that she had heard screams but never asked what they meant.
The defense argued voluntary prostitution, that women were paid, that singling out Japan was Victor’s justice.
But the nurs’s testimonies undermined these arguments.
They proved military nurses existed separately from comfort women.
That the system made deliberate distinctions.
That women in comfort stations were transported, guarded, controlled, called supplies by medical officers.
That girls as young as 14 were involved.
That deception was standard recruitment practice.
Seven defendants were sentenced to death by hanging.
Others received life imprisonment.
The comfort women system was officially recognized as a war crime, systematic sexual slavery.
But recognition was not the same as justice, not the same as healing, not the same as restoration.
The nurses returned to Japan in summer 1946, carrying repatriation papers and the weight of what they had spoken aloud.
Ko returned to Fukuoka.
Her father met her at the train station, face carefully neutral.
That night at dinner, he spoke, “You have brought disgrace to this family.
No decent family will accept you as a bride now.
You are unmarriageable.” The words were spoken without anger, simply as fact.
Ko had known this would happen, had chosen it anyway.
She became a school teacher in a small village, never married, lived with her parents until they died, then alone, taught children for 40 years.
Some nights she dreamed of numbered doors and screams she hadn’t investigated.
But she never regretted testifying because somewhere in Korea was a woman who had been 14 when taken, who deserved someone to speak for her, even if the speaking came decades too late and cost everything.
Sachiko went to Hiroshima.
Her fiance’s family refused to see her.
They sent a letter saying their son had died honorably serving the emperor.
And her testimony was betrayal.
She burned the letter and got a job at a hospital treating atomic bomb survivors.
Grueling, heartbreaking work.
She saved lives, set bones, held dying hands for 30 years, never married, never had children, but it was purpose, and purpose was enough.
Haruko struggled most.
Within 2 months of returning home, she attempted suicide by drowning.
A fisherman pulled her out.
She spent weeks in hospital, months in a mental facility, but she survived.
In the 1960s, when survivors started speaking publicly, Haruko added her voice, gave interviews, testified to human rights organizations.
Her family disowned her, but Korean comfort women wrote thanking her, saying her testimony helped them feel less alone.
She died in 1991, age 66, knowing she had finally used her voice.
Madori kept her diary her entire life.
Married in 1950, had children, taught art, published a memoir under pseudonym in 1965.
Her children discovered the truth only after her death in 2003.
Her daughter donated the diary to a museum.
It sits now in climate controlled archives, a firstp person account of complicity and courage.
Lieutenant Chen left the military in 1948.
In later years, she reflected, we didn’t tell them what their testimony was for, because we needed uncoached statements.
Was that ethical? I’ve asked myself for 45 years.
We use their naivity as a weapon for justice.
Is that exploitation or pragmatism in service of greater good? We got convictions.
We executed men who designed a system of rape.
But it cost those women their futures.
Would I do it again? Yes.
Because the alternative was letting crimes go undocumented, perpetrators unpunished, survivors dismissed as liars.
But I won’t pretend it was clean.
Justice rarely is.
Today, in a small Tokyo apartment, a photograph sits framed on a wall.
30 women in mismatched clothing.
Spring 1946.
most smiling, none yet understanding what their testimonies will cost.
Kiko Matsumoto, the last living woman in that photograph, died in March 2024, age 98.
In her final interview 2 weeks before death, she spoke about the questions.
They asked if we were virgins.
We thought it was kindness.
We didn’t know we were building a case against evil.
Do you regret it? Never.
Those comfort women, 14 years old, told they’d work in factories.
They had no voice.
It was stolen.
If my embarrassment, my ruined prospects, my family’s shame, gave them even a small piece of justice, it was worth it.
She looked at the camera with eyes that had seen too much but never looked away.
But I want people to understand, we were naive.
We were used.
Our innocence was weaponized for good, but still weaponized.
We paid a price we didn’t understand we were agreeing to pay.
Would I do it again? Yes.
Because what happened to those women was evil, systematic, unforgivable, and silence is the final victory of evil.
But I hope in future wars and atrocities, because they always come, that we find ways to document horror without requiring victims and witnesses to sacrifice themselves again.
Two weeks later, Ko died.
The last witness, the last voice, the photograph remains.
30 women, spring 1946.
Still smiling because they don’t yet know.
Still innocent, still believing the Americans were being kind.
Still thinking they were going home.
Still unaware that they were witnesses to history.
that their words would echo through decades, that their embarrassment would become evidence, that their naivity would become a weapon.
Still just women who wanted to survive.
Who answered questions because they were polite.
Who spoke truth because they didn’t know how to lie.
Who became part of justice they never fully understood.
and who paid for it every day for the rest of their lives.
