Revisiting the “Comfort Girls” of Report 49

Abstract In 1944, a Japanese American intelligence officer stationed in Ledo, India, unwittingly composed a famous historical document: “Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49,” which focused on twenty Korean comfort women captured near Myitkyina, Burma. In the decades since, most historians have regarded the report as evidence of the Japanese state’s responsibility for the comfort woman system, but it has also been embraced by revisionists arguing the opposing case. This essay reassesses the document to show how it emerged from a many-sided struggle over how women’s bodies should be used in the simultaneous conflicts of empire and decolonization that constituted World War II in Burma. Korean comfort women’s status as both Japan’s “own women” and colonized subjects meant that they could be exploited to a variety of ends—both on the battlefield and in the realm of information warfare—for audiences including Anglophone newspaper readers, American military officers, Japanese soldiers, and Burmese civilians. Removed from its specific geographical and temporal context, the document’s elevation as a generic piece of evidence has obscured a larger history in which concerns about “sex slavery,” a concept notably absent from this report, emerged, retreated, and reemerged over the course of the war.