Mar 04 (TRNGL) - During the first half of the twentieth century, the expansion of the Japanese Empire across Asia turned war into a landscape of systematic violence against civilian populations.
In 1937, after Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanjing, one of the most brutal atrocities of the modern era unfolded: tens of thousands of civilians were executed and an even greater number of women were subjected to mass sexual violence in what would later be known as the Nanjing Massacre. At the same time, in occupied territories such as Korea, the Imperial Army established a network of military brothels where thousands of women, many of them teenagers, were forced into sexual slavery as so-called “comfort women” for the troops. These events remain deeply embedded in the historical memory of East Asia and continue to be the subject of research, debate, and demands for recognition by survivors and their descendants, serving as a reminder of the human consequences of war and imperial domination.
