ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, the history of the Taiwan comfort women surfaced. With the help of women’s rights activists and many civil society groups, their ordeals were publicised in Taiwan, the memory of each individual being documented by newspaper articles, books and documentary films. e comfort women’s ordeals during the war became a part of the public memory of the Japanese colonial era in Taiwan. Innocent young women had been deceived and exploited, but their suffering continues into the present. Women’s rights activitists used the mass media to expose their ordeal and the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF) organised public testimony meetings at the campuses to introduce the stories of comfort women. It was estimated that the TWRF had held about 300 meetings at universities and high schools up to 2007. Many young students said that they felt the pain of the Taiwanese comfort women after hearing their public testimonies. However, their memories were not to go unchallenged in Taiwan. In 2001, a Japanese political cartoonist, Kobayashi Yoshinori, published On Taiwan, a series of manga texts in which he voiced the opinion that the Taiwanese comfort women were volunteers. Some 250,000 copies were sold in Japan and, when a Chinese translation was published in Taipei later in 2001, comfort women survivors and their sympathisers organised rallies to have the book banned in Taiwan.
