Who we are

CARE (formerly known as the KAFC) is a community organization that focuses on advocacy and education regarding the “comfort women,” meaning the girls and women coerced into institutionalized sexual slavery and human trafficking perpetrated by the Japanese military during the first half of the twentieth century. The issue remains relevant to current acts of wartime sexual violence and human trafficking occurring around the world today.

A key part of our mission is to combat the historical revisionism perpetuated by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of the Japanese government through raising awareness in the United States. Under the Abe administration, references to the “comfort women” and other Japanese war crimes have disappeared from ALL Japanese textbooks.

While international human rights institutions such as the UN Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International has repeatedly prompted Japan to acknowledge and accept legal responsibility for these crimes, so far, the Abe administration has not heeded those calls.

“Comfort women” is a euphemistic term for the hundreds of thousands of young women and girls who were coerced, abducted, and imprisoned as sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces as part of their militaristic expansion in the Asia Pacific region, beginning in 1932 until the end of World War II. As stated in House Resolution 121, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007, the “comfort women” system constituted one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20 th century, and one that was unprecedented in its cruelty and magnitude.

Many of the victims were in their teens. The majority were from Korea and China, but girls were also locally sourced from every occupied region, including the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The military authorities were directly involved in the creation and maintenance of “comfort stations.”

The conditions at the stations were sub-human and brutal. Girls were repeatedly raped, and were subject to forced sterilizations and abortions by military doctors, yet they were denied basic necessities such as food or clothing. Those who tried to escape were ruthlessly tortured or killed. The suicide and mortality rate among the victims is estimated to be around 75%; the death rate among Japanese troops at the front lines was 30%.

At the end of the war, when Japan’s surrender was imminent, the military government systematically destroyed military documents and massacred the girls at the stations in order to erase proof of the crimes that were committed. The small number of women who managed to survive suffered in pain and silence for decades due to social and cultural stigma and the physical and psychological scars inflicted by the horrors they suffered.

In 1991, Hak-sun Kim, one of the Korean survivors, became the first to break the silence. Her courage led to other survivors demanding an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government. These survivors or “grandmothers” became human rights activists and leaders in a global movement to hold the Japanese government accountable for its past war crimes.

Since the passage of H. Res. 121 in 2007, we have worked on significant efforts in California and beyond. These include the installation of the Glendale Peace Monument, an issue that reached the federal courts after Japanese revisionists sued for the monument’s removal. We also advocated for the inclusion of “comfort women” issues in the California Grade 10 History/Social Science Framework. In collaboration with the San Francisco-based organization Comfort Women Justice Coalition, we supported the installation of the “Column of Strength” memorial in San Francisco and developed an educational resource guide and booklet for teachers that are free and publicly available at www.ComfortWomenEducation.org.

• Mindy Kotler is founder and director of Asia Policy Point, a membership nonprofit research center in Washington, DC studying the U.S. policy relationship with Japan and Northeast Asia. Her research focus is the relationship between history and Asian regional security. She advised Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA) in his drafting and defense of the 2007 Comfort Women resolution. Ms. Kotler holds a M.A. from Yale University and a B.A. from Smith College.

• Julie Tang is a Retired Judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. She was a highly respected jurist and remembered in particular for helping to develop and presided over the first Domestic Violence Court in San Francisco in 1997. Her passion for justice for victims of violence goes beyond her judicial career. In 1997 she co-founded the “Rape of Nanjing” Redress Coalition with Judge Lillian Sing to seek redress for the victims from the Japanese government. Upon her retirement, Judge Tang again partnered up with Judge Sing to form the “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition, the organization that successfully built the San Francisco “Comfort Women” Memorial in 2017. She currently works as a mediator for Arbitration Dispute Resolution (ADR) and spends her spare time educating the community and fighting for justice for the “Comfort Women” survivors.

• Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut. She publishes regularly about Japan and Northeast Asia, and her books include Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (Columbia, 2008) and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (Hawaii, 2005). Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea, with awards from Fulbright, ACLS, NEH, and SSRC and fellowships at Princeton and Harvard and is the recipient of the 2015 Manhae Peace Prize. She is currently completing a book for Oxford University Press about Japan’s territorial contests with regional neighbors tentatively called, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020, and is an advisory council member of Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies’ Research Project on Constitutional Revision.