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 sizeable plurality or a majority of them were Korean. Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Dutch, and Indonesian women made up most of the rest.

While information about the comfort women system appeared periodically after World War II, it was not until the 1980s and early 1990s that major publications appeared in Japan describing details of the system and governments and citizens of countries occupied by Japan began to discuss it more openly. In the 1990s, the issue of comfort women became part of the dispute between Japan and several neighboring countries over whether Japan had accounted fully for its aggression against its neighbors and the abuses of its occupation policies. Governments and civic groups in Japan and Japanese-occupied countries debated several issues: whether Japan had acknowledged fully the responsibility of the Japanese military and government for the abuses of the comfort women system; whether Japanese apologies to former comfort women constituted a sufficient official apology; whether Japan should pay official monetary compensation to comfort women; and whether Japanese school history textbooks should describe the comfort women system in their chapters on World War II.

Several bodies of evidence emerged or were developed in the 1990s and 2000s regarding the operation of the comfort women system. The main ones were:

—The research of historian, Dr. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, in 1992 in the library of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Dr. Yoshimi found and disclosed a number of documents of the Japanese army in occupied China in the late 1930s regarding the comfort women system. Dr. Yoshimi handed the documents to the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, which ran a feature story on them on January 11, 1992. He wrote a book, published in 1995, detailing the documents, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II.

—Documents discovered in the late 1990s by Chu Te-lan, a history professor with the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. These documents described relations between the Japanese army, the Japanese colonial government on Taiwan, and a Taiwan Development Company regarding the comfort women system.

—A report of the U.S. Office of War Information of October 1, 1944, concerning the interview of 20 Korean comfort women found at Myintkyina at northern Burma in August 1944 after allied forces had captured Myintkyina from the Japanese. (The report is in the U.S. National Archives.)

—A reference to the recruiting of comfort women in Korea by an American missionary in Korea, Horace H. Underwood, in a report to the U.S. Government after his repatriation by Japan in August 1942. (The report is in the U.S. National Archives)

—A report by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of May 6, 1945 on interviews of 23 Korean comfort women in Kunming, China. The women had escaped the Japanese army units they were serving and had reached Chinese lines in September 1944. (The report is in the U.S. National Archives.)

—A South Korean Foreign Ministry report of 1992, citing Japanese military documents on the comfort women system in Korea.