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 —The Report of a Study of Dutch Government Documents on the Forced Prostitution of Dutch Women in the Dutch East Indies during the Japanese Occupation, released in 1994. Also Document AS 5200 from the Dutch National Archives, which contains interrogation texts of Japanese suspects in war crimes committed against Dutch women, testimony of Dutch and Eurasian comfort women, and testimony of camp leaders and other internees of Japanese military-run internment camps on Java for Dutch women. AS 5200 also contains court proceedings of the War Crimes Tribunals on comfort women cases conducted by the Dutch military in 1947 and 1948.

—A Japanese government study of 1992–1993 based on documents from Japanese ministries and government agencies and interviews with former comfort women, former Japanese military personnel, former officials of the Japanese colonial government in Korea, and former operators of “comfort stations.” This report was the basis for the Kono Statement.

—The testimony of several hundred former comfort women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. Many of these are described in the book, Japan’s Comfort Women, by Yuki Tanaka, published in 2002, which references over 400 women who gave testimonies.

These documents and reports provide information on three issues that have been debated in Japan and between Japan and other countries regarding the comfort women system:

(1) The degree of involvement of the Japanese military and government in creating the comfort women system: The evidence is clear that the Japanese government and military directly created the comfort women system. The Japanese government’s 1992–1993 report found that military officials in different locales initiated the process of establishing comfort stations in their locales. The military also helped to equip the comfort stations and drew up the regulations for their operations. The Taiwan documents found by Chu Te-lan described the founding of the Taiwan Development Company by the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan for the purpose of supporting Japan’s invasion of China. By 1939, the colonial government directed the Taiwan Development Company to recruit and send Taiwanese comfort women to China’s Hainan island. On Hainan, the Japanese military supervised all activities of the Taiwan Development Company including the construction of 62 comfort stations. The Yoshimi documents establish that Japanese military units in China initiated the process of establishing comfort stations in northern and central China following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. One such document, issued by the Chief of Staff of the Northern China Area Army in July 1938, instructed units under the Area Army’s