Former "comfort women" sue Japan in US court

In the lawsuit, the women say the "Japanese government built, operated and controlled hundreds of brothels," or so-called comfort stations, which were staffed with some 200,000 women and girls, who were beaten, raped and made to live in under miserable conditions.

Inhabiting tiny cubicles and nearly starving, the women were held for up to eight years and were tortured and beaten on a regular basis, the lawyers said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

"After the war, those who were in combat zones were abandoned, often in dense jungles, while their Japanese captors fled; many of those died of starvation and disease," while others were executed, the lawsuit charges.

"Survivors returned to what were often lifetimes of isolation and societal rejection, compounded by deeply instilled feelings of guilt and shame … and they suffer grievously to this day," the statement said.

It is the first lawsuit filed in the US against Japan seeking compensation for the comfort women, and the first US lawsuit against Japan for what the lawyers described as "World War II atrocities".

Earlier cases were filed against Japanese companies for their use of slave labour during the war.

Named in the lawsuit, filed in the US district court for the district of Columbia, are six women from South Korea, four from China, four from the Philippines and one from Taiwan. But the suit represents "all women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japan between 1931 and 1945, as well as their heirs," according to the statement.

Lawyers representing the women said the suit was filed under US and international law prohibiting war crimes and crimes against humanity. They did not say how much compensation they were seeking for the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit claims that Japan instituted sexual slavery on a massive scale during the Asia-Pacific War of the 1930s and 1940s in a systematic plan ordered and executed by the Japanese government that required the deployment of vast infrastructure and resources.

Until July 1992, the Japanese government denied that its military ran brothels and it still denies legal responsibility. In 1995, then prime minister Tomiichi Murayama issued profound apologies, saying Japan’s actions were "entirely inexcusable."

Attorney Barry Fisher, who has also been involved in a series of lawsuits filed on behalf of Holocaust survivors against Switzerland, Germany and Austria, said it was time for Japan finally to put its past to rest.

"I’m optimistic. … I think Japan could be encouraged to follow suit and close the book on the war years rather than let it fester further," Fisher said. "After all these years — while some of these woman are still alive — there should be an apology and some kind of restitution," he said.

Geum Joo Hwang, then 19 and living in Puyo, Korea, is one woman represented in the lawsuit.

Believing that she was joining other unmarried Korean women working in Japanese military factories, she was taken to a troop compound, where she was repeatedly raped and ordered to service 30 to 40 soldiers on weekdays and more on weekends.

She was beaten daily, once to unconsciousness for three days, and her body was bleeding and swollen, the lawyers said.

Yuan Zhulin, of Wuhan, China, was also 19 in 1941. She was offered a job cleaning hotels but was taken to a "comfort house" that had been fashioned from a Buddhist temple.

She was initiated into her service by being gang-raped by 10 soldiers and became pregnant but lost the baby when she was beaten for trying to escape, according to the lawsuit.

She escaped after two years but has since lived in poverty, the lawsuit claims.

A Filipino woman, Tomasa Salinog, was arrested at her house at the age of 13 after Japanese troops beheaded her father. She was raped continuously, day after day, while lines of soldiers waited their turn.

Like many of the other abused women, Salinog never married and has lived what the lawyers called "a life of suffering and humiliation."