Video clip appears to offer first footage of WWII ‘comfort women’

An 18-second video clip released by the South Korean government claims to show one of the darkest moments in Asia’s 20th century history — the so-called “comfort women” forced to work as sex slaves by Japanese troops during World War II.

The footage, released Wednesday, is believed to have been filmed by American soldiers in China’s Yunnan Province during 1944. It was discovered by a government-funded research team from Seoul National University who spent years looking through the United States National Archives.

The footage may be the only known moving images of “comfort woman” in existence. However, researchers say that of the seven Korean woman featured in the video, two have appeared in previously released photographs. In the footage, the women appear to be speaking to a Chinese soldier after being freed.

Researchers say the film makes obvious that the women were being held against their will. “Their appearance, such as the bare feet, suggest they were enslaved,” SungKongHoe University professor Kang Sung-hyun, who participated in the study, told reporters.

“Due to a long-standing dispute over Japan’s wartime sexual slavery, it became crucial to come up with evidence,” Kang said. “This video clip will strengthen the admissibility of evidence behind wartime sex slavery.”

Historians estimate that as many as 200,000 women and girls from occupied countries such as Korea and China were forced to work in brothels ran by the Japanese Imperial Army. Once little acknowledged in South Korea or Japan, the issue came to the forefront when survivors of the practice began speaking out in the 1990s. In December 2015, Seoul and Tokyo reached an agreement that they said would “finally and irreversibly” resolve the dispute, with Japan agreeing put $8.3 million into a fund for the remaining survivors.