The sexual enslavement of so-called “comfort women” across Asia by Japan’s army in World War II is the subject of this hard-hitting play by Kyo Choi, a South Korean writer based in London. Though far from subtle as a piece of drama, it explores this horrific and under-reported slice of history lucidly and well. It also packs more surprises into the second half than anyone would reasonably expect from the clunky first act.
Between 50,000 and 200,000 women are thought to have been kidnapped or coerced, trafficked far from their homelands, and then systematically raped on a daily basis under official Japanese military policy. Those not murdered before the invaders’ surrender were silenced for decades, by a culture of shame at home or by Allied complicity in Japan’s stonewalling denial that anything happened, or that the women “volunteered”. Kyo distills this into a tale of two women taking on the sexist, racist world establishment.
