title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson, the Hamiltons, and several other British travellers, left Leghorn for Florence, on 13 July. They made stops at Trieste and Vienna, spending three weeks in the latter, where they were entertained by the local nobility and heard the "Missa in Angustiis" by Haydn, which now bears Nelson's name. Haydn would meet them that August when they visited Eisenstaedt. By September, they were in Prague, and later called at Dresden, Dessau and Hamburg; from there, they caught a packet ship to Great Yarmouth, arriving on 6 November. Nelson was given a hero's welcome, and after being sworn in as a freeman of the borough, received the amassed crowd's applause. He then made his way to London, arriving on 9 November.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: He attended court and was guest of honour at a number of banquets and balls. During this period, Fanny Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton met for the first time; Nelson was reported as being cold and distant to his wife, while his attentions to Lady Hamilton became the subject of gossip. With the marriage breaking down, Nelson began to hate even being in the same room as Fanny. Events came to a head around Christmas, when according to Nelson's solicitor, Fanny issued an ultimatum on whether he was to choose her or Lady Hamilton. Nelson replied: I love you sincerely but I cannot forget my obligations to Lady Hamilton or speak of her otherwise than with affection and admiration. The two never lived together again.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Shortly after his arrival in England, Nelson was appointed to be second-in-command of the Channel Fleet, under Lord John Jervis. He was promoted to Vice-Admiral of the Blue on 1 January 1801, and travelled to Plymouth, where on 22 January, he was granted the freedom of the city. On 29 January 1801, Lady Emma Hamilton gave birth to their daughter, Horatia. Nelson was delighted, but subsequently disappointed, when he was instructed to move his flag from to , in preparation for a planned expedition to the Baltic.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Tired of British ships imposing a blockade against French trade and stopping and searching their merchantmen, the Russian, Prussian, Danish and Swedish governments had formed an alliance to break the blockade. Nelson joined Admiral Sir Hyde Parker's fleet at Yarmouth, from where they sailed for the Danish coast in March. On their arrival, Parker was inclined to blockade Denmark and control the entrance to the Baltic, but Nelson urged a pre-emptive attack on the Danish fleet in the harbour of Copenhagen. He convinced Parker to allow him to make an assault and was given significant reinforcements. Parker himself would wait in the Kattegat, covering Nelson's fleet in case of the arrival of the Swedish or Russian fleets.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: On the morning of 2 April 1801, Nelson began to advance into Copenhagen harbour. The battle began badly for the British, with HMS "Agamemnon", and running aground, and the rest of the fleet encountering heavier fire from the Danish shore batteries than had been anticipated. Sir Hyde Parker sent the signal for Nelson to withdraw, reasoning:I will make the signal for recall for Nelson's sake. If he is in a condition to continue the action he will disregard it; if he is not, it will be an excuse for his retreat and no blame can be attached to him. Nelson, directing action aboard , was informed of the signal by the signal lieutenant, Frederick Langford, but angrily responded: "I told you to look out on the Danish commodore and let me know when he surrendered. Keep your eyes fixed on him." He then turned to his flag captain, Thomas Foley, and said "You know, Foley, I have only one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes." He raised the telescope to his blind eye, and said "I really do not see the signal."


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: The battle lasted three hours, leaving both Danish and British fleets heavily damaged. At length, Nelson dispatched a letter to the Danish commander, Crown Prince Frederick, calling for a truce, which the Prince accepted. Parker approved of Nelson's actions in retrospect, and Nelson was given the honour of going into Copenhagen the next day to open formal negotiations. At a banquet that evening, he told Prince Frederick that the battle had been the most severe he had ever participated in. The outcome of the battle—and several weeks of ensuing negotiations—was a fourteen-week armistice, with Nelson becoming commander-in-chief in the Baltic Sea, upon Parker's recall in May.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: As a reward for the victory, he was created Viscount Nelson of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe in the County of Norfolk, on 19 May 1801. In addition, on 4 August 1801, he was created Baron Nelson of the Nile and of Hilborough in the County of Norfolk, with a special remainder to his father and sisters. Nelson sailed to the Russian naval base at Reval in May, and there learnt that the pact of armed neutrality was to be disbanded. Satisfied with the outcome of the expedition, he returned to England, arriving on 1 July.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: In France, Napoleon was amassing forces to invade Great Britain. After a brief spell in London, where he again visited the Hamiltons, Nelson was placed in charge of defending the English Channel to prevent the invasion. He spent the summer of 1801 reconnoitring the French coast, but apart from a failed attack on Boulogne in August, saw little action. On 1 October, the Peace of Amiens was signed between the British and the French, and Nelson—in poor health again—retired once more to Britain, where he stayed with Sir William and Lady Hamilton. On 30 October, Nelson spoke in support of the Addington government in the House of Lords, and afterwards, made regular visits to attend sessions.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: In the summer of 1802, Nelson, and the Hamiltons, embarked on a tour of England and Wales, visiting Oxford (Star Inn), Woodstock, Oxfordshire 4th Duke of Marlborough - Blenheim Palace, Gloucester, Forest of Dean, Ross-on-Wye, then by river to Monmouth, Abergavenny, Brecon, Carmarthen, Milford Haven (New Inn), Tenby, Swansea, Carmarthen, Merthyr Tydfil (Star Inn) visited Cyfartha Ironworks to see the place were the 104 guns had been made for his flagship, HMS Victory, Ffos y Gerddinen coaching inn, now both village and inn renamed Nelson, Caerphilly, Monmouth (Beaufort Arms), Hereford, Ludlow, Worcester (Hop Pole Inn), Birmingham (Styles hotel), Warwick, Althorp (Lord Spencer) and returning to Merton Place Sunday 5 September passing through numerous other towns and villages along the way. Nelson often found himself received as a hero, (except at Woodstock) and was the centre of celebrations and events held in his honour.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: In September, Lady Hamilton purchased Merton Place, a country estate in Merton, Surrey (now within the borders of south-west London) for Nelson, where he lived with the Hamiltons until William's death, on 6 April 1803. The following month, war broke out once again, and Nelson prepared to return to sea.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: In January 1803, Nelson appeared as a character witness in the treason trial of a former comrade in arms, Colonel Edward Despard. Despard, who had been moving in radical circles in London—a member both of the London Corresponding Society and the United Irishmen—was the alleged ringleader of a conspiracy to assassinate King George III and seize the Tower of London; the so-called Despard Plot. In court, Nelson recollected his service with Despard in the Caribbean, during the American War:


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Under cross-examination, however, Nelson had to concede to having "lost sight of Despard for the last twenty years".


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson directed a further plea for clemency to Prime Minister Henry Addington, who was later to tell Nelson that "he and his family had sat up after supper, weeping over the letter". Following Despard's execution in February, Lady Fanny Nelson is reported to have taken the Colonel's Jamaican wife, Catherine Despard, under her "protection".


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson was appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet and given the first-rate as his flagship. He joined her at Portsmouth, where he received orders to sail to Malta and take command of a squadron there, before joining the blockade of Toulon. Nelson arrived off Toulon in July 1803, and spent the next year and a half enforcing the blockade. He was promoted to Vice-Admiral of the White while still at sea, on 23 April 1804. In January 1805, the French fleet, under the command of Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, escaped Toulon and eluded the blockading British. Nelson set off in pursuit, but after searching the eastern Mediterranean, learnt the French had been blown back into Toulon. Villeneuve managed to break out a second time in April, and this time, succeeded in passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, and into the Atlantic—bound for the West Indies.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson gave chase, but after arriving in the Caribbean, spent June in a fruitless search for the fleet. Villeneuve had briefly cruised around the islands, before heading back to Europe, in contravention of Napoleon's orders. The returning French fleet was intercepted by a British fleet, under Sir Robert Calder, and engaged in the Battle of Cape Finisterre, but managed to reach Ferrol with only minor losses. Nelson returned to Gibraltar at the end of July, and travelled from there to England, dismayed at his failure to bring the French to battle and expecting to be censured.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: To his surprise, he was given a rapturous reception from crowds who had gathered to view his arrival. Senior British officials congratulated him for sustaining the close pursuit, crediting him with saving the West Indies from a French invasion. Nelson briefly stayed in London, where he was cheered wherever he went, before visiting Merton Place to see Lady Hamilton, arriving in late August. He entertained a number of his friends and relations there over the coming month, and began plans for a grand engagement with the enemy fleet, one that would surprise his foes by forcing a pell-mell battle on them.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Captain Henry Blackwood arrived at Merton early on 2 September, bringing news that the French and Spanish fleets had combined and were currently at anchor in Cádiz. Nelson hurried to London, where he met with cabinet ministers and was given command of the fleet blockading Cádiz. It was while awaiting one of these meetings, on 24 September, with Lord Castlereagh, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, that Nelson and Major General Arthur Wellesley—the future Duke of Wellington—met briefly in a waiting area. Wellington was waiting to be debriefed on his Indian operations, and Nelson on his chase and future plans. Wellington later recalled, "[Nelson] entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself and, in reality, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me". After a few minutes, Nelson left the room, but having then been informed who his companion had been, returned and entered into a more earnest and intelligent discussion with the young Wellesley. This lasted for a quarter of an hour, and encompassed topics such as the war, the state of the colonies, and the geopolitical situation. On this second discussion, Wellesley recalled, "I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more". This was the only meeting between the two men.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson returned briefly to Merton to set his affairs in order, and bid farewell to Emma, before travelling back to London and then on to Portsmouth; arriving there early on the morning of 14 September. He breakfasted at the George Inn with his friends George Rose, the Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and George Canning, the Treasurer of the Navy. During the breakfast, word spread of Nelson's presence at the inn and a large crowd of well-wishers gathered. They accompanied Nelson to his barge and cheered him off, which Nelson acknowledged by raising his hat. He was recorded as having turned to his colleague and stated: "I had their huzzas before; I have their hearts now." Robert Southey reported on the onlookers for Nelson's walk to the dock: "Many were in tears and many knelt down before him and blessed him as he passed."


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: "Victory" joined the British fleet off Cádiz, on 27 September, and Nelson took over from Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood. Nelson spent the following weeks preparing and refining his tactics for the anticipated battle, and dining with his captains to ensure they understood his intentions. He had devised a plan of attack that anticipated the allied fleet would form up in a traditional line of battle. Drawing on his own experience from the Nile and Copenhagen, and the examples of Duncan at Camperdown and Rodney at the Saintes, Nelson decided to split his fleet into squadrons rather than forming it into a similar line parallel to the enemy. These squadrons would then cut the enemy's line in a number of places, allowing a pell-mell battle to develop. The British ships could overwhelm and destroy parts of their opponents' formation, before unengaged enemy ships could come to their aid.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: The combined French and Spanish fleet under Villeneuve's command numbered thirty-three ships of the line. Napoleon had intended for Villeneuve to sail into the English Channel and cover a planned invasion of Britain. However, the entry of Austria and Russia into the war forced Napoleon to call off this invasion, and transfer troops to Germany. Villeneuve had been reluctant to risk engagement with the British and this reluctance led Napoleon to send Vice-Admiral François Rosily to Cádiz, in order to take command of the fleet. Rosily was then to sail it into the Mediterranean and land troops at Naples, before making port at Toulon. Villeneuve decided to sail the fleet out before his successor could arrive. On 20 October 1805, the fleet was sighted making its way out of harbour, by patrolling British frigates, and Nelson was informed that they appeared to be heading to the west.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: At four o'clock in the morning of 21 October, Nelson ordered the "Victory" to turn towards the approaching enemy fleet, and signalled the rest of his force to battle stations. He then went below and made out his will, before returning to the quarterdeck to carry out an inspection. Despite having twenty-seven ships to Villeneuve's thirty-three, Nelson was confident of success, declaring that he would not be satisfied with taking fewer than twenty prizes. He returned briefly to his cabin to write a final prayer, after which he joined "Victory"'s signal lieutenant, John Pasco. Mr Pasco, I wish to say to the fleet "England confides that every man will do his duty". You must be quick, for I have one more signal to make, which is for close action. Pasco suggested changing "confides" to "expects" which, being in the Signal Book, could be signalled by the use of a single code (three flags), whereas "confides" would have to be spelt out letter by letter. Nelson agreed, and the signal was hoisted.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: As the fleets converged, "Victory"'s Captain Thomas Hardy, suggested that Nelson remove the decorations on his coat, so that he would not be so easily identified by enemy sharpshooters. Nelson replied that it was too late "to be shifting a coat", adding that they were "military orders and he did not fear to show them to the enemy". Captain Henry Blackwood, of the frigate , suggested Nelson come aboard his ship to better observe the battle. Nelson refused, and also turned down Hardy's suggestion to let Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey's come ahead of "Victory" and lead the line into battle.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: "Victory" came under fire, initially passing wide, but then with greater accuracy as the distances decreased. A cannonball struck and killed Nelson's secretary, John Scott, nearly cutting him in two. Hardy's clerk then took over, but he too, was almost immediately killed. "Victory"s wheel was shot away; another cannonball cut down eight marines. Standing next to Nelson on the quarterdeck, Hardy's shoe buckle was suddenly dented by a splinter. Nelson observed, "This is too warm work to last long."


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: "Victory" had, by now, reached the enemy line and Hardy asked Nelson which ship to engage first. Nelson told him to take his pick, whereupon Hardy moved "Victory" across the stern of the 80-gun French flagship, "Bucentaure". "Victory" then came under fire from the 74-gun "Redoutable", which was lying off "Bucentaure"s stern, as well as the 130-gun "Santísima Trinidad". As sharpshooters from the enemy ships fired onto "Victory"s deck from their rigging, Nelson and Hardy continued directing and giving orders.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: At a quarter-past one in the afternoon, Hardy realised that Nelson was not by his side. He turned to see Nelson kneeling on the deck, supporting himself with his hand, before falling onto his side. Hardy rushed to him, at which point, Nelson smiled: Hardy, I do believe they have done it at last ... my backbone is shot through.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: He had been hit by a musket ball, fired from the mizzen-top of "Redoutable", at a range of 50 feet (15 m). The ball entered his left shoulder, passed through a lung, then his spine at the sixth and seventh thoracic vertebrae, and lodged two inches (5 cm) below his right shoulder blade, in the muscles of his back. Nelson was carried below to the cockpit, by sergeant major of marines Robert Adair, and two seamen. As he was being carried down, he asked them to pause while he gave advice to a midshipman on the handling of the tiller. He then draped a handkerchief over his face to avoid causing alarm amongst the crew. He was taken to ship surgeon William Beatty, telling him: You can do nothing for me. I have but a short time to live. My back is shot through. Nelson was made comfortable, fanned, and brought lemonade and watered wine to drink, after he complained of feeling hot and thirsty. He asked several times to see Hardy, who was on deck supervising the battle, and asked Beatty to remember him to Emma, his daughter and his friends.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Hardy came belowdecks to see Nelson, just after half-past two, and informed him that a number of enemy ships had surrendered. Nelson told him that he was sure to die, and begged him to pass his possessions on to Emma. Those with Nelson, at this point, were the chaplain Alexander Scott, the purser Walter Burke, Nelson's steward, Chevalier, and Beatty. Nelson, fearing that a gale was blowing up, instructed Hardy to be sure to anchor. After reminding him to "take care of poor Lady Hamilton", Nelson said: "Kiss me, Hardy". Beatty recorded that Hardy knelt and kissed Nelson on the cheek. He then stood for a minute or two, before kissing Nelson on the forehead. Nelson asked, "Who is that?" On hearing that it was Hardy, he replied, "God bless you, Hardy."


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: By now very weak, Nelson continued to murmur instructions to Burke and Scott, "fan, fan ... rub, rub ... drink, drink." Beatty had heard Nelson murmur, "Thank God I have done my duty", and when he returned, Nelson's voice had faded and his pulse was very weak. Nelson looked up, as Beatty took his pulse, then closed his eyes. Scott, who remained by Nelson as he died, recorded his last words as, "God and my country". Nelson died at half-past four in the afternoon, three hours after he had been shot. He was 47 years old.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson's body was placed in a cask of brandy mixed with camphor and myrrh, which was then lashed to the "Victory"s mainmast and placed under guard. "Victory" was towed to Gibraltar after the battle, and on arrival the body was transferred to a lead-lined coffin filled with spirits of wine. Collingwood's dispatches about the battle were carried to England aboard , and when the news arrived in London, a messenger was sent to Merton Place to bring the news of Nelson's death to Emma Hamilton. She later recalled, They brought me word, Mr Whitby from the Admiralty. "Show him in directly", I said. He came in, and with a pale countenance and faint voice, said, "We have gained a great Victory." – "Never mind your Victory", I said. "My letters – give me my letters" – Captain Whitby was unable to speak – tears in his eyes and a deathly paleness over his face made me comprehend him. I believe I gave a scream and fell back, and for ten hours I could neither speak nor shed a tear.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: King George III, on receiving the news, is alleged to have said, in tears, "We have lost more than we have gained." "The Times" reported: We do not know whether we should mourn or rejoice. The country has gained the most splendid and decisive Victory that has ever graced the naval annals of England; but it has been dearly purchased.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson's body was unloaded from the "Victory" at the Nore. It was conveyed upriver, in Commander Sir George Grey's yacht "Chatham", to Greenwich and placed inside a lead coffin. The lead coffin was then placed inside a wooden one, made from the mast of "L'Orient", which had been salvaged after the Battle of the Nile.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: He lay in state for three days in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital, where the surrounding arrangements all but disintegrated, under the crush of crowds far greater than authorities had anticipated. His body was then taken upriver, aboard a barge originally used as King Charles II's state barge; accompanied by Lord Samuel Hood, chief mourner Sir Peter Parker, and the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales, at first, announced his intention of attending the funeral as chief mourner. However, he ultimately attended in a private capacity, along with his brothers, when his father, King George III, reminded him that it was against protocol for the heir to the throne to attend the funerals of anyone except members of the royal family.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: On 8 January 1806, the coffin was taken into the Admiralty for the night, attended by Nelson's chaplain, Alexander Scott. The following day, 9 January, a funeral procession consisting of 32 admirals, over a hundred captains, and an escort of 10,000 soldiers took the coffin from the Admiralty to St Paul's Cathedral. After a four-hour service, he was interred within a crypt, in a sarcophagus originally carved for Cardinal Wolsey; the sarcophagus and its base had been previously taken over for the tomb of Henry VIII, which was never completed. The sailors charged with folding the flag, which they were to then place on Nelson's coffin after it had been lowered through the floor of the nave, instead tore it into fragments, each taking a piece as a memorial of their fallen commander.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson was regarded as a highly effective leader, and someone who was able to sympathise with the needs of his men. He based his command on love, rather than authority, inspiring both his superiors and his subordinates with his considerable courage, commitment and charisma—dubbed "the Nelson touch". Nelson combined this talent with an adept grasp of strategy and politics, making him a highly successful naval commander. Admiral Togo, himself often called "the Nelson of the East", placed Nelson as among the greatest naval commanders in history—second only to Admiral Yi Sun-sin. The memorandum Nelson wrote before Trafalgar expresses his attitude well: "No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy."


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson's personality was complex, often characterised by a desire to be noticed—both by his superiors and the public. He was easily flattered by praise, and dismayed when he felt he was not given sufficient credit for his actions. This led him to take risks, and to enthusiastically publicise his resultant successes, which was not always considered acceptable at the time. Nelson was also highly confident in his abilities, determined and able to make important decisions. His active career meant that he was considerably experienced in combat and was a shrewd judge of his opponents, able to identify and exploit his enemies' weaknesses.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: He was often prone to insecurities, however, as well as violent mood swings, and was extremely vain; he loved to receive decorations and tributes. Despite his personality, he remained a highly professional leader and was driven all his life by a strong sense of duty. Nelson's fame reached new heights after his death, and he came to be regarded as one of Britain's greatest military heroes, ranked alongside the Duke of Marlborough and Duke of Wellington. In the BBC's "100 Greatest Britons" programme in 2002, Nelson was voted the ninth greatest Briton of all time.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Aspects of Nelson's life and career were controversial, both during his lifetime and after his death. His affair with Emma Hamilton was widely remarked upon, and disapproved of, to the extent that Emma was denied permission to attend his funeral. She and their daughter, Horatia, were also subsequently ignored by the government, which awarded Nelson's money and titles only to legitimate family. Nelson's actions during the reoccupation of Naples have also been the subject of debate. His approval of the wave of reprisals against the Jacobins, who had surrendered under the terms agreed by Cardinal Ruffo, as well as his personal intervention in securing the execution of Francesco Caracciolo, are considered by some biographers, such as Robert Southey, to have been a shameful breach of honour. A prominent contemporary, politician Charles James Fox, was among those who attacked Nelson for his actions at Naples, declaring in the House of Commons: I wish that the atrocities of which we hear so much and which I abhor as much as any man, were indeed unexampled. I fear that they do not belong exclusively to the French – Naples for instance has been what is called "delivered", and yet, if I am rightly informed, it has been stained and polluted by murders so ferocious, and by cruelties of every kind so abhorrent, that the heart shudders at the recital ... [The besieged rebels] demanded that a British officer should be brought forward, and to him they capitulated. They made terms with him under the sanction of the British name. Before they sailed their property was confiscated, numbers were thrown into dungeons, and some of them, I understand, notwithstanding the British guarantee, were actually executed. Other pro-republican writers produced books and pamphlets decrying the events in Naples as atrocities. Later assessments, including one by Andrew Lambert, have stressed that the armistice had not been authorised by the King of Naples, and that the retribution meted out by the Neapolitans was not unusual for the time. Lambert also suggests that Nelson, in fact, acted to put an end to the bloodshed; using his ships and men to restore order in the city.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson's influence continued long after his death, and saw periodic revivals of interest, especially during times of crisis in Britain. In the 1860s, Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson appealed to the image and tradition of Nelson, in order to oppose the defence cuts being made by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher was a keen exponent of Nelson during the early years of the twentieth century, and often emphasised his legacy during his period of naval reform. Winston Churchill also found Nelson to be a source of inspiration during the Second World War.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson has been frequently depicted in art and literature; appearing in paintings by Benjamin West and Arthur William Devis, and in books and biographies by John McArthur, James Stanier Clarke and Robert Southey. Nelson is also celebrated and commemorated in numerous songs, written both during his life and following his death. Nelson's victory in the Battle of the Nile is commemorated in "The Battle of the Nile: a favourite patriotic song". Thomas Attwood's "Nelson's Tomb: A Favourite Song" commemorates Nelson's death in the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1797, the famous composer Haydn wrote a mass to commemorate Nelson’s stunning defeat over Napoleon and the French. In 1800, Nelson visited Eisenstadt for four days and most certainly saw Haydn’s new mass and in response he met and gave the elderly Haydn a watch he wore during the battle.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: A number of monuments and memorials were constructed across the country, and abroad, to honour his memory and achievements. Dublin's monument to Nelson, Nelson's Pillar, completed in 1809, was destroyed by Irish republicans in 1966. In Montreal, a statue was started in 1808 and completed in 1809. In Great Yarmouth, on the coast in his home county of Norfolk, the Britannia Monument (aka the Norfolk Naval Pillar) to Nelson was erected in 1819, with dedications at the base to his four main naval victories. Others followed around the world, with London's Trafalgar Square being created in his memory in 1835 and the centrepiece, Nelson's Column, finished in 1843. A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque was unveiled in 1876, to commemorate Nelson, at 147 New Bond Street. The architect of the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, Sir Aston Webb placed a window high in the chapel such that annually, on 21 October at the time of Nelson's death, the light from it falls on the statue of Christ behind the altar.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson and his monuments are seen more critically though, particularly in countries that felt the negative weight of colonialism, and seek to revise their public history. Here Nelson is viewed as a national anti-hero, a figurehead of historic oppression. His legacy continues to shape debate. Major public memorials in primary locations in capital cities have been subject to protest and removal, as conscious acts of resistance or decolonisation. In 1966, the Nelson Pillar in Dublin was blown up by Irish Republicans. This was and is not lamented in Ireland: a novelty folk song, "Up went Nelson", topped the Irish pop charts in the wake of the explosion, while a newspaper article marking the 55th anniversary noted: "For many, the biggest surprise about the blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar...is why it took 157 years. The resentment had run deep. Almost fifty years after the 1916 Rising an Englishman still towered over every other notable in the city, many groused." Across the Atlantic, in the Caribbean in 2020, after years of campaigning, the Nelson Statue in National Heroes Square, Bridgetown, Barbados, was removed and placed in a museum. It had stood since 1813, in a central public space of the capital known until 1999 as Trafalgar Square. The Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley said at the ceremony marking the statue's removal:


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson's titles, as inscribed on his coffin and read out at the funeral by the Garter King at Arms, Sir Isaac Heard, were: The Most Noble Lord Horatio Nelson, Viscount and Baron Nelson, of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe in the County of Norfolk, Baron Nelson of the Nile and of Hilborough in the said County, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Vice Admiral of the White Squadron of the Fleet, Commander in Chief of his Majesty's Ships and Vessels in the Mediterranean, Duke of Bronte in the Kingdom of Sicily, Knight Grand Cross of the Sicilian Order of St Ferdinand and of Merit, Member of the Ottoman Order of the Crescent, Knight Grand Commander of the Order of St Joachim.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Nelson received large Naval Gold Medals for the battles of St Vincent, the Nile and, posthumously, Trafalgar, one of very few recipients of three such medals. Nelson was granted a royal license in 1802 to receive and wear the foreign Order of Saint Joachim.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: He was a Colonel of Marines from 1795 to 1797 and voted a Freeman of the cities and boroughs of London (10 March 1797), Bath, Salisbury, Exeter (15 January 1801), Plymouth, Monmouth, Sandwich, Oxford (22 July 1802), Hereford, Haverfordwest (in 1802) and Worcester (30 August 1802). The University of Oxford, in full Congregation, bestowed the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law upon Nelson on 30 July 1802.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: In 1799, Nelson was created Duke of Bronte (Italian: "Duca di Bronte"), of the Kingdom of Sicily (after 1816, existing in the nobility of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), by King Ferdinand III of Sicily, and after briefly experimenting with the signature "Brontë Nelson of the Nile", he signed himself "Nelson & Brontë" for the rest of his life. Nelson had no legitimate children; his daughter, Horatia, married the Reverend Philip Ward, with whom she had ten children before her death in 1881.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Since Nelson died without legitimate issue, his viscountcy and his barony created in 1798, both "of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe in the County of Norfolk", became extinct upon his death. However, the barony created in 1801, "of the Nile and of Hilborough in the County of Norfolk", passed by a special remainder, which included Nelson's father and sisters and their male issue, to the Reverend William Nelson, who was Nelson's older brother. In November 1805, William Nelson was created Earl Nelson and Viscount Merton, of Trafalgar and of Merton in the County of Surrey, in recognition of his late brother's services, and he also inherited the dukedom of Bronte.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: Arms were granted and confirmed on 20 October 1797. Nelson's paternal arms ("Or, a cross flory sable over all a bendlet gules") were augmented to honour his naval victories. After the Battle of Cape St Vincent (14 February 1797), Nelson was created a Knight of the Bath and was granted heraldic supporters (appropriate for peers) of a sailor and a lion.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: In honour of the Battle of the Nile in 1798, the Crown granted him an augmentation of honour blazoned "On a chief wavy argent a palm tree between a disabled ship and a ruinous battery all issuant from waves of the sea all proper" (deemed a notorious example of debased heraldry), the Latin motto "Palmam qui meruit ferat" ("let him who has earned it bear the palm"), and added to his supporters a palm branch in the hand of the sailor and in the paw of the lion, and a "tri-colored flag and staff in the mouth of the latter".


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: After Nelson's death, his elder brother and heir William Nelson, 1st Earl Nelson, was granted a further augmentation: "On a fess wavy overall azure the word TRAFALGAR or". This additional augmentation was not used by those who succeeded him in the earldom, including the present Earl Nelson.


title: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson

text: The herald Wilfrid Scott-Giles (d.1982) wrote a jocular verse describing the successive augmentations to the Nelson arms, ending with the line "But where, alas! is Nelson's ancient cross?"


title: Chad Kroeger

text: Chad Robert Kroeger ( Turton; born November 15, 1974) is a Canadian musician who is the lead singer and guitarist of the rock band Nickelback. In addition to his work with Nickelback, Kroeger has been involved with a variety of collaborations, appearing as a guest musician in several songs and has contributed in both production and songwriting. He has co-written several songs for other artists and films.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: Kroeger was born Chad Robert Turton in Hanna, Alberta, on November 15, 1974. His maternal grandfather, politician Henry Kroeger, was born in Moscow to a Mennonite family of Prussian descent. After his father left the family when he was two, he started going by his mother's maiden name of Kroeger. He learned to play the guitar at age 13. His youth was sometimes troubled, and he was sent to juvenile detention for breaking into his junior high school.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: In the early 1990s, Kroeger was part of a grunge cover band, Village Idiot, with his cousin Brandon Kroeger and future Nickelback members bassist Mike Kroeger (his brother) and singer Ryan Peake. In 1995, Kroeger, Peake, Mike Kroeger, and then drummer Brandon Kroeger, formed the band Nickelback. Kroeger has continued to record and tour with this successful band for more than 20 years.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: In 2001, Kroeger founded the band The Suits XL. Band members included Sam Loubier-Demers and Yohann Gosselin on vocals and guitars, drummer Patrick Paquet, keyboardist Felix-Antoine Berube and singer Oliver Roy de Belleval. The next year, he co-founded the Vancouver-based 604 Records. Later, in 2006, The Suits XL released an album through this label. The next year the band was nominated for a Canadian Indie Award.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: Kroeger, along with Saliva vocalist Josey Scott, Theory of a Deadman lead vocalist (serving as guitarist for this track) Tyler Connolly and Our Lady Peace drummer Jeremy Taggart, performed the theme song titled "Hero" for the hit movie "Spider-Man" in 2002. Also in 2002, Kroeger wrote and sang on "Why Don't You & I" for Santana's "Shaman". However, when Arista decided to release the song as a single in Summer 2003, Kroeger's label, Roadrunner, refused permission, citing concerns that Kroeger appearing on a "high-profile single" would compromise the excitement over Nickelback's fall 2003 release "The Long Road". Kroeger recommended The Calling's Alex Band, another Arista artist, as a replacement for re-recording the single.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: In 2003, Kroeger won an International Achievement Award for the song "Hero" at the SOCAN Awards in Toronto.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: In 2007, Chad Kroeger worked with Santana for a second time, when he co-wrote and recorded guitar and vocals parts for a new song meant to appear on the compilation album "Ultimate Santana". The track is called "Into the Night" and was released as a single on October 2, 2007. The album "Ultimate Santana" was released in October. Besides working with Santana, Kroeger also recorded with Travis Tritt on his album "The Storm", where Tritt did a cover of Nickelback's "Should've Listened" track from "The Long Road".


title: Chad Kroeger

text: Chad Kroeger, Eric Dill, Rune Westberg and Chris Daughtry wrote the debut single of Daughtry's new album. The single, titled "No Surprise", was debuted on American Idol Wednesday, May 6, 2009. Kroeger also contributed writing to another song from the album titled "Life After You." He and Brett James co-wrote Tim McGraw's 2009 single "It's a Business Doing Pleasure with You."


title: Chad Kroeger

text: Kroeger featured on the Timbaland album Shock Value 2 with the song "Tomorrow in the Bottle", which also features Sebastian. In 2010, he provided guest vocals, along with Ludacris and guest lead guitarist Zakk Wylde, on the My Darkest Days single "Porn Star Dancing."


title: Chad Kroeger

text: In 2011, Kroeger was featured on the new Steel Panther album "Balls Out" with the song "It Won't Suck Itself." In early 2012, it was confirmed that Kroeger was working with French-Canadian pop rock singer Avril Lavigne on her upcoming fifth studio album.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: In 2008, Kroeger was convicted of drunk driving in a British Columbia court after he was stopped for speeding in Surrey.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: Kroeger started dating fellow Canadian rocker Avril Lavigne on July 1, 2012. The relationship blossomed after they began working together in March 2012 to write and record music for Lavigne's fifth album. Kroeger and Lavigne became engaged in August 2012. The couple married in the south of France on July 1, 2013, which is Canada Day. Lavigne and Kroeger honeymooned in Portofino, Italy. In September 2014, the entertainment media began reporting that Lavigne and Kroeger were headed for separation after only one year of marriage. On September 2, 2015, Lavigne announced their amicable separation via her official Instagram account.


title: Chad Kroeger

text: In 2015, the second leg of the band's North American tour had to be cancelled so Kroeger could have surgery for a cyst on his larynx. The entire leg of the European tour was cancelled as well.


title: Comfort women

text: Comfort women or comfort girls were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese "" (慰安婦), which literally means "comforting, consoling woman."


title: Comfort women

text: Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with most historians settling somewhere in the range of 50,000–200,000; the exact numbers are still being researched and debated. Most of the women were from occupied countries, including Korea, China, and the Philippines. Women who were used for military "comfort stations" also came from Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaya, Manchukuo, Taiwan (then a Japanese dependency), the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor, New Guinea and other Japanese-occupied territories. Stations were located in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and French Indochina. A smaller number of women of European origin were also involved from the Netherlands and Australia with an estimated 200–400 Dutch women alone, with an unknown number of other European females. Some women of Papuan origin including Japanese-Papuan girls born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers were also conscripted as comfort women. The number of Papuan comfort women from New Guinea is unknown.


title: Comfort women

text: Originally, the brothels were established to provide soldiers with voluntary prostitutes in order to reduce the incidence of wartime rape, a cause of rising anti-Japanese sentiment across occupied territories. However, despite the goal of reducing rape and venereal disease, the comfort stations aggravated rape and increased the spread of venereal diseases. Many women were coerced into working in the brothels. According to testimonies, some young women were abducted from their homes in countries under Imperial Japanese rule. Japanese women were the first victims to be enslaved in military brothels and trafficked across Japan, Okinawa, Japan's colonies and occupied territories, and overseas battlegrounds. In many cases, local middlemen tasked with procuring women for the military deceived them with promises of work in factories or restaurants. In some cases, propaganda advocated equity and the sponsorship of women in higher education. Other enticements were false advertising for nursing jobs at outposts or Japanese army bases; once recruited, they were incarcerated in comfort stations both inside their nations and abroad. A significant percentage of comfort women were minors.


title: Comfort women

text: Given that prostitution in Japan was pervasive and organized, it was logical to find military prostitution in the Japanese armed forces. Military correspondence within the Imperial Japanese Army shows that there were a number of the aims for facilitating comfort stations: to reduce or prevent rape crimes by Japanese army personnel in an effort to prevent a worsening of anti-Japanese sentiment, to reduce venereal diseases among Japanese troops, and to prevent leakage of military secrets by civilians who were in contact with Japanese officers. Carmen Argibay, a former member of the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice, states that the Japanese government aimed to prevent atrocities like the Rape of Nanking by confining rape and sexual abuse to military-controlled facilities, or stop incidents from leaking to the international press should they occur. She also states that the government wanted to minimize medical expenses on treating venereal diseases that the soldiers acquired from frequent and widespread rape, which hindered Japan's military capacity. Comfort women lived in sordid conditions, and were called "public toilets" by the Japanese. Yuki Tanaka states that local brothels outside of the military's reach had issues of security, since there were possibilities of spies disguised as workers of such private facilities. Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi further states that the Japanese military used comfort women to satisfy disgruntled soldiers during World War II and prevent military revolt. He also asserts that, despite the goal of reducing rape and venereal disease, the comfort stations did the opposite—aggravating rape and increasing the spread of venereal disease. Comfort women stations were so prevalent that the Imperial Army offered accountancy classes on how to manage comfort stations, which included how to determine the actuarial “durability or perishability of the women procured.”


title: Comfort women

text: In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Japan's military closely regulated privately operated brothels in Manchuria.


title: Comfort women

text: Comfort houses were first established in Shanghai after the Shanghai incident in 1932 as a response to wholesale rape of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers. Okamura Yasuji, the chief of staff in Shanghai, ordered the construction of comfort houses to prevent further rape. After the rapes of many Chinese women by Japanese troops during the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, the Japanese forces adopted the general policy of creating comfort stations in various places in Japanese occupied Chinese territory, "not because of their concern for the Chinese victims of rape by Japanese soldiers but because of their fear of creating antagonism among the Chinese civilians." According to Yoshiaki Yoshimi, comfort stations were established to avoid criticism from China, the United States of America and Europe following the case of massive rapes between battles in Shanghai and Nanjing.


title: Comfort women

text: As Japan continued military expansion, the military found itself short of Japanese volunteers, and turned to local populations—abducting and coercing women into serving as sex slaves in the comfort stations. Many women responded to calls to work as factory workers or nurses, and did not know that they were being pressed into sexual slavery.


title: Comfort women

text: In the early stages of World War II, Japanese authorities recruited prostitutes through conventional means. In urban areas, conventional advertising through middlemen was used alongside kidnapping. Middlemen advertised in newspapers circulating in Japan and in the Japanese colonies of Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo, and China. These sources soon dried up, especially in metropolitan Japan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs resisted further issuance of travel visas for Japanese prostitutes, feeling it tarnished the image of the Japanese Empire. The military turned to acquiring comfort women outside mainland Japan, mostly from Korea and from occupied China. An existing system of licensed prostitution within Korea made it easy for Japan to recruit females in large numbers.


title: Comfort women

text: Many women were tricked or defrauded into joining the military brothels. Based on false characterizations and payments—by Japanese or by local recruitment agents—which could help relieve family debts, many Korean girls enlisted to take the job. Furthermore, the South East Asia Translation and Interrogation Center (SEATIC) Psychological Warfare Interrogation Bulletin No.2 states that a Japanese facility-manager purchased Korean women for 300 to 1000 yen depending on their physical characteristics, who then became his property and were not released even after completing the servitude terms specified in the contract. In northern Hebei province of China, Hui Muslim girls were recruited to "Huimin Girls' school" to be trained as entertainers, but then forced to serve as sex slaves. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that a major issue that no historian has examined whether the soldiers of the Indian National Army had used comfort women, there had been no investigation for it. Lebra wrote "None of those who have written on Bose's Indian national army has investigated whether, while they were trained by the Japanese army, they were permitted to share in the 'comfort' provided by thousands of kidnapped Korean young women held as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army at its camps. This might have provided them with some insight into the nature of Japanese, as opposed to British, colonial rule, as well what might be in store for their sisters and daughters."


title: Comfort women

text: Under the strain of the war effort, the military became unable to provide enough supplies to Japanese units; in response, the units made up the difference by demanding or looting supplies from the locals. The military often directly demanded that local leaders procure women for the brothels along the front lines, especially in the countryside where middlemen were rare. When the locals were considered hostile in China, Japanese soldiers carried out the "Three Alls Policy" ("kill all, burn all, loot all") which included indiscriminately kidnapping and raping local civilians.


title: Comfort women

text: On April 17, 2007, Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi announced the discovery of seven official documents in the archives of the Tokyo Trials, suggesting that Imperial military forces – such as the "Tokkeitai" (Naval military police) – forced women whose fathers attacked the "Kenpeitai" (Japanese Army military police) to work in front-line brothels in China, Indochina, and Indonesia. These documents were initially made public at the war crimes trial. In one of these, a lieutenant is quoted as confessing to having organized a brothel and having used it himself. Another source refers to "Tokkeitai" members having arrested women on the streets and putting them in brothels after enforced medical examinations.


title: Comfort women

text: On May 12, 2007, journalist Taichiro Kajimura announced the discovery of 30 Dutch government documents submitted to the Tokyo tribunal as evidence of a forced mass prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang.


title: Comfort women

text: The South Korean government designated Bae Jeong-ja as a pro-Japanese collaborator ("chinilpa") in September 2007 for recruiting comfort women.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2014, China produced almost 90 documents from the archives of the Kwantung Army on the issue. According to China, the documents provide ironclad proof that the Japanese military forced Asian women to work in front-line brothels before and during World War II.


title: Comfort women

text: In June 2014, more official documents were made public from the government of Japan's archives, documenting sexual violence and women forced into sexual slavery, committed by Imperial Japanese soldiers in French Indochina and Indonesia.


title: Comfort women

text: A 2015 study examined archival data which was previously difficult to access, partly due to the China-Japan Joint Communiqué of 1972 in which the Chinese government agreed not to seek any restitution for wartime crimes and incidents. New documents discovered in China shed light on facilities inside comfort stations operated within a Japanese army compound, and the conditions of the Korean comfort women. Documents were discovered verifying the Japanese Army as the funding agency for purchasing some comfort women.


title: Comfort women

text: Documents were found in Shanghai that showed details of how the Japanese Army went about opening comfort stations for Japanese troops in occupied Shanghai. Documents included the Tianjin Municipal Archives from the archival files of the Japanese government and the Japanese police during the periods of the occupation in World War II. Municipal archives from Shanghai and Nanjing were also examined. One conclusion reached was that the relevant archives in Korea are distorted. A conclusion of the study was that the Japanese Imperial government, and the colonial government in Korea, tried to avoid recording the illegal mobilization of comfort women. It was concluded that they burned most of the records immediately before the surrender; however, the study confirmed that some documents and records survived.


title: Comfort women

text: Professor Su Jiliang concludes that during the seven-year period from 1938 to 1945, "comfort women" in the territory occupied by the Japanese numbered 360,000 to 410,000, among whom the Chinese were the largest group, about 200,000.


title: Comfort women

text: Lack of official documentation has made estimating the total number of comfort women difficult. Vast amounts of material pertaining to war crimes, and the responsibility of the nation's highest leaders, were either destroyed or concealed on the orders of the Japanese government at the end of the war. Historians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation, which indicates the ratio of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women, and replacement rates of the women.


title: Comfort women

text: Most academic researchers and media typically point to Yoshiaki's estimate as the most probable range of the numbers of women involved. This figure contrasts with the inscriptions on monuments in the United States such as those in New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and California, which state the number of comfort women as "more than 200,000".


title: Comfort women

text: The BBC quotes "200,000 to 300,000", and the International Commission of Jurists quotes "estimates of historians of 100,000 to 200,000 women."


title: Comfort women

text: According to State University of New York at Buffalo professor Yoshiko Nozaki and other sources, the majority of the women were from Korea and China. Chuo University professor and historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered an abundance of documentation and testimony that proves the existence of 2,000 comfort women stations where approximately 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and Japanese women, many of whom were teenagers, were confined and forced to perform sexual activities with Japanese troops. According to Qiu Peipei of Vassar College, comfort women were replaced with other women at a rapid rate, making her estimates of 200,000-400,000 comfort women plausible, with the majority being Chinese women. Ikuhiko Hata, a professor of Nihon University, estimated the number of women working in the licensed pleasure quarter was fewer than 20,000 and that they were 40% Japanese, 20% Koreans, 10% Chinese, with others making up the remaining 30%. According to Hata, the total number of government-regulated prostitutes in Japan was only 170,000 during World War II. Others came from the Philippines, Taiwan, the Dutch East Indies, and other Japanese-occupied countries and regions. Some Dutch women, captured in Dutch colonies in Asia, were also forced into sexual slavery.


title: Comfort women

text: In further analysis of the Imperial Army medical records for venereal disease treatment from 1940, Yoshimi concluded that if the percentages of women treated reflected the general makeup of the total comfort women population, Korean women made up 51.8 percent, Chinese 36 percent and Japanese 12.2 percent.


title: Comfort women

text: In 1997, Bruce Cumings, a historian of Korea, wrote that Japan had forced quotas to supply the comfort women program, and that Korean men helped recruit the victims. Cumings stated that between 100,000 and 200,000 Korean girls and women were recruited. In Korea, the daughters of the gentry and the bureaucracy were spared from being sent into the "comfort women corps" unless they or their families showed signs of pro-independence tendencies, and the overwhelming majority of the Korean girls taken into the "comfort women corps" came from the poor. The Army and Navy often subcontracted the work of taking girls into the "comfort women corps" in Korea to contractors, who were usually associated in some way with organized crime groups, who were paid for girls they presented. Though a substantial minority of the contractors in Korea were Japanese, the majority were Korean.


title: Comfort women

text: During the initial invasion of Dutch East Indies, Japanese soldiers raped many Indonesian and European women and girls. The Kenpeitai established the comfort women program to control the problem. The Kenpeitai forced and coerced many interned women to serve as prostitutes, including several hundred European women. A few of these chose to live in the homes of Japanese officers to serve one man as a sex slave rather than many men in a brothel. One such European woman, K'tut Tantri, wrote a book describing her ordeal. A Dutch government study described the methods used by the Japanese military to seize the women by force. It concluded that among the 200 to 300 European women found in the Japanese military brothels, "some sixty five were most certainly forced into prostitution". Others, faced with starvation in the refugee camps, agreed to offers of food and payment for work, the nature of which was not completely revealed to them. Some of the women also volunteered in hopes protecting the younger ones. The women forced into prostitution may therefore be much higher than the Dutch record have previously indicated. The number of Dutch women that were sexually assaulted or molested were also largely ignored. It was not until individuals and groups such as the Foundation of Japanese Honorary Debts began advocating for victims of the Japanese occupation that the plight of Dutch comfort women entered the collective conscience. As well as being raped and sexually assaulted every day and night, the Dutch girls lived in constant fear of beatings and other physical violence.


title: Comfort women

text: J.F. van Wagtendonk and the Dutch Broadcast Foundation estimated a total number of 400 Dutch girls were taken from the camps to become comfort women.


title: Comfort women

text: Besides Dutch women, many Javanese were also recruited from Indonesia as comfort women including around 1000 East Timorese women and girls who also used as sexual slaves. Most were adolescent girls aged 14–19 who had completed some education and were deceived through promises of higher education in Tokyo or Singapore. Common destinations of comfort women from Java included Burma, Thailand, and Eastern Indonesia. Interviews conducted with former comfort women also suggest that some women came from the island of Flores. After the war, many Javanese comfort women who survived stayed in the locations where they had been trafficked to and became integrated into local populations.


title: Comfort women

text: Melanesian women from New Guinea were also used as comfort women. Local women were recruited from Rabaul as comfort women, along with some number of mixed Japanese-Papuan women born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers. One Australian Captain, David Hutchinson-Smith, also mentioned of some mixed-race, young Japanese-Papuan girls who were also conscripted as comfort women.


title: Comfort women

text: To date, only one Japanese woman has published her testimony. This was done in 1971, when a former comfort woman forced to work for Showa soldiers in Taiwan published her memoirs under the pseudonym of Suzuko Shirota.


title: Comfort women

text: More than 2,000 Taiwanese women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, as of 2020 only two were still believed to be alive. Yoshiaki Yoshimi notes that more than half of Taiwanese comfort women were minors.


title: Comfort women

text: Based on a statement made by Representative Seijuro Arahune of the Japanese Diet in 1975 in which he claimed to cite numbers provided by Korean authorities during the 1965 Korea-Japan Treaty negotiations, as many as three-fourths of Korean comfort women may have died during the war, although the validity of this statement has since been brought into question as the number does not seem to be based on an actual investigation on the matter. It is estimated that most of the survivors became infertile because of the multiple rapes or venereal diseases contracted following the rapes.


title: Comfort women

text: Since comfort women were forced to travel to the battlefields with the Japanese Imperial Army, many comfort women perished as Allied forces overwhelmed Japan's Pacific defense and annihilated Japanese encampments. In certain cases, the Japanese military executed Korean comfort women when they fled from losing battles with the Allied Forces. During the last stand of Japanese forces in 1944–45, "comfort women" were often forced to commit suicide or were killed. At the Truk naval base, 70 "comfort women" were killed prior to the expected American assault as the Navy mistook the American air raid that destroyed Truk as the prelude to an American landing while during the Battle of Saipan "comfort women" were among those who committed suicide by jumping off the cliffs of Saipan. In Burma, there were cases of Korean "comfort women" committing suicide by swallowing cyanide pills or being killed by having a hand grenade tossed into their dug-outs. During the Battle of Manila, when Japanese sailors ran amok and simply killed everyone, there were cases of "comfort women" being killed, though there does not seem to have been any systematic policy of killing "comfort women". The Japanese government had told the Japanese colonists on Saipan that the American "white devils" were cannibals, and so the Japanese population preferred suicide to falling into the hands of the American "white devils". It is possible that many of the Asian "comfort women" may also have believed this. British soldiers fighting in Burma often reported that the Korean "comfort women" whom they captured were astonished to learn that the British were not going to eat them. Ironically, given this claim, there were cases of starving Japanese troops cut off on remote Pacific islands or trapped in the jungles of Burma turning towards cannibalism, and there were at least several cases where "comfort women" in Burma and on Pacific islands were killed to provide protein for the Imperial Japanese Army.


title: Comfort women

text: According to an account by a survivor, she was beaten when she attempted to resist being raped. The women who were not prostitutes prior to joining the "comfort women corps", especially those taken in by force, were normally "broken in" by being raped. One Korean woman, Kim Hak-sun, stated in a 1991 interview about how she was drafted into the "comfort women corps" in 1941: "When I was 17 years old, the Japanese soldiers came along in a truck, beat us [her and a friend], and then dragged us into the back. I was told if I were drafted, I could earn lots of money in a textile factory ... The first day I was raped and the rapes never stopped ... I was born a woman but never lived as a woman ... I feel sick when I come close to a man. Not just Japanese men, but all men-even my own husband who saved me from the brothel. I shiver whenever I see a Japanese flag ... Why should I feel ashamed? I don't have to feel ashamed." Kim stated that she was raped 30–40 times a day, every day of the year during her time as a "comfort woman". Reflecting their dehumanized status, Army and Navy records where referring to the movement of "comfort women" always used the term "units of war supplies".


title: Comfort women

text: Military doctors and medical workers frequently raped the women during medical examinations. One Japanese Army doctor, Asō Tetsuo, testified that the "comfort women" were seen as "female ammunition" and as "public toilets"—as literally just things to be used and abused—with some "comfort women" being forced to donate blood for the treatment of wounded soldiers. At least 80% of the "comfort women" were Korean, who were assigned to the lower ranks, while Japanese and European women went to the officers. For example, Dutch women captured in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) were reserved exclusively for the officers. Korea is a Confucian country where premarital sex was widely disapproved of, and since the Korean teenagers taken into the "comfort women corps" were almost always virgins, it was felt that this was the best way to limit the spread of venereal diseases that would otherwise incapacitate soldiers and sailors.


title: Comfort women

text: Ten Dutch women were taken by force from prison camps in Java by officers of the Imperial Japanese Army to become forced sex slaves in February 1944. They were systematically beaten and raped day and night. As a victim of the incident, in 1990, Jan Ruff-O'Herne testified to a U.S. House of Representatives committee:


title: Comfort women

text: In their first morning at the brothel, photographs of Ruff-O'Herne and the others were taken and placed on the veranda which was used as a reception area for the Japanese personnel who would choose from these photographs. Over the following four months the girls were raped and beaten day and night, with those who became pregnant forced to have abortions. After four harrowing months, the girls were moved to a camp at Bogor, in West Java, where they were reunited with their families. This camp was exclusively for women who had been put into military brothels, and the Japanese warned the inmates that if anyone told what had happened to them, they and their family members would be killed. Several months later the O'Hernes were transferred to a camp at Batavia, which was liberated on August 15, 1945.


title: Comfort women

text: At Blora, twenty European women and girls were imprisoned in two houses. Over a period of three weeks, as Japanese units passed by the houses, the women and their daughters were brutally and repeatedly raped.


title: Comfort women

text: The Japanese officers involved received some punishment by Japanese authorities at the end of the war. After the end of the war, 11 Japanese officers were found guilty, with one soldier being sentenced to death by the Batavia War Criminal Court. The court decision found that the charge violated was the Army's order to hire only voluntary women. Victims from East Timor testified they were forced into slavery even when they were not old enough to have started menstruating. The court testimonies state that these prepubescent girls were repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers while those who refused to comply were killed.


title: Comfort women

text: Hank Nelson, emeritus professor at the Australian National University's Asia Pacific Research Division, has written about the brothels run by the Japanese military in Rabaul, in what is now Papua New Guinea during WWII. He quotes from the diary of Gordon Thomas, a POW in Rabaul. Thomas writes that the women working at the brothels "most likely served 25 to 35 men a day" and that they were "victims of the yellow slave trade". Nelson also quotes from Kentaro Igusa, a Japanese naval surgeon who was stationed in Rabaul. Igusa wrote in his memoirs that the women continued to work through infection and severe discomfort, though they "cried and begged for help".


title: Comfort women

text: Contrarily, reports based on interrogation of Korean comfort women captured after the Siege of Myitkyina in Burma indicated that they lived comparatively well, received many gifts, and were paid wages while they were in Burma. The label 'homecoming women', originally referring to comfort women who returned to Korea, has remained as a pejorative term for sexually active women in South Korea.


title: Comfort women

text: The Japanese Army and Navy went to great lengths to avoid venereal diseases with large numbers of condoms being handed out for free. For example, documents show that in July 1943 the Army handed out 1,000 condoms for soldiers in Negri Sembilan and another 10,000 for soldiers in Perak. The "comfort women" were usually injected with salvarsan, which together with damage to the vagina caused by rape were the causes of unusually high rates of sterility among the "comfort women". As the war went on and as the shortages caused by the sinking of almost the entire Japanese merchant marine by American submarines kicked in, medical care for the "comfort women" declined as dwindling medical supplies were reserved for the servicemen. As Japanese logistics broke down as the American submarines sank one Japanese ship after another, condoms had to be washed and reused, reducing their effectiveness. In the Philippines, "comfort women" were billed by Japanese doctors if they required medical treatment. In many cases, "comfort women" who were seriously ill were abandoned to die alone.


title: Comfort women

text: The Survey of Korean Comfort Women Used by Japanese Soldiers said that 30% of the interviewed former Korean comfort women produced biological children and 20% adopted children after World War II.


title: Comfort women

text: In 1944, Allied forces captured twenty Korean comfort women and two Japanese comfort station owners in Burma and issued a report, Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report 49. According to the report, Korean women were deceived into being used as comfort women by the Japanese; in 1942, there were about 800 women trafficked from Korea to Burma for this purpose, under the pretence of being recruited for work such as visiting the wounded in hospitals or rolling bandages.


title: Comfort women

text: In Confucian cultures such as those of China and Korea, where premarital sex is considered shameful, the subject of the "comfort women" was ignored for decades after 1945 as the victims were considered pariahs. In Confucian cultures, traditionally an unmarried woman must value her chastity above her own life, and any women who loses her virginity before marriage for whatever reason is expected to commit suicide; by choosing to live, the survivors made themselves into outcasts. Moreover, documents such as the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco, as well as the 1965 treaty which normalised relations between Japan and South Korea, had been interpreted by the Japanese government as having settled issues related to war crimes, despite the fact that none of them specifically mentioned the comfort women system.


title: Comfort women

text: An early figure in comfort women research was the writer Kakou Senda, who first encountered photographs of comfort women in 1962, but was unable to find adequate information explaining who the women in the photographs were. Senda, through a long process of investigation, published the first book on the subject, entitled "Military Comfort Women", in 1973. Nonetheless, the book did not garner widespread publicity, and his book has been widely criticized as distorting the facts by both Japanese and South Korean historians. In any event, this book did become an important source for 1990s activism on the issue. The first book written by a Korean on the subject of comfort women appeared in 1981. However, it was a plagiarism of a 1976 Japanese book by the zainichi author Kim Il-Myeon.


title: Comfort women

text: In 1982, a dispute over history textbooks sprang up after the Ministry of Education ordered a number of deletions in history textbooks related to Japanese wartime aggression and atrocities. This ignited protest from neighbouring countries such as China and also sparked interest in the subject among some Japanese, including a number of wartime veterans who began to speak more openly about their past actions. However, the comfort women issue was not a central topic and instead most of this resurgence in historical interest went towards other themes such as the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731. Nevertheless, historians who had studied Japan's wartime activities in-depth were already aware of the existence of comfort women in general.


title: Comfort women

text: In 1989, the testimony of Seiji Yoshida was translated into Korean. His book was debunked as fraudulent by some Japanese and Korean journalists, and in May 1996 Yoshida admitted that his memoir was fictional, stating in an interview by Shūkan Shinchō that "There is no profit in writing the truth in books. Hiding the facts and mixing them with your own assertions is something that newspapers do all the time too". In August 2014, the Japanese newspaper "Asahi Shimbun" also retracted articles that the paper had published based on or including information from Yoshida, in large part because of pressure from conservative activists and organizations. Following the retraction, attacks from conservatives increased. Takashi Uemura, a journalist who wrote one of the retracted articles, was subject to similar attacks from conservatives, and his employer, Hokusei Gakuen University, was pressured to terminate his position. Uemura sued for libel but lost his case against Professor Tsutomu Nishioka and Japanese news magazine "Shūkan Bunshun".


title: Comfort women

text: The existence of comfort women in South Korea and activism in their favour began to build momentum following democratisation in 1987, but no former comfort woman had yet come forward publicly. After the Japanese government denied that the state was involved and rejected calls for apologies and compensation in a June 1991 Diet session, Kim Hak-sun came forward in August 1991 as the first to tell her story. She followed by others in several different countries demanding an apology from the Japanese government through filing a lawsuit. The Japanese government initially denied any responsibility, but, in January 1992, historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered official documents from the archives of the Defense Agency's National Institute of Defense Studies which indicated Japanese military involvement in establishing and running "comfort stations." Following this, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa became the first Japanese leader to issue a statement specifically apologising for the comfort women issue. This led to an intense increase of public interest in the topic as well. In 1993, following multiple testimonies, the Kono Statement (named after then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono) was issued by Japanese Government confirming that coercion was involved in seizing the comfort women.


title: Comfort women

text: All of this has since triggered a counterreaction from Japanese right-wing forces since the mid-1990's, with disputes over history textbooks being a common example. In 1999, the Japanese historian Kazuko Watanabe complained about a lack of sisterhood among Japanese women, citing a survey showing 50% of Japanese women did not believe in the stories of the "comfort women", charging that many Japanese simply regard other Asians as "others" whose feelings do not count. In 2004, Minister of Education Nariaki Nakayama made known his desire to remove references to comfort women from history textbooks, and textbooks approved in 2005 contained no mentions of comfort women at all. In 2007, the Japanese government issued a response to questions which had been posed to Prime Minister Abe about his position on the issue, concluding that "No evidence was found that the Japanese army or the military officials seized the women by force." In 2014, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga formed a team to reexamine the background of the report. The review brought to light coordination between Japan and South Korea in the process of composing the Kono Statement and concluded that, at the request of Seoul, Tokyo stipulated coercion was involved in recruiting the women. After the review, Suga and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated that Japan continues to uphold the Kono Statement.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2014, China released documents it said were "ironclad proof" that the comfort women were forced to work as prostitutes against their will, including documents from the Japanese Kwantung Army military police corps archives and documents from the national bank of Japan's puppet regime in Manchuria.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2019, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan asserted officially the view that the expression "sex slaves" contradicts the facts and should not be used, noting that this point had been confirmed with South Korea in a Japan-South Korea agreement.


title: Comfort women

text: In 1951, at the start of negotiations, the South Korean government initially demanded $364 million in compensation for Koreans forced into labor and military service during the Japanese occupation: $200 per survivor, $1,650 per death and $2,000 per injured person. Japan offered to compensate the victims, but South Korea insisted that Japan simply give the South Korean government financial aid instead. In the final agreement reached in the 1965 treaty, Japan provided an $800 million aid and low-interest loan package over 10 years. South Korean government "spent most of the money on economic development, focusing on infrastructure and the promotion of heavy industry".


title: Comfort women

text: Initially, the Japanese government denied any involvement in the comfort women system, until Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered and published documents from the Japanese Self-Defense Agency's library that suggested direct military involvement. In 1994, under public pressure, the Japanese government admitted its complicity and created the public-private Asian Women's Fund (AWF) to compensate former comfort women. The fund was also used to present an official Japanese narrative about the issue. Sixty one Korean, 13 Taiwanese, 211 Filipino, and 79 Dutch former comfort women were provided with a signed apology from the then prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, stating "As Prime Minister of Japan, I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women." Many former Korean comfort women rejected the compensations on principle – although the Asian Women's Fund was set up by the Japanese government, its money came not from the government but from private donations, hence the compensation was not "official". Eventually, 61 former Korean comfort women accepted 5 million yen (approx. $42,000) per person from the AWF along with the signed apology, while 142 others received funds from the government of Korea. The fund was dissolved on March 31, 2007. However, the establishment of the AWF was criticized as a way for the Japanese government to evade state responsibility; the establishment of the fund also prompted protests from various Asian countries.


title: Comfort women

text: Three South Korean women filed suit in Japan in December 1991, around the time of the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, demanding compensation for forced prostitution. In 1992, documents which had been stored since 1958 when they were returned by United States troops and which indicated that the military had played a large role in operating what were euphemistically called "comfort stations" were found in the library of Japan's Self-Defense Agency. The Japanese Government admitted that the Imperial Japanese Army had forced tens of thousands of Korean women to have sex with Japanese soldiers during World War II. On January 14, 1992, Japanese Chief Government Spokesman Koichi Kato issued an official apology saying, "We cannot deny that the former Japanese army played a role" in abducting and detaining the "comfort girls," and "We would like to express our apologies and contrition". Three days later on January 17, 1992, at a dinner given by South Korean President Roh Tae Woo, the Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa told his host: "We Japanese should first and foremost recall the truth of that tragic period when Japanese actions inflicted suffering and sorrow upon your people. We should never forget our feelings of remorse over this. As Prime Minister of Japan, I would like to declare anew my remorse at these deeds and tender my apology to the people of the Republic of Korea." He apologized again the following day in a speech before South Korea's National Assembly. On April 28, 1998, the Japanese court ruled that the Government must compensate the women and awarded them each.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2007, the surviving women wanted an apology from the Japanese government. Shinzō Abe, the prime minister at the time, stated on March 1, 2007, that there was no evidence that the Japanese government had kept sex slaves, even though the Japanese government had already admitted the use of coercion in 1993. On March 27 the Japanese parliament issued an official apology.


title: Comfort women

text: On February 20, 2014, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that the Japanese government may reconsider the study and the apology. However, Prime Minister Abe clarified on March 14, 2014 that he had no intention of renouncing or altering it.


title: Comfort women

text: On December 28, 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye reached a formal agreement to settle the dispute. Abe again expressed his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women and acknowledged that they had undergone immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women. He stated that Japan continued to hold the position that issues relating to property and claims between Japan and the ROK, including the issue of comfort women, had been settled completely and finally by the Japan-ROK Claims Settlement and Economic Cooperation Agreement of 1965 and welcomed the fact that the issue of comfort women is resolved "finally and irreversibly" with this agreement.


title: Comfort women

text: Japan agreed to pay ¥1 billion (₩9.7 billion; $8.3 million) to a fund supporting surviving victims while South Korea agreed to refrain from criticizing Japan regarding the issue and to work to remove a statue memorializing the victims from in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. The announcement came after Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida met his counterpart Yun Byung-se in Seoul, and later Prime Minister Shinzo Abe phoned President Park Geun-hye to repeat an apology already offered by Kishida. The Korean government will administer the fund for the forty-six remaining elderly comfort women and will consider the matter "finally and irreversibly resolved". However, one Korean news organization, Hankyoreh, said that it fails to include the request from the survivals of sexual slavery to state the Japanese government's legal responsibility for the state-level crime of enforcing a system of sexual slavery. The South Korean government did not attempt to collect the viewpoints on the issues from the women most directly affected by it—the survivors themselves. Concerning the deal between two countries, literally, Seoul and Tokyo failed to reach a breakthrough on the comfort women issue during the 11th round of Foreign Ministry director-general level talks on December 15, 2015. Several comfort women protested the agreement as they claim they did not want money, but to see a sincere acknowledgement of the legal responsibility by the Japanese government. The co-representative of a support group of the surviving women expressed that the settlement with Japan does not reflect the will of the comfort women, and they vowed to seek its invalidation by reviewing legal options.


title: Comfort women

text: On February 16, 2016, the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Seventh and Eighth Periodic Reports, was held, with Shinsuke Sugiyama, Deputy Minister for Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan), reiterating the official and final agreement between Japan and South Korea to pay ¥1 billion. Sugiyama also restated the Japanese Government apology of that agreement: "The issue of comfort women, with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women, and the Government of Japan is painfully aware of responsibilities."


title: Comfort women

text: In August 2016, twelve comfort women filed suit against the government of South Korea, declaring that the government had nullified the victims' individual rights to claim damages from Japan by signing an agreement not to demand further legal responsibility without consulting with the victims themselves. The suit claimed the 2015 deal violated a 2011 Constitutional Court ruling that the South Korean government must "offer its cooperation and protection so that citizens whose human dignity and values have been violated through illegal actions perpetrated by Japan can invoke their rights to demand damages from Japan."<ref name="http://english.hani.co.kr- 17 June 2018"></ref>


title: Comfort women

text: In January 2018, South Korea's president Moon Jae-in called the 2015 agreement "undeniable" and said that it "finally and irreversibly" was an official agreement between the two countries; however, when referring to aspects of the agreement he found flawed, he said: "A knot wrongly tied should be untied." These remarks came a day after the government announced it would not seek to renew the 2015 agreement, but that it wanted Japan to do more to settle the issue. Moon said: "A real settlement would come if the victims can forgive, after Japan makes a sincere apology and takes other actions".


title: Comfort women

text: In March 2018, the Japanese government argued that the 2015 Japan-South Korea agreement confirmed that this issue was finally and irreversibly resolved and lodged a strong protest to South Korea through diplomatic channels, stating that "such a statement goes against the agreement and is therefore completely unacceptable and extremely regrettable".


title: Comfort women

text: On June 15, 2018, The 20th civil division of Seoul Central District Court dismissed the comfort women's suit seeking damages against the South Korean government for signing the 2015 agreement with Japan. The court announced that the intergovernmental comfort women agreement "certainly lacked transparency or was deficient in recognizing 'legal responsibility' and on the nature of the one billion yen provided by the Japanese government". However, "an examination of the process and content leading up to the agreement cannot be seen as discharging the plaintiffs' right to claim damages." An attorney for the survivors said they would be appealing the decision on the basis that it recognizes the lawfulness of the 2015 Japan-South Korean agreement.


title: Comfort women

text: On January 8, 2021, Seoul Central District Court ordered the government of Japan to pay reparations of 100 million won ($91,300) each to the families of the twelve women.


title: Comfort women

text: On the court case, referring to the principle of Sovereign immunity guaranteed by International law, the Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said that "a sovereign state should not be put under the jurisdiction of foreign courts", claiming that the lawsuit should be rejected. And Suga stressed that the issue is already settled completely and finally, through ".


title: Comfort women

text: On the same day, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi also spoke about the lawsuit of a claim for damages against Japanese government consistently in Extraordinary Press Conference from Brazil.


title: Comfort women

text: On June 25, 2021, the Japanese government announced that Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga stands by statements made by past administrations apologizing for Japan's aggression in World War II and admitting the military had a role in coercing comfort women to work in brothels.


title: Comfort women

text: The novel "My War Crime", written by Seiji Yoshida in 1983, which played a major role in publicizing the issue of comfort women, was later found to be mere fiction, causing the "Asahi Shimbun" newspaper to publish several retractions and apologies to its readers, as recently as 2014.


title: Comfort women

text: A 2001 comic book, "Neo Gomanism Manifesto Special – On Taiwan" by Japanese author Yoshinori Kobayashi, depicts kimono-clad women lining up to sign up for duty before a Japanese soldier. Kobayashi's book contains an interview with Taiwanese industrialist Shi Wen-long, who stated that no women were forced to serve and that the women worked in more hygienic conditions compared to regular prostitutes because the use of condoms was mandatory.


title: Comfort women

text: In early 2001, in a controversy involving national public broadcaster NHK, what was supposed to be coverage of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery was heavily edited to reflect revisionist views. In 2014, the new president of NHK compared the wartime Japanese comfort women program to Asian brothels frequented by American troops, which western historians countered by pointing out the difference between the Japanese comfort stations, which forced women to have sex with Japanese troops, and Asian brothels, where women chose to be prostitutes for American troops.


title: Comfort women

text: In publications around 2007, Japanese historian and Nihon University professor Ikuhiko Hata estimates the number of comfort women to have been more likely between 10,000 and 20,000. Hata claims that "none of the comfort women were forcibly recruited". Historian Chunghee Sarah Soh noted that Hata's initial estimate was at approximately 90,000, but he reduced that figure to 20,000 for political reasons. He has been criticized by other Japanese scholars for minimizing the hardship of comfort women.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2012, the former mayor of Osaka and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, Tōru Hashimoto initially maintained that "there is no evidence that people called comfort women were taken away by violence or threat by the [Japanese] military". He later modified his position, asserting that they became comfort women "against their will by any circumstances around them", still justifying their role during World War II as "necessary", so that soldiers could "have a rest".


title: Comfort women

text: In 2014, Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone chaired a commission established to consider "concrete measures to restore Japan's honor with regard to the comfort women issue", despite his own father Yasuhiro Nakasone, having organized a "comfort station" in 1942 when he was a lieutenant paymaster in Japan's Imperial Navy.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2014, the Japanese Foreign Ministry attempted to pressure McGraw Hill into erasing several paragraphs on comfort women from one of their textbooks. The attempt was unsuccessful, and American academics criticized Japanese attempts to revise the history of comfort women.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2018, the "Japan Times" changed its description of the terms "comfort woman" and "forced labourer" causing a controversy among staff and readers.


title: Comfort women

text: On August 18, 2018, United Nations rights experts and UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed that Japan should do more for sufferers of wartime sexual slavery. Japan responded by stating it has already made numerous apologies and offered compensation to the victims.


title: Comfort women

text: Since information disclosed by the Asian Women's Fund can be attributed to parts of a speech delivered in 1965 by Japanese Diet Member Arafune Seijuro, some of the information mentioned by the fund remains controversial.


title: Comfort women

text: The Japanese government, and the mayor of Osaka, demanded the removal of comfort women monuments located in other countries, blatantly denying that women were coerced into sexual slavery during World War 2. They have demanded the removal of comfort women statues in Palisades Park, New Jersey, United States; San Francisco, California, United States; and Berlin, Germany, with each demand rejected by the relevant authorities.


title: Comfort women

text: In August 2014, the "Asahi Shimbun", Japan's second largest newspaper in circulation, retracted 16 articles published between 1982 and 1997. The articles were concerned with former imperial army officer Seiji Yoshida, who claimed he had forcibly taken Korean women to wartime Japanese military brothels from the Jeju Island region in South Korea. Following the retraction of the articles, the newspaper also refused to publish an op-ed on the matter by Japanese journalist Akira Ikegami. The public response and criticism that ensued pushed the newspaper to nominate a third-party investigative committee headed by seven leading scholars, journalists and legal experts. The committee report dealt with the circumstances leading to the publication of Yoshida's false testimony and to the effect these publications had on Japan's image abroad and diplomatic relations with various countries. It found that the Asahi was negligent in publishing Yoshida's testimony, but that the reports on the testimony had "limited" effect on foreign media outlets and reports. On the other hand, the report found that Japanese officials' comments on the issue had a far more detrimental effect on Japan's image and its diplomatic relations.


title: Comfort women

text: In 2004, 13 former comfort women filed a complaint against the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery and the House of Sharing with the Seoul Western District Court to prevent these two organizations from profiting and exploiting the victims' past experiences to collect donations. The victims accused Shin Hye-Soo, head of the Korean Council at the time, and Song Hyun-Seob, Head of the House of Sharing, of using the women's past experiences in videos and leaflets without their permission to solicit donations and then keeping the money instead of using it to help the victims. The complaint further stated that a significant number of victims did not receive compensation through the citizen-funded Asian Women's Fund established in 1995 by Japan due to the opposition from the organizations in 1998. In addition, they accused the institutions of recruiting six former comfort women survivors from China and paying them to get them to partake in weekly rallies. The complaint was dismissed by the court in May 2005.


title: Comfort women

text: Again, in May 2020, Lee Yong-Soo, a comfort woman survivor and longtime activist for the victims, held a press conference and accused the Korean Council and its former head, Yoon Mee-hyang, of exploiting her and other survivors, politically and financially for decades, to obtain government funds and public donations through the protests while spending little money aiding them.


title: Comfort women

text: Consequently, a civic group filed a complaint against Yoon Mee-hyang, a lawmaker-elect and former head of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. After an investigation, the Seoul Western District Prosecutors' Office indicted Yoon, on eight charges including fraud, embezzlement and breach of trust.


title: Comfort women

text: Among the charges, Yoon was indicted for is a count of quasi-fraud against Gil Won-ok, a 92-year-old survivor. The prosecution said Gil suffers from dementia and that Yoon had exploited her reduced physical and mental capacities and pressed her to donate a total of 79.2 million won ($67,102) to the Korean Council between November 2017 and January 2020.


title: Comfort women

text: Additionally, she was accused of fraud and embezzlement of almost half a million dollars from governmental organizations and private donors, which were used to buy properties and even pay tuition for her daughter's education at the University of California.


title: Comfort women

text: In a forensic audit of the comfort women's shelter controlled by Yoon's group, it was found that barely 2.3% of its massive $7.5 million budget raised since 2015 was actually spent on supporting the living needs of surviving comfort women, many of whom live in cramped quarters, with substandard care, with few luxuries.


title: Comfort women

text: In September 2020, the Democratic Party (DP) suspended Yoon's party membership due to the charges that she was facing.


title: Comfort women

text: The Comfort Women survivors have asked the Korean government multiple times to bring their case in front of the International Court of Justice, but South Korea has yet to respond.


title: Comfort women

text: The cause has long been supported beyond the victim nations, and associations like Amnesty International are campaigning in countries where governments have yet to support the cause, like in Australia, or New Zealand.


title: Comfort women

text: Support in the United States continues to grow, particularly after the passage of United States House of Representatives House Resolution 121 on July 30, 2007. The resolution expresses that the government of Japan should formally redress the situation by acknowledging, apologizing and accepting historical responsibility for the use of comfort women by its armed forces; have the Prime Minister of Japan give a public apology; and educate their people using internationally accepted historical facts about the crime while refuting any claims that deny the crime. In July 2012, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a strong advocate of the cause, denounced the use of the euphemism 'comfort women' for what should be referred to as 'enforced sex slaves'. The Obama Administration also addressed the need for Japan to do more to address the issue. In addition to calling attention to the issue, the American memorial statues erected in New Jersey in 2010 and California in 2013 show support for what has become an international cause.