A damaging personal experience with sexual assault has led one young Japanese woman to examine her country's past.
The woman, who uses the pseudonym Kaori Miyake, now draws on her own hurt together with what she has learned about the experiences of so-called comfort women — women and girls forced to provide sex for Japanese troops before and during World War II — in the hope of driving change.
Miyake still suffers after the horror of being repeatedly sexually assaulted by a male teacher when she was a teenager. Now a 22-year-old college student, she was shocked when she read testimonials in a class at her private Tokyo school from former comfort women from the Korean Peninsula, who were forced into Japanese wartime military brothels. The stories drove her to learn more, so she decided to join a five-day Japanese university student tour earlier this year to Seoul to educate herself on the comfort women issue from the victims' perspective.