Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49 (1944)

Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49 is a 1944 report produced by the Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Unit attached to the U.S. Army forces in CBI (China-Burma-India) Theatre. It documents interrogations of 20 Korean comfort women and two Japanese “house masters” detained by the U.S. military in Myitkyina, Burma. The report was originally declassified in 1973 and was part of the documents Japanese government gathered in the early 1990s prior to releasing Kono Statement (1993).

Comfort women deniers like Tony Marano and Michael Yon selectively quote the report to portray it as an evidence that comfort women were willing prostitutes who made a lot of money providing their service to Japanese soldiers. For example, they quote the sentence “a ‘comfort girl’ is nothing more than a prostitute or ‘professional camp follower’ attached to the Japanese military for the benefit of the soldiers” while neglecting that the report also states that the women were recruited under the false premise that they would “work connected with visiting the wounded in hospitals, rolling bandages, and generally making the soldiers happy.” For more details, read “Does 1944 U.S. military report prove that ‘comfort women’ were ‘just prostitutes’?