Annotation source: Seoul Metropolitan Archive Annotation and image link: https://archives.seoul.go.kr/item/10 Annotation Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a U.S. wartime intelligence agency created during WWII, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The U.S. psychological warfare agencies, including OSS, seems to have considered the “comfort women” issue useful for their operations. There were two ways the “comfort women” could be useful in psychological warfare against Japan. First, it provided an element of conflict within the Japanese military. The fact that the Japanese military tried to use “comfort women” to boost the morale of soldiers means that the usage of, and access to, the comfort stations were potentially a source for internal conflicts. Second, the “comfort women” system could provoke outrage among the local population. Informing the local residents that a large number of women were forcibly taken and exploited for the “comfort” of the Japanese army could trigger anti-Japanese sentiment. In other words, the comfort station system could be a useful tool for psychological warfare that could generate a rift within the armed forces of the Japanese empire and externally in the regions it occupied. OSS, based in Kunming at the time, carried out interrogations of POWs in order to gather information for psychological warfare. This memorandum includes information from Korean POWs interned in the camp in Kunming. It says that 24 out of 25 Korean POWs were female and states that all of them had become “‘comfort girls,’ apparently under compulsion and misrepresentation.” Itt reports, 15 of them “were recruited through advertisements in Korean newspapers offering employment for girls in Japanese factories in Singapore.” The report also states that “the contingent with which they were sent southward included at least 300 girls who were similarly misled.” Young-shim Park (spelled as Pak Yông-sim on p.2), whose name is found in the list of Korean POWs, testified at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery convened in Tokyo in December 2000 that it was indeed herself shown in the well-known photograph of the pregnant “comfort woman,” taken in Songshan, China[see US-32]. The name of another survivor, Kyung-ae Yoon (spelled as Yun Kyông-I on p. 2), is found in this document. Yoon was alive in North Korea as of 2003 and testified that she was also a “comfort woman” in Songshan. In total, 24 “comfort women,” including Park and Yoon, had been taken to Songshan, China, a strategic point near the border between China and Burma (today’s Myanmar). In June 1944, the U.S.-China Allied Forces started attacks on Songshan and captured the area on September 7 of the same year. In the process, the Japanese troops were annihilated and 14 “comfort women” were killed by bombing. Only 10 women survived, either by escaping from the caves that the Japanese troops used as strongholds, or by being captured on site by the Allied Forces. Park was one of the women who escaped from the Japanese military base and was found by Chinese troops. Those women, including Park, were interned in the POW camp in Kunming for about seven months and were sent to Korea via Chongqing, China. Contributors [Organization] Seoul National University, Chin-sung Chung Research Team, 2015~ [Organization] Seoul National University, Chin-sung Chung Research Team, 2015~ [Organization] City of Seoul, Women and Family Policy Affairs Office 2011~ [Organization] National Archives and Records Administration 1934~ #OSS #Songshan#Kunming #China #Burma #Young-shim_Park #Pak_Yông-sim #Kyung-ae_Yoon Download file: https://international.ucla.edu/media/files/US-23-OSS-Attached-memorandum---Korean-and-Japanese-prisoners-of-war-in-Kunming-yw-cy4.pdf