A Sankei Shimbun feature presents testimony from a 95-year-old former military doctor regarding wartime comfort stations.
He states that they were run by civilian operators and that military involvement was limited to periodic medical inspections to prevent disease.
The account offers firsthand perspectives for reconsidering the historical debate.

The military’s involvement was limited to conducting regular medical examinations of comfort women by military doctors in order to prevent the spread of venereal disease.
2018-01-29
The following continues from the previous chapter.
The Operators Were Civilian Businesses
Shunsuke Kōchi (95) is from the 20th graduating class of the school.
After graduation, in 1939, he advanced to the Pyongyang Medical College.
When Kōchi entered, of the 70 students in each class, 25 were Korean and 45 were Japanese.
The faculty was said to be of a high level, with surgery affiliated with the University of Tokyo and internal medicine and pediatrics with Kyushu University.
Kōchi graduated in the autumn of 1942 and passed the army’s short-term active-duty military doctor examination.
After a brief period of training, in January of the following year he was dispatched as a military doctor to the 39th Army Division near Hankou in central China (now part of Wuhan).
“As the war intensified, there was also a shortage of military doctors. We were trained quickly and sent straight to the front lines. If we died in battle, we were simply replaced—we were expendable military doctors.”
Kōchi, appointed a second lieutenant and still only 20 years old, was assigned to the 39th Field Artillery Regiment of the division.
Together with three other military doctors, he provided health care for soldiers and treated the wounded on the front lines.
In March 1944 he was promoted to first lieutenant and transferred to an infantry regiment as the replacement for a military doctor who had been killed in action.
According to Kōchi, “comfort stations” were established for each unit.
They were not created by the military.
“Older Japanese men who resembled procurers ran them. There were Japanese, Korean, and Chinese comfort women, but it was the operators who brought them. Civilian businesses ran them as commercial enterprises. The military’s involvement was limited to having military doctors conduct regular medical examinations of the comfort women to prevent the spread of venereal disease.”
When he first visited for an examination, Kōchi remembered being cheerfully called out to by Korean comfort women.
“Come play! It’s free for you!”
The comfort women, in their mid-twenties, were older than Kōchi and teased him, leaving him somewhat unsettled.
The young Kōchi did not even know how to conduct gynecological examinations.
He pleaded with a senior military doctor, who had also graduated from Pyongyang Medical College, to guide him only the first time, and he worked desperately to learn the procedures.
Examinations were conducted once a week.
If illness was detected, depending on the severity, operations could be ordered suspended.
To be continued.