Hello, hello. Welcome to Shoeiha. Where this week it is my fault. Yeah, I didn't expect this to be about this. No. I did know, which makes it worse. Why have I done this to us? I don't know, but I have. But it's a bit important thing.

Yeah, it's absolutely. That has just gone unspoken about. It's going to ruin your day and I can only apologize. I'm sorry.

If you looked at the title and thought it might just be like an episode about gaysha's. That's not what it is. It's sex-lavery. Yeah.

I'm not saying gaysha's, I don't know enough about them. No idea. That's what I thought it was going to be. It's not that. No.

In 1943, Tericita Bermude's dayo had just turned 12. Her and her family lived in the Philippines, which as an Asian ally of the US was attacked by Japanese forces shortly after Pearl Harbor.

When war broke out, a lot of people fled to the mountains. But after a few years, they decided to emerge, move back to their villages and Tericita's family were among those people.

You would be in a bad spot if you are an Asian ally after Pearl Harbor. It's probably the worst place to be, apart from physically in Japan, which is about to happen.

On their way back to their village, Tericita's family was stopped by Japanese soldiers. And one of these soldiers commented that Tericita was beautiful. And before she knew it, she was being led to an armed vehicle.

Trimbling, she was driven away from her family to a vast mansion in a city nearby. There, she was thrown into a small, windowless room, lit by a single bear bulb.

Then, before her 13th birthday, Tericita's nightmare really began.

Japanese soldiers came in two at a time and sexually assaulted her. Some of violent, many were cruel.

Man after man came into abuse Tericita, until she lost consciousness. She was locked in that room for a week. And though she was given food, she was unable to eat.

By 1940, Kim Haksun was 15 and was taken by family from her native career to Beijing to look for work.

Shortly after arriving, the family were detained by, you guessed it, Japanese soldiers.

She was taken by truck to a red brick house next to a military base. There, Kim Haksun was raped on her first night.

There were five Korean girls held there, at least three were teenagers. The room was guarded, the soldiers came in at will.

If Haksun resisted, she was kicked and flogged. On days that soldiers returned from expeditions, each girl was visited by as many as 10 to 15 men in one night.

Years later, Kim Haksun told South Korean radio, quit. They took us as if we were some kind of object and used us however they wanted.

When we broke down with problems like diseases, they abandoned us like objects or killed us. Kim Haksun was held for three months before she managed to escape.

Those two stories that you just heard are unimaginably tragic. Each one is a life-altering, traumatic ordeal.

But they're not the only women with stories like these, and these stories aren't just an isolated random symptom of war.

They're not just abuses of power by a few rogue soldiers either. This was part of a wise-scale systemic abuse, one of history's largest examples of state-sponsored sex slavery.

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