And I do want to clarify that my comparisons to fictional events is merely because they spurred my thoughts on the matter. I in no way want to trivialize or understate the horrors people went through under the occupation of Korea.

Possibly the most unfiltered portrayal we have from the time period is a racist song parody written by Japanese men mocking the comfort women. With the obvious caveat that I am translating it to demonstrate the widespread feelings of Japanese at the time and not to agree with the contents, here is the original.

雨のショポショポ降るぱん（晩）に カラス（ガラス）のまと（窓）からのそ（覗）いてる まてつ（満鉄）のきぽたん（金ボタン）のぱか（馬鹿）やろう

さわるはこちせん（五十銭）見るはたた（只） 三円こちせん（五十銭）くれたなら かしわ（鶏）の鳴くまで 付き合うわ

あか（登楼）るの帰るの とうしゅる（どうする）の 早く精神ち（決）めなしゃい ち（決）めたらけた（下駄）もて あか（登楼）んなしゃい

お客さんこのころ（頃）紙高い ちょうぱ（帳場）の手前もあるてしょう（でしょう） こちせんしゅうき（五十銭祝儀）をはちみ（弾み）なさい

そしたら私はた（抱）いて寝て ふたち（二つ）もみっち（三つ）もおまけして かしわ（鶏）の鳴くまで ぽぽしゅる（ぼぼする）わ

ああたま（騙）されたたま（騙）された こちせん（五十銭）金貨と思うたに ピールピン（ビール瓶）の栓かよ たま（騙）された

(please see reply for corrected translation)

Some notes on this translation: The entire song is written in a crude dialect, mocking Korean pronunciation. "Mantetsu" is the Manchurian Railroad Company, Japan's major colonial corporation. Fifty sen is less than a dollar. Japanese racists thought the way non-native speaker Koreans pronounced “fifty sen” was extremely funny, and it was used as a shibboleth to identify and kill Koreans during the 1923 Kanto massacre.

We don't have contemporary reactions from Koreans for two reasons: Japanese controlled the printing presses especially after the 1930s, and the Japanese propaganda was that impoverished fathers were selling their daughters into prostitution, which at the time was considered the lowest of professions and not something a Korean nationalist idealist would want to write about.

But we have this Japanese parody, called the "Mantetsu Song" (満鉄小唄), which not only demonstrates the persuasiveness of the propaganda, but also eagerly dehumanizes the supposed singer and degrades her with markers of ethnic difference. It sort of reads like a minstrel song, except that instead of imagining Koreans as happy and nostalgic for old times, it emphasizes the suffering and abuse of comfort women in order to produce joy in the Japanese audience. It's easy to see that comfort women were seen as an inferior species of being, freely available for the Japanese men to abuse. If you read debates about the comfort women system you will see all manner of primary sources that Japanese created at the time to whitewash what they were doing, but I have never seen this song mentioned.

While this dehumanization seems to have been widespread and dominant even after World War II, it was not all-pervasive. The 1959 Japanese film The Human Condition (人間の條件), made just 11 years after Japan's surrender, portrays comfort women as victims of the capitalist and colonialist systems, robbed of their freedom but trying to make the most of their situation.

Unfortunately, though, in both Japan and Korea, the postwar consensus view was that comfort women did not deserve to be thought about or remembered; that their dignity had been taken away from them by their fathers, basically. Again, this narrative was perpetrating the wartime propaganda, and to a large extent Confucian dogmas of both countries. It was only in the 1980s that Koreans started to see comfort women as victims of Japanese rape, rather than as selling themselves out to the Japanese.