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Years After “Victory Over Japan” (V-J) Day, Still No Apology For Japanese
Comfort Women
Remedios Tecson, 85,
a Filipino “comfort woman” during World War II, displays a placard as she joins
a rally outside the Japanese Embassy in Manila on Aug. 14. (Bullit Marquez / AP)
By Janice G. Raymond* –
August 31, 2015
The history of the so-called
comfort women constitutes one of the most egregious war crimes of the 20th
century, but it has never been officially recognized as such. On Victory Over
Japan (V-J) Day, September 2, marking the 70th anniversary of Japan’s formal
surrender in World War II, countries are planning events to honor the service
and sacrifice of those who fought. No plans are underway, however, to
commemorate the hundreds of thousands of women conscripted into military sexual
slavery who were also sacrificed in this war.
In this “comfort system” of
state-sponsored prostitution, Japan subjugated between 100,000 and 200,000
women, most of whom are now deceased. The methods of procuring women ranged
from abduction to deception and spanned Japan’s wartime empire in the
Asia-Pacific. Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka
calls this crime “the largest and most elaborate system of trafficking in women
in the history of mankind, and one of the most brutal.”1 [See footnotes at the end of the
article.]
Most women procured for
military sexual slavery came from the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Korea and
China. In the Philippines, Japanese soldiers pressed an estimated 1,000 women
into sexual servitude during the war, seizing women and girls from homes and
streets and then raping and confining them.
In other countries, the
Japanese military used recruiters to stock the “comfort stations.” Many women
were deceived about the real nature of their position, being told they owed
debts for payments to parents or relatives. On a normal day, women serviced 10
men, but the number would increase to 30 or 40 a day before and after battles.
In Indonesia, 20,000
Indonesian women and a small number of Dutch women were victims of sexual
servitude. Numerous brothels were built to accommodate the 220,000 Japanese
military personnel stationed there. After the war, Dutch authorities organized
a war crimes tribunal but prosecuted only those Japanese officers responsible
for violating white Dutch women.
More than 100,000 of the
women taken into sexual servitude were Korean. After 50 years of anonymity,
privation and an experience that produced shame and fear of revelation, the
survivors told their stories. Yi Yongny? was one of them. “The Japanese
occupied our country and abused us. … But now they are making feeble excuses
about the recruitment of the comfort women, and they say that we volunteered.”2
When the war ended, most of
the comfort women were abandoned. Many stationed close to the battlefields died
as a result of warfare. Those who survived lived with lifelong illnesses and
injuries. The Allied forces rescued some, but others were drafted again into
sexual slavery when the system was replicated by the U.S. military, which
occupied Japan after the war.
Decades after World War II,
researchers found documents buried in the national archives of Japan, the U.S.
and Australia. These records proved that Japanese authorities institutionalized
the comfort system during and after the war.
It took an Asian feminist
movement, inspired by the brave public testimonies of survivors, to make the
victims’ plight visible to the world. Matsui Yayori, a Japanese journalist at the time, wrote
the first article about the comfort women in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun,
marking the first time any major newspaper had addressed the issue.
The Korean women’s movement
has led international efforts to pressure Japan into accepting legal
responsibility for their war crimes against women and for paying compensation
to the survivors.
The terms “comfort women”
and “comfort stations” are euphemisms used by the military authorities to mask
Japan’s brutal system of prostitution and make it sound like the women were
performing a voluntary service. In 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
announced there was no evidence the Imperial Japanese Army had forced Asian
women into military brothels during World War II. A paid Washington Post advertisement that followed claimed the
women were “embedded with the Japanese army ... working under a system of
licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time.”
In April 2015, Abe visited
Washington and addressed the U.S. Congress. Asked about making an official
apology for Japan’s system of sexual slavery during the war, he evaded a direct
admission of guilt. “I am deeply pained to think about the comfort women who
experienced immeasurable pain and suffering due to human trafficking,” Abe said. He
made no reference to Japan’s responsibility for this pain and suffering.
Then in August of this year,
Abe offered only an indirect statement avoiding official culpability for these
crimes against women. He added, “We must not let our children, grandchildren
and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.”
The evidence for World War II military sexual slavery points not to Japan alone. U.S. re-enactment of the comfort system in postwar Japan is less well known but not less abusive. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the Japanese government, fearful that “sex-starved” U.S. occupation troops would behave as Japanese forces did abroad, recruited thousands into officially organized brothels.
Many of these women were war
orphans and widows who were starving and homeless. Some were high school
students who had been compelled to work in the munitions factories and had lost
their jobs and families. Some were raped by U.S. soldiers at the end of the
war. Still others were returning from wartime comfort stations in the
Asia-Pacific.
Both the Japanese and
American occupation authorities treated prostitution as a necessary amenity for
the “recreation of the warriors.” From the beginning, U.S. authorities not only
tolerated military prostitution but also systematized it. They colluded with
Japanese officials to inspect women for venereal disease, monitor the red-light
districts and brothels and set up prophylactic stations. U.S. military police
were commanded to keep order among the lines of soldiers waiting their turn to
enter the brothels and initially could hardly contain the mobs of men who lined
up to be sexually gratified. Each woman had to service from 15 to 60 buyers a day.
It has been estimated that
at the peak of the legal postwar system, 70,000 women were used by 350,000
occupation troops, most of whom were from the U.S. but also included 40,000
from Britain and Australia.
The Tokyo War Crimes
Tribunal, held to prosecute Japanese war crimes, took place from 1946 to 1949.
U.S. authorities who held key positions at the tribunal were well aware of
Japan’s crimes against the comfort women but chose not to prosecute. It is
likely that U.S. officials did not want their own “comfort women” system
exposed. That it was mostly Asian women who were violated by both the Japanese
and the Americans added to the U.S.’s lack of accountability.
The history of the comfort
women system is timely because it reverberates with lessons about
state-sponsored prostitution today. In a non-military context, governments are
as persuasive in promoting prostitution as in a military context. Countries
that have legalized or decriminalized systems of prostitution become
prostitution nations in which women are encouraged to prostitute because
it is legal. More men are given legal permission to buy women because
prostitution is rebranded as a “sexual service” and pimps are transformed into
legitimate business agents. State-sponsored prostitution regimes weave the
sturdy fabric of sexual exploitation in peace as well as in war.
In 1952, historian Yanaihara Tadao
stated that the consequences of America’s postwar sexual exploitation of women
corrupted Japanese society both morally and economically, not only when the
brothels were set up for the Allied occupation troops but also when Japan became
the rest and relaxation center for U.S. and Australian forces during the Korean
War. High taxes levied on the Japanese sex industry played a key role in
raising public money for the rebuilding of Japan and constructing the economic
infrastructure of Japanese capitalism after the war—the same infrastructure
that governments are replicating through legally sanctioned prostitution of
women in state-sponsored regimes such as the Netherlands, where prostitution
accounts for 5 percent of the country’s GDP.
The Japanese government
whitewashed its conscription of women into military prostitution by alleging
that they were “embedded” within a system of voluntary legal prostitution,
which masked the exploitation and violence. The Netherlands, Germany, Australia
and New Zealand use the same rationale and ignore the harmful consequences of
their legal regimes of prostitution.
We honor the comfort women
by opposing the comfort systems of today.
*Janice G.
Raymond is professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
former co-director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the
author of many books and articles. She has published pieces in The Guardian,
The Christian Science Monitor and many e-journals. Her most recent book is “Not
a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex
Trade.”
Footnotes:
1. Yuki Tanaka, “Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation” (London: Routledge, 2002), 167. I am indebted to Tanaka’s meticulous and groundbreaking work.