Japan's Comfort Women (19 page)

According to Pramoeda Ananta Tur, a well-known dissident Indonesian writer who collected many testimonies, including the two previously mentioned cases, many of the Javanese girls who became the victims of Japanese military prostitution were daughters of prominent local chiefs, such as subdistrict heads, village heads, policemen, and school headmasters. The military government made it known that the girls would be offered an opportunity to study in Japan, and this information was passed on to local public servants through provincial Japanese Residents (i.e. governors). Thus, many of the public servants who collaborated with the Japanese were placed in a difficult situation of having to show loyalty to Japan by sending their own daughters first.61 It is not known how many Indonesian girls were “recruited” in this way, nor exactly where they were sent.

Dough Davey, a member of the Australian 9th Regiment, which acted as the British-Borneo Civil Affairs Unit, was in Borneo in August 1945. There he found some Javanese women who had been transported to Borneo by the Japanese.

Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
81

They were living in the ruins of the Japanese comfort station at Beaufort (presently Weston) on the Padas River in the northwest. The Australian forces took them to a small island off the Borneo coast for medical treatment and rehabilita-tion with the intention of sending them back to Indonesia. But the women were afraid of going home because of the shame associated with their experience. One committed suicide.62 It is possible that these women were also deceived by the Japanese in the same way. The Australian troops who landed at Kupan in the southwest of Timoa Island shortly after Japan surrendered also found 46 Javanese women who had been brought there as comfort women. The Japanese tried to camouflage this by making them wear Red Cross armbands.63 The Australian forces apparently had no interest in finding out which Japanese were responsible for crimes against these Indonesian women. They took several photos of the women but never attempted to investigate the matter as a serious war crime.

These testimonies suggest that a large number of Indonesian women and girls were taken out of Java and put into comfort stations in various places in Southeast Asia, stretching from Thailand to New Guinea, from North Borneo to Timor.64 Such extensive transportation of comfort women must have required a plan that was designed and implemented at a high level, by such Japanese military bodies as the Headquarters of Southern Army, and, most likely, in
Plate 3.5
Forty-six Javanese comfort women found by Australian troops in the southwest of Timoa Island shortly after Japan surrendered in August 1945. They were forced to wear Red Cross armbands by the Japanese in order to cover up the real nature of their work.

Source
: Australian War Memorial, transparency number 120082

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Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
Plate 3.6
One of the Javanese comfort women found in the southwest of Timoa Island, delighted to be freed from sexual slavery enforced by the Japanese soldiers.

Source
: Australian War Memorial, transparency number 120083

collaboration with the 16th Army which controlled all of Java. Yet, due to a lack of interest by the Dutch, Australian, and other Allied nations’ military authorities, the unprecedented scale of sexual abuse committed by the Japanese on Indonesian women was consigned to oblivion.

Since 1993, in response to the Indonesian government’s request, more than 20,000 Indonesian women have come forward, claiming that they were victims of sexual violence committed by the Japanese troops stationed in various places in the Dutch East Indies during the war.65 Not all were comfort women; many seem to have been victims of rape. Some of these women may have been “semi-professionals,” working at comfort stations or acting as concubines to Japanese officers.66 At the peak time, 220,000 Japanese soldiers and military employees were stationed throughout the Dutch East Indies. Numerous comfort stations were operated to cater for these men. From the available information examined in this chapter, there is no doubt that a large number of Indonesians and Eurasians were forcibly pressed into prostitution at these comfort stations and ill-treated by the Japanese.

The Dutch Army sexually exploited large numbers of Indonesian women during its colonial period prior to the Pacific War. Its men stationed in the Dutch East Indies suffered high rates of VD as a result.67 It followed that, when the Japanese invaded, the sexual abuse of the Indonesian and Indo-Dutch women by the Japanese was probably not viewed as a serious crime against humanity. It
Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
83

is in this climate, and because of previously accepted sexual “norms,” that we see racial and gender factors closely intertwined. Due to racial discrimination against the Indonesian and Indo-Dutch women and sexual discrimination against women in general, the Dutch military authorities were unable to see the serious criminal nature of the comfort women issue except in so far as it affected Dutch women and girls. The same can be said about postwar attitudes of other Allied forces.

They all failed to pursue legal prosecution against – or even to seriously investigate – the Japanese who committed crimes against numerous Asian women, despite the fact they had accumulated ample evidence. In the following chapter, this issue will be further examined by analyzing the relevant official military documents of the Allied forces, in particular those of the United States.

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Why did US forces ignore the issue?

4

Why did the US forces

ignore the comfort women

issue?

US military indifference towards comfort women
Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, and the occupation of Japan led by the US forces commenced less than two weeks later. The purpose of the occupation was “democratization” of Japan’s entire political, economic, and social system.

As one of the important exercises in this process, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (usually known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) was convened to prosecute Japanese war leaders who had instigated the war against the Allied nations and bore final responsibility for the various war crimes committed by their own forces. The tribunal, which lasted two and a half years, was presented with massive evidence of such war crimes as rape, murder, and ill-treatment committed by the Japanese against Allied soldiers and non-combatants. Yet the issue of comfort women – a crime against humanity on an unprecedented scale – was never dealt with by this trial.

Does this mean that the US authorities were utterly unaware of this crime?

On the contrary, well before the end of World War II, the US armed forces became aware of the comfort women system organized by the Japanese Imperial forces.

One piece of evidence is the existence of a report entitled
Amenities in the
Japanese Armed Forces
, prepared in February 1945 by the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service (ATIS), which was revised and expanded for publication in November of the same year.1 The report explains in detail how Japanese military “brothels” were managed and operated. It details the regulations which covered the “brothels” that were available for Japanese officers and soldiers in various places in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. The report is based on information obtained from captured materials, with information on “brothels”

listed in Section II under the heading of “Amusements.” Other ATIS documents, such as interrogation reports of Japanese POWs, also refer to the fact that Koreans, Chinese and Indonesians were used as comfort women at these military brothels.2

Only a few interrogation reports on comfort women have so far been found at the US National Archives. One of these is
Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation
Report, No. 49
prepared by the Psychological Warfare Team attached to US Army
Why did US forces ignore the issue?

85

forces in India–Burma theater.3 The POWs interrogated in this case were 20

Korean women “employed” by a Japanese couple, who had been serving the 114th Infantry Regiment of the Japanese Imperial forces stationed in Burma.

The women were captured by the US forces in August 1944.

Another document is
Psychological Warfare: Interrogation Bulletin
No. 2
published by the South East Asia Translation and Interrogation Centre.4 This bulletin contains a section entitled “A Japanese Army Brothel in the Forward Area,”

which is also a summary of the interrogation conducted with the same Korean comfort women captured in Burma.

Why did a Psychological Warfare Team interrogate these comfort women?

US Psychological Warfare Teams were formed for the purpose of gathering as much information as possible concerning the psychological conditions of Japanese soldiers in the battlefield. A particular function was to conduct thorough interrogations of Japanese POWs, to find out how they perceived the ongoing war and under what conditions they would decide to surrender. Such information was forwarded to the Foreign Morale Analysis Division in the Office of War Information, to be analyzed by such prominent psychologists and anthropologists as Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, and John Embree. These specialist opinions were taken into account in producing various propaganda leaflets designed to persuade Japanese soldiers and civilians to surrender rather than fight to the death. Tens of thousands of these leaflets were printed and scattered from the air throughout the Pacific region, in particular during the fiercest battle of World War II in the Okinawa Islands.

It is presumed, therefore, that the interrogation of comfort women was not regarded as an important task for the US Psychological Warfare Teams. Such interrogation could provide only secondary information on the psychology of members of Japanese military forces. A few years ago I interviewed Grant Hirabayashi, one of the former
nisei
interpreters attached to the Psychological Warfare Team mentioned above that interrogated the 20 Korean women captured in Burma. He explained that only a brief interrogation was conducted, simply because these women had unexpectedly fallen into the hands of US

forces. According to Hirabayashi, only a summary memorandum was recorded in this case, in contrast to normal POW interrogation procedures in which every question and answer was precisely recorded.5 In other words, information obtained from these women was not highly valued by the Americans.

Interrogation Report No. 49
prepared by the Psychological Warfare Team in the India–Burma theater clearly refers to the violation of these Korean women’s human rights by the Japanese forces. It claims that most of these women were deceived into becoming prostitutes for the Japanese forces. However, it seems that the American interrogators did not regard it as a serious war crime against humanity, and had no intention of prosecuting the Japanese officers of the 114th Infantry Regiment for sexual exploitation of these women.

It is almost certain that the US forces captured many Korean comfort women in Okinawa. From the middle of 1944, a large number of Korean women were sent to comfort stations on the main island of Okinawa as well as many other 86

Why did US forces ignore the issue?

small islands in Ryukyu Archipelago. The exact number of women sent to Okinawa is not known, but it is estimated to be at least 350.6

Two short US military government reports are available which give numbers for Korean women who were repatriated to Korea from Okinawa after the war.7

According to these reports, a total of 150 Korean women (40 women captured on the main island and 110 women from other islands) were gathered in Naha, the capital of Okinawa, and then sent back to Korea in November 1945. The pas-senger boarding list on the repatriation ship to Korea made by SCAP contains 147 names of Korean women from Okinawa, many of whom had typical names of Japanese geisha in addition to their own Korean names.8 Only a few Korean women stayed on in Okinawa after the war.9 Thus, it is presumed that more than half of the Korean comfort women sent to Okinawa died during the fighting.