Japan's Comfort Women (2 page)

129

5.6

Homeless Japanese near Ueno railway station

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6.1

US sailors gather in front of Yasu-ura House comfort station, Yokosuka

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6.2

Japanese high-school students mobilized to work in munitions factories during the war

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6.3

T
d
h
d
Beer Hall in Ginza 144

6.4

A US soldier patrols the red-light district in Sasebo 150

6.5

A US soldier visits a Japanese comfort woman, Kyoto 154

6.6

Japanese prostitutes in Tokyo being rounded up and taken to hospital for VD checks

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Foreword

By Susan Brownmiller

In December 1991, three Korean women who had been abducted into Japanese military brothels during World War II filed a dramatic class-action lawsuit in a Tokyo court. After a half-century of shame, anonymity, and hardship, the aged survivors were ready to tell their personal stories, and to demand an apology and reparations from the Japanese government on behalf of an estimated 100,000

victims.

The women’s campaign had begun in Seoul with a call for a public memor-ial and had escalated into impromptu confrontations with Japanese diplomats.

Their tactical leader, an active feminist, was Professor Yun Chung Ok of Ehwa Women’s University. As a young schoolgirl, Professor Yun herself had narrowly escaped abduction and conscription into the brothels. Aided by church women and a sisterly coalition of Japanese feminists who were equally intent on righting an historic wrong, the Koreans’ demand for belated justice was covered widely by the foreign media, putting the term “comfort woman” into the international lexicon.

Thus, the world learned of a highly organized trafficking system during the Pacific War run by the Japanese Imperial Army, secret police, and local “labor recruitors” using the ruse of legitimate jobs for good pay. Girls and women taken from country villages, or hijacked in broad daylight on city streets, became a human cargo that was transported to barracks on frontline posts, jungle airstrips, and base camps, where the captives remained in sexual servitude until the war’s end.

Japan’s military brothels were not exactly an undocumented story when the Korean comfort women launched their international campaign. Two books on the subject published in the 1970s had assumed a modest place in Japan’s grow-ing literature of conscience, but the research of Kim Il Myon, a Korean, and Senda Kako, a Japanese, had produced little interest and only scant indignation.

It took the rise of an indigenous feminist movement in Asia to supply the moral outrage and place the dormant issue in a modern context.

Yuki Tanaka, the son of a Japanese military man, is the latest historian, and certainly the most meticulous, exhaustive scholar, to explore the dimensions of the comfort women story. In addition to ferreting out fresh documentation from buried and forgotten sources, he creates an original overview by moving xvi

Foreword

backward and forward in time from the World War II era. He offers a capsule history of Japanese prostitution in foreign and domestic ports in the nineteenth century as Japan sought to expand its international trade (making the interesting point that the trade in women’s flesh helped to jump-start capitalist enterprise).

He compares Japan’s wartime comfort stations with the brothels hastily set up by the defeated rulers for American soldiers during the postwar Occupation (the coercion was economic need rather than brute force). And he notes the similarities between the comfort women’s slavery-like barracks and the “rape camps” holding Bosnian women in the ethnic wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia.

Professor Tanaka offers no excuses for what his country did to women in the Second World War, but he sees it as part of a pervasive pattern of worldwide male aggression and domination. Trafficking in women has been on the increase, in China, Vietnam, Russia, and Eastern Europe, ever since the fall of communism exposed the destitute economies of these unfortunate countries. The moral law-lessness accompanying crude, rudimentary capitalism is not very different from the brutal sexual exploitation that accompanies warfare. The question for the future, of course, is can it be stopped?

Susan Brownmiller

author of
Against Our

Will: Men, Women and Rape

Acknowledgments

This research project started as an extension of my last book,
Hidden Horrors:
Japanese War Crimes in World War II
, in particular Chapter 3, “Rape and War: the Japanese Experience.”

Initially I had no plan to cover the conduct of the Allied forces in relation to the comfort women issue. However, my two research trips to the US altered the original plan. In late 1995 and early 1996 I was asked to conduct research at the US National Archives in Maryland by Mr.
i
mori Junr
d
, a director of the TV

documentary section of NHK ( Japan Broadcasting Commission), for a documentary film project. My assignment was to find documents that would reveal why, at the end of World War II, the US military authorities were not interested in prosecuting the Japanese who had been responsible for the sexual exploitation of vast numbers of so-called “comfort women,” despite their clear knowledge of this matter. On the first trip to the US in December 1995, I spent long hours at the US National Archives, searching any documents that might give some hint to the answer. I concentrated on the documents prepared during the Battle of Okinawa. As I knew that some of the US troops who landed on the Okinawan islands had come across many Korean comfort women abandoned by the Japanese forces, I hoped to find relevant official reports. The result was miserable. I could not find a single document that referred to comfort women, and I came back to Australia on Christmas Eve without any “Christmas present” for Mr.

i
mori. I was embarrassed to report this totally unsatisfactory result to him in Tokyo.

Therefore I was really surprised when he asked me to go back to the US to try again a few months later. This time I drastically changed my research strategy. I started investigating the US military documents in reference to their own soldiers’ sexual conduct during World War II, hoping that I might find some clue using this indirect way of searching. My speculation was right. I was astounded by the amazing content and the large volume of vital documents that I found. I photocopied almost all of these documents and brought them back to Australia.

As soon as I returned home, I visited the Australian National Archives and the War Memorial and started uncovering similar documents. The amount and content of relevant Australian documents that I subsequently found was a further surprise to me. Some of the results of these discoveries are included, mainly in xviii

Acknowledgments

Chapter 4, but also in Chapters 5 and 6. If I had not been given the opportunity to visit the US National Archives twice, both times at the expense of NHK, the content of this book would have been very different. For this, my principal thanks go to NHK and Director
i
mori. The NHK documentary entitled
Asian
Comfort Women
was broadcast in December, 1996.

I also thank the Australian Research Council for a grant in 1998 which partly funded my research trip to the National Diet ( parliament) Library in Tokyo to collect further relevant information, which was used in Chapters 5 and 6.

As in my last book, Mark Selden offered the most detailed comments on my draft manuscript. I am grateful for his valuable comments and continuing help.

Without his patience and generosity, I could not have finished this book. I extend sincere thanks to Gavan McCormack and his wife Fusako Yoshinaga. I particularly appreciate the hospitality they extended to me at their Canberra home every time I worked at the Australian War Memorial and the Australian National Archives. My discussion of a range of issues with them over the dinner table stimulated my thoughts and writing.

My special appreciation goes to Susan Brownmiller for her most articulate and concise foreword. It is a great honor for me to have an endorsement from one of the world’s leading feminists whom I admire immensely.

I also offer my thanks to many colleagues and friends in Japan, Australia, the UK, and the US, who helped me in various different ways. In particular, Awaya Kentar
d
, Chita Takeshi, Fujinaga Takeshi, Hayashi Hirofumi, Igarashi Masahiro, Ikeda Eriko, Kawada Fumiko, Kim Booja, Matsui Yayori, Matsumoto Masumi, Nakagawa Sadamu, Nishino Rumiko,
i
waki Michiyo, Takazato Suzuyo, Ueno Chizuko, Utsumi Aiko, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Yun Myeongsuk, Martina Balazova, Cynthia Enloe, Stephen Frost, Michiko Hase, Laura Hein, Mary Katzenstein, Laurence Rees, Carol Rittner, Jean Ruff-O’Herne, Indai Sajor, Gary Sigley, Chris Smyth, Paul Tickle, Katharine Moon, and Nick MacLellan.

If there are any inaccuracies in this text, however, I alone bear responsibility for them.

For help in searching archival documents, photos, and pictures, I thank all the staff of the US National Archives, Australian National Archives, the Australian War Memorial, and the Japanese Diet Library, in particular, Rick Boyland, Esta Carey, and Ian Afflex.

Special thanks to my wife Jo, and my parents-in-law, Inge and Grahame. As in my last book, without their moral support, I could not have completed this project. This book is dedicated to our daughters, Mika and Alisa, hoping that some day they will find this book useful for cultivating their own thoughts and ideas on gender issues.

While completing this book project, my father, who was a young army officer during the Pacific War, passed away at the age of 84 years. While sorting out my father’s old photos, I was made to re-appreciate the profound impact of the war upon his life. The latter half of his twenties was entirely given to the war.

Usually, the experiences of one’s twenties are the most important for shaping the foundation of one’s own way of thinking. As the population of my father’s
Acknowledgments

xix

generation, which had first-hand experience of unforgettable events in World War II, is now rapidly diminishing, I feel an urgent need to accurately record such important issues as the subject of this present book, and to re-examine that generation’s wartime conduct from various angles. Ideally, such an exercise should be a cooperative work between the people of my father’s generation and those of my own. That is an extremely difficult task, however, due to the enormous “generation gap” between us. Difficulties arise also as a result of the widespread silence on our fathers’ side about certain relevant subjects. This book, I hope, will contribute to dissolving the estrangement between the two generations, and to bringing about something that we can learn from and, at the same time, that we can pass on to our children.

Author’s note

I use the term “Asia-Pacific War” to include various battles in which the Japanese Imperial forces were involved, starting from the so-called Manchurian Incident in September 1931 and continuing on until the end of World War II in the Pacific in August 1945. The main reason for the use of this term is to clearly indicate that the Japanese military activities in China before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the war in the Pacific theater were closely interlinked and inseparable historical events. I believe that World War II in the Pacific theater can be adequately analyzed only when it is examined in this time span of 15 years.

All Japanese names, including authors of Japanese texts, have been cited in traditional Japanese order with the surname first.

Introduction

1

Introduction

Sex becomes a source of brutality and oppression, instead of one of joy and life, when it is exploited in warfare. A lengthy and comprehensive argument is unnecessary to illuminate this point, which is well illustrated by the following extract from the autobiography of Maria Rosa Henson, a former Filipina comfort woman. The passage depicts clearly how military violence involves atrocious abuse of women’s sexuality.

Twelve soldiers raped me in quick succession, after which I was given half an hour rest. Then twelve more soldiers followed. They all lined up outside the room waiting for their turn. I bled so much and was in such pain, I could not even stand up. The next morning, I was too weak to get up . . . I could not eat. I felt much pain, and my vagina was swollen. I cried and cried, calling my mother. I could not resist the soldiers because they might kill me. So what else could I do? Every day, from two in the afternoon to ten in the evening, the soldiers lined up outside my room and the rooms of the six other women there. I did not even have time to wash after each assault. At the end of the day, I just closed my eyes and cried. My torn dress would be brittle from the crust that had formed from the soldiers’ dried semen. I washed myself with hot water and a piece of cloth so I would be clean. I pressed the cloth to my vagina like a compress to relieve that pain and the swelling.1

Sex is a beautiful and extremely enjoyable human activity when it confirms and reconfirms the intimate relationship with a partner. When out of control, however, sex becomes ugly and monstrously abusive. Unfortunately these are the two diametrically opposing characteristics of sex.

This book is about how sex is used and abused to maintain military organization and discipline; ultimately it is about
control
. It investigates mass rape under the control of military forces in the years 1931–1945, and the half-century effort to suppress information about the system and its role in sustaining the Japanese military in World War II. It also examines the lives of the women whom the system abused. This study of the Japanese system of military sexual slavery is an attempt to understand the origins, uses, and abuses of the system, and to tell the stories of those who ordered and implemented it, as well as those of the many Asian women victims.