Japan's Comfort Women (3 page)

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Introduction

A heavy silence regarding this issue among the men of my father’s generation who participated in World War II was one of many motives that inspired my research into this subject some years ago. However, this book is not only about Japan at war. I wanted to trace and understand the specific experiences that our fathers – not only Japanese, but also those from the Allied nations – did not tell us about and on which they still maintain silence. I introduce, therefore, discussion of American, Australian, and other nations’ practices concerning wartime prostitution. I also discuss the experience of Japan under American occupation in order to point out certain continuities in Japanese government-directed prostitution during the US occupation, while distinguishing important and unique elements of sexual slavery in the wartime comfort women system.

During the war my father was a young officer – a lieutenant – of Japan’s Kwantung Army and was stationed at a garrison near Harbin in Manchuria.

Well before the end of the war, he was seriously injured in a battle with China’s People’s Liberation Army forces and was consequently sent back to a hospital in Japan. After recovering from injury, he was posted to a domestic military base and never returned to Manchuria. He married my mother shortly before the war ended while still serving as a military officer. He had three brothers, all army officers, who served in various places in Manchuria. All survived the war and eventually returned home. I grew up repeatedly hearing stories about the war in Manchuria told by my father and my uncles. The gist of these stories was how horrendous and absurd the war was, but also how honorably they personally had behaved. I heard stories again and again of how well they had protected and looked after the men under their command, and how well they disciplined their young soldiers. Yet very little reference was made to the lives of the local Chinese people and the relationship between the Japanese troops and the local population in Manchuria. There was certainly no mention of the various atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese troops against Chinese civilians.

My father and uncles were particularly silent about the issue of comfort women.

Indeed, I knew very little about this subject until the early 1970s when, as a university student, I read a book by a Korean resident in Japan, describing the lives of Koreans who were forced laborers and comfort women during the war.2

It was then that I first realized the scale and intensity of the sexual exploitation of Korean women by the Japanese forces. Although I had known little about the comfort women system previously, the book did not surprise me. I was vaguely aware of the issue from Japanese feature films I had seen in the 1960s, which were set in the war and occasionally depicted scenes showing the sexual exploitation of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers. It was many years later that I came to realize the necessity to question, not only why and how such crimes against women of various nationalities were committed, but also why it took so long for knowledge of the crimes to become public, despite the existence of many publications and films referring to this issue.

It is difficult to judge whether or not the fact that my father and uncles were silent about certain subjects, including the comfort women issue, means that they lied about their lives during the war. Was this a case of selective memory in

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which they suppressed entirely the issue of the comfort women and sexual slavery of the Japanese military? Or was it rather that even critics of the war long after Japan’s defeat could not bring themselves to be frank about this and other sordid dimensions of Japanese colonialism and war? These are questions for which no answers are presently possible.

Yet, I think that both my father and my uncles firmly believed that they had adhered to high moral standards during the war – standards defined in the Japanese Imperial Code of Military Conduct. I am sure that they disciplined their soldiers quite well, considering their sincere personalities. I recall, for example, a story my father often told of how he succeeded in eradicating stealing by the men in his unit, through the implementation of various disciplinary measures. Yet, if he was so concerned about stealing, I wonder whether or not my father ever considered trying to eradicate the theft of Chinese civilians’ possessions by his men, who were conducting warfare in a so-called “hostile district” in China. Was it not also true that Heinrich Himmler told his SS men not to steal because it would damage their soul and character? As Jonathan Glover clearly pointed out in his recent work,3 no matter how high and clear the sense of moral identity, if it is not firmly rooted in basic “human responses” and “moral imagination,” it is utterly useless or becomes weaker as a defense against inhuman-ities. In other words, no matter how strongly one embraces high moral standards, the lack of a sincere concern for dehumanizing others will paralyze true moral standards of humanity.

The extraordinary scale and brutality of the organized sexual violence committed by the Japanese Imperial forces against women is a powerful example of demeaning other people in the name of “high ideals” – in this case, Japan’s claim to liberate Asian people from the toils of Western colonialism. Japan’s military leaders organized the comfort women system based on the conviction that they were protecting the moral and physical character of their troops, and protecting Asian civilians, too. They regarded the system as a necessary and effective means of preventing Japanese soldiers from raping civilians and from contracting VD through contact with unauthorized prostitutes. They undoubtedly viewed their conduct as honorable. Yet, they were completely unaware that their moral standards showed a profound lack of humanitarian concern for others and that the system they had set up would victimize others irrevocably.

Thus, they remained oblivious to the irreparable violation of the most fundamental human rights of the comfort women who were its victims. Focusing narrowly on the protection and control of their troops, Japan’s military leaders were unable to consider the basic human rights of the victims of the system they created – the Asian comfort women drawn from Japan’s colonies and other occupied territories.

Hannah Arendt, a German-born American-Jewish political thinker, once summed up the Holocaust with the phrase “the banality of evil,” concluding that everyone is a potential perpetrator of atrocities against others. Describing Nazi “torturers,” Primo Levi wrote that “they were made of our same cloth, they were average human beings, people of average intelligence, and average wickedness: 4

Introduction

save for exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.”4 The words “banality” and “average” are particularly apt when describing the crimes that Japanese committed against vast numbers of women, crimes committed not only by the architects of the comfort women system, but also directly by the officers and enlisted men who sexually exploited those women. For me, my father and my uncles were certainly not “monsters.” Indeed they were “average” men and their faces were similar to mine. In other words, I need to face up to the fact that in other circumstances I could easily have become “a young Japanese officer”

myself. This is my starting-point and it will also be the end point of this study.

An important question to consider is what causes the disjuncture between a sense of moral identity and human responses. Finding the answer is not simple, as this subject is not just a matter of individual psychology or ethics. It is closely intertwined with the structure of the military and state organizations and various ideologies such as masculinity, racism, and nationalism. We therefore need to approach this subject from two different directions – from the actions and responsibility of individuals and from the power structure of the military and state political machines. While the present study focuses on Japan, these are, of course, issues that pertain not only to Japan at war but to many other nations whose reach extends beyond their borders.

Japanese officers and enlisted men were
not ordered or forced
to abuse comfort women. They visited comfort stations by choice. Naturally, they were not punished for not using the “comfort service” organized by the military authorities. Clearly, this was a very different situation from cases in which soldiers were ordered to inflict violence on villagers or POWs, or to kill them. Crimes against POWs were in most cases carried out under orders, and soldiers could easily endanger their own lives by disobeying orders. The exploitation of comfort women, also a serious crime against humanity, was, however, a matter of personal choice, and in this sense, those Japanese men who chose to avail themselves of this facility undoubtedly bear personal responsibility for the crimes that they directly committed against the comfort women they used. Considered purely from a viewpoint of the “motive for the crime,” personal responsibility in this situation is far more serious than in instances in which soldiers acted under orders to commit atrocities.

The question of the abuse of comfort women must be examined ultimately within the parameters of the intertwined ideologies of masculinity and militarism rather than exclusively within those of the Japanese military structure, even as we search for distinctive features of the Japanese system of sexual enslavement.

In particular, it is imperative to closely analyze the symbolic parallel between the violation of a woman’s body and the domination over others (enemies) on the battlefield or through colonial institutions. The question that needs to be asked here is why men find it necessary to demonstrate their power in this manner, particularly in a war situation. The structure of the Japanese military organization must be examined in relation to this fundamental question – how its specific structure and ideology created a strong propensity among soldiers to abuse women.

The answer to the question – why so many Japanese soldiers abused comfort

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women – does not lie merely in a simple analysis of the organizational structure of the Japanese military.

In a broader sense, the ideology of masculinity is intrinsically interrelated with racism and nationalism. The conquest of another race and colonization of its people often produce the de-masculinization and feminization of the colonized.

Sexual abuse of the bodies of women belonging to the conquered nation symbol-izes the dominance of the conquerors. This helps us to understand why the majority of comfort women were from Korea – Japan’s colony at the time.

Therefore, in order to understand the nature of this system of forced prostitution – unprecedented perhaps both in its cruelty and in the magnitude of a state-organized system of forced military prostitution – it is necessary to study the broad historical context of the colonization of Korea and the military occupation of other areas in Asia. This also requires examination of Japanese overseas prostitution business, which began in the late nineteenth century and preceded the development of the prostitution industry in colonial Korea.

In the following chapters I will attempt to analyze these important issues and hope to reveal their complexity as well as to offer some useful guidance towards understanding them better.

Chapter 1 introduces the historical process that led to the establishment of the comfort women system, revealing the direct role of top-ranking officers of the Japanese Imperial forces in organizing and controlling the system. The close collaboration between government ministries – namely, the Ministries of the Army, Navy, and Foreign Affairs – and the military is examined in detail.

Chapter 2 analyzes the relationship between Japan’s colonization of Korea and the sexual exploitation of Korean women, showing why and how Korea became the main source for procuring comfort women. The comfort women system expanded from the China theater to the entire Asia-Pacific zone after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The chapter examines the initiation of women into the comfort women system and the working and living conditions of women exploited by Japanese troops. In order to explain the ordeals that comfort women had to endure, I introduce the testimonies of several groups of Asian women who were the main victims of the Japanese – Koreans, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Filipinas.

Chapter 3 analyzes the sexual exploitation of the Dutch women who were taken from internment camps in Java to serve in comfort stations. This chapter also examines the enforced military prostitution of large numbers of Eurasian (Dutch-Indonesian) and Indonesian women that began in 1943. I explain, too, why the Dutch military authorities subsequently vigorously prosecuted those Japanese responsible for the exploitation of Dutch women, but not those who similarly victimized Eurasian and Indonesian women.

Chapter 4 considers why the US and other Allied forces failed to prosecute Japanese who had committed crimes against Asian women, despite the fact that they had accumulated ample evidence of the system of military sexual slavery.

One answer to this question lies in US policies of military-controlled prostitution and the cover-up of the extent of this practice during World War II. The fact 6

Introduction

that British and Australian forces had similar policies to those of the US is revealed in this chapter, too, through the examination of a large number of relevant archival documents. The discussion raises the following questions which are dealt with in detail in the Epilogue. How distinctive were the Japanese military’s comfort woman practices? To what extent were these practices common among contemporary military forces? In what other ways did military prostitution function in contemporary military forces? What larger issues are integral to the relationship of war and sexuality?

Chapter 5 uses both Japanese and American archival documents as well as personal memoirs to assess the extent and nature of sexual violence by US and Australian occupation troops immediately following their landing in Japan. I also discuss the responses of the Japanese government, police and women to these crimes. The aim of this chapter is to pinpoint the universal characteristics of military violence against women and to consider the fundamental causes of such sexual crimes. The point is not to mitigate or rationalize the crimes that Japanese men committed during the war by referring to similar or related crimes committed by the Allied soldiers immediately after the war. Rather, I aim to bring about an understanding of the broader dimensions of the problem, as well as to give some insight into the particularities of the Japanese crimes.