Japan's Comfort Women (37 page)

It seems that in the latter half of the 1880s karayuki-san, forced out of Shanghai by the above mentioned policy of the Japanese consulate, moved to other parts of China and Asia. Karayuki-san were soon found in places like Hong Kong, Ningbo, Chongging, British Malaya, and Singapore. By the early twentieth century, Singapore had become the center of overseas Japanese prostitution. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904 –1905), about 6,000 Japanese prostitutes were working in Southeast Asia, 700 of them in Singapore. Among the 1,835 Japanese residents in the Straits Settlement in 1906, 852 were karayuki-san and 113 were brothel-keepers.5 In other words, more than half of the Japanese residents there were engaged in prostitution. A Japanese government survey conducted in January 1910 found that the largest number of business premises operated by the Japanese in Singapore and its neighboring towns were brothels – a total of 188 brothels staffed by 1,048 Japanese women.6

Clients of these Japanese prostitutes in British Malaya included not only Caucasians, who were mainly engaged in various kinds of business or colonial government administration, but also Asian migrants, particularly Indian and Chinese workers employed at rubber plantations, in mining or in construction.

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Because of its ideal location – surrounded by the hinterlands of the Malay peninsula, Thailand, and the Dutch East Indies – Singapore became a vital trade center. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Singapore prospered as the main port of entry for exports of Southeast Asian natural resources to the West and for the import of European industrial manufactured goods. Prostitution developed apace, serving a growing number of young male migrant workers in Singapore and throughout the region. Over 90 percent of licensed prostitutes in Singapore in the late nineteenth century were Chinese, but they mainly served Chinese clients. A small number of European prostitutes catered solely to Caucasians. Japanese prostitutes, however, entertained customers irrespective of race or nationality.7 As a result of this non-discriminatory attitude, the karayuki-san became popular and business prospered.

Due to this rapid expansion of Japanese prostitution overseas, by 1910 the number of Japanese women registered as overseas prostitutes increased to more than 19,000, compared with 47,541 officially registered prostitutes within Japan.

The Japanese government had already prohibited women from leaving the country to engage in prostitution abroad by promulgating a law in 1896. However, the government effort to reduce the number of Japanese prostitutes working outside the country failed, just as it had done in Shanghai in 1883. This was partly because of the existence of well-established organizations smuggling young women out of Japan. It was also due, however, to the Japanese government’s half-hearted effort to crack down on the trafficking of women, as it was well aware that the overseas prostitution business was an important source for the acquisition of much needed foreign currency at the time.8

Many young women were kidnapped and smuggled out of Japan by “labor brokers” who specialized in trafficking women, particularly in the early karayuki-san era. These “labor brokers” also deceived young women, and sometimes their parents, with false promises of employment overseas, promising jobs such as shop assistants in Japanese retail stores. There were highly organized Japanese groups trafficking in women both within and outside Japan, each controlled by a kingpin.9 One such group was controlled by a man called Muraoka Iheji, a resident of Singapore. Muraoka later claimed that he had set up his own group in July 1889, recruiting a few dozen men with criminal records as “labor brokers.”

These men were assigned to travel to various parts of Japan and procure young women. Between 1889 and 1894, Muraoka’s men reportedly smuggled 3,222 women out of Japan to Singapore and sold them to brothels.10 Although much of Muraoka’s autobiography is thought to be exaggerated and unreliable,11 there were many “labor brokers” of dubious character like Muraoka, who made a fortune by trafficking in young women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Among karayuki-san there were also those who were sold to procurers by their own poverty-stricken parents. As time passed, some women chose to become karayuki-san in order to earn money quickly. Indeed, a few returned home with substantial assets. However, most karayuki-san ended up destitute and in ill-health. Many died overseas without ever seeing their families again.12

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Each woman was sold to a brothel for between $500 and $600, which was levied upon her as a “debt” by her brothel keeper. Even in the case of kidnappings, a levy was imposed for “travel expenses.” As a result, almost all karayuki-san were financially bound to their brothels for years until this “debt” was paid off.

Generally, the debt also included the cost of bedding, clothes, furniture and the like. Half of their daily earnings went to a brothel keeper as his income, leaving the other half for the prostitute, from which was deducted the debt and other living expenses, including the full cost of periodic medical check-ups. After these necessary “expenditures,” very little money was left for the karayuki-san. If she became ill and could not work for any period, her debt would multiply, thus prolonging the bondage period. Such conditions caused many deaths from sick-ness and drove many karayuki-san to suicide.13 It is indisputable that the comfort women system was essentially based on this karayuki-san system.

Most Japanese residents in Singapore who were not directly involved in prostitution were, however, initially dependent upon the Japanese sex industry that operated in the city. Various goods and services were required by prostitutes and brothels, such as sundry retail dealers, drapers, photographers, doctors, and brothel keepers. As karayuki-san usually wore kimonos, a reliable supply from Japanese drapers was particularly important.14 It can be said that Japan’s modern international trade developed from such small-scale retail trade beginnings which followed the expansion of the traffic in Japanese women in the Asia-Pacific region. The following remarks made by two Japanese men in 1919 clearly support this point:

It is true that five-
shaku
men [“men of 150 cm in height” – a Japanese expression in those days for “adult Japanese men”] followed the Japanese prostitutes and then spread everywhere [in Southeast Asia]. . . . The Japanese prostitutes needed Japanese food, Japanese beverages, Japanese clothes and many other Japanese goods. Their demand was met by queer Japanese sundry-goods traders who dealt in a wide variety of goods, ranging from Japanese clothing to canned food. As the Japanese goods were also sold to non-Japanese customers by such traders, their business became widely known.

The prosperity of Japan’s trade in Southeast Asia today is not thanks to Mitsui & Co and some other large merchants. But the trade was in fact developed by these sundry-goods retailers, behind whom there was the shadow of the Japanese prostitutes.15

It seems that the foreign currencies that these Japanese brothel keepers and traders (as well as some karayuki-san) saved and sent back to their homes in Japan played an important role in developing Japan’s modern economy. For example, it is said that of a total of one million yen that Japanese residents in Vladivostok remitted home to Japan in 1900, 630,000 yen was from earnings in the sex industry.16 The acquisition of foreign currency was one of the most urgent tasks for the new Meiji regime in order to lay the foundations of its capitalism. In early Meiji, apart from a few semi-processed manufactured goods,

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such as silk yarn, Japan did not have many export staples to aid the speedy accumulation of foreign money. Many contemporaries in the early Meiji era were aware of the indispensable contribution of Japan’s overseas sex industry to securing foreign currency. For example, the philosopher and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi – who promoted Western ideas of individualism, equality between men and women, and national independence – argued against some of the domestic criticism of Japan’s large-scale overseas prostitution business. In January 1896

he wrote:

In human society prostitutes are necessary. . . . As the work by women away from home necessarily follows the migration of people, it would be wise to openly permit [the business of prostitution]. . . . It is economically necessary to promote migration and at the same time to allow women to freely work away from home.17

This was the opinion of one of the most prominent educators in the early Meiji period, a man heavily influenced by seemingly “progressive” Western ideas. It seems, however, that Fukuzawa misunderstood the situation. The above remarks create the false impression that Japanese prostitutes left Japan, seeking business opportunities created by Japanese men who were migrating overseas. In fact, it was the other way around, as we have seen – in many instances it was men who followed the karayuki-san.

Thus, by the outset of the Russo-Japanese War, a large number of Japanese brothels were being operated in various parts of Asia and Oceania – from Khabarovsk in the north to Perth, Western Australia in the south, and from China in the west to insular Southeast Asia in the east. Shortly before the war began, almost all of the Japanese brothel keepers and karayuki-san in Russian territories moved out. As soon as the war broke out, many Japanese brothel keepers in Russia decided to move to the major cities in South Manchuria, where Japanese Imperial Army troops were stationed. They brought a large number of karayuki-san with them.18 This was the origin of the close relationship between Japanese prostitutes and Imperial Army forces abroad.

When the war ended in September 1905, there were more than 1,400 Japanese prostitutes in Kwantung province in Manchuria – 54.3 percent of the Japanese civilian resident population of the province at that time. In the city of Yingkou, about 400 Japanese prostitutes were staying at several inns which were frequented by members of the Japanese Army. Concerned about the spread of VD among the troops, the military authorities quickly introduced a licensing system and imposed regular medical check-ups on the prostitutes. This was the origin of the direct role of military authorities in organizing and controlling military prostitution to service Japanese forces abroad. These military regulations were also applied to Chinese prostitutes. In some places, the kempeitai (military police) were mobilized to enforce these regulations. In Andong, under the instruction of the military authorities, a brothel named Y
e
enchi was opened in December 1904. It was also open for civilian clients. However, in February 1905, the 172

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Japanese Restaurant and Bar Business Association of the city voluntarily established a new brothel called Suiraitei, reserved exclusively for the use of members of the Imperial forces.19 However, generally speaking, the military authorities were not directly involved in setting up and operating brothels.

From this perspective, the brothels that operated in South Manchuria during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, despite the close regulation by military authorities, differed from the future “comfort stations.” They were independently established and managed by civilian brothel keepers. They differed, too, in that the facilities also usually catered to non-military personnel as well, although in reality most of the clients were members of the Japanese forces. The control that the military authorities exercised over the brothels at that time was limited, mainly to that of VD. In this regard, it was similar to the control that the Allied forces exercised over privately-operated brothels during World War II.

This small boom in the sex industry and the emergence of military-controlled prostitution in South Manchuria was short-lived. Following Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the major component of the troops soon returned to Japan and the number of brothels and karayuki-san decreased. However, there is no doubt that the frequent use of Japanese brothels by the military in South Manchuria during and after the Russo-Japanese War period laid the foundation for the subsequent spread of Japanese prostitution in north-eastern China and beyond. For example, in December 1907 a Japanese newspaper reported that one out of every two or three Japanese business premises in the city of Lushun (Port Arthur) was a brothel. An official survey conducted in Dalian in May 1907

found 630 sex workers, of whom 554 were Japanese and the rest Chinese. In May of the following year, the number increased to 883 (790 Japanese, 81

Chinese, and 12 Russians). By the end of 1911, a red-light district was set up in this city, and prostitution outside the district was prohibited by the Japanese civil administrative bureau. Japanese brothels were also established in many places along the South Manchurian Railway line between Lushun and Changchun, which Japan acquired from Russia at the end of the war. For example, in February 1906, it is reported that there were 156 prostitutes and 34 Japanese restaurant-brothels in Changchun. In Jinling, in early 1906, there were 74 brothels.

Of the 907 Japanese residents in this town 466 were engaged in the sex industry. From September 1906, these Japanese brothels in Manchuria came under the control of the office of the Japanese consulate of each major city of the region. This government supervision allowed the continuation of regular VD

inspections for Japanese prostitutes. From 1918, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs adopted a new policy to prohibit Japanese prostitutes in Manchuria from serving non-Japanese clients.20

Japan’s colonization of Korea officially took place in 1910. From the 1920s onward many Korean women were procured as prostitutes and sent to Manchuria.

Gradually karayuki-san were replaced by Korean women to work at Japanese brothels in Manchuria and in other places in China, like Shanghai.21 Therefore, by the time of the Shanghai Incident in 1938, certain basic elements of the comfort women system were already in existence in parts of East Asia where the