comfort woman

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Rangoon, Burma. August 8, 1945. An ethnic Chinese woman who was in one of the Imperial Japanese Army's "comfort battalions" is interviewed by an Allied officer.

Comfort women (慰安婦, ianfu^?) or military comfort women (従軍慰安婦, jūgun-ianfu^?) is a euphemism for between 60,000 and 200,000 women, who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese military brothels during World War II^[1]. Historians and researchers into the subject have stated that the majority were from Korea, China and other Japanese-occupied territories. Initially some were recruited by offering attractive wages to women who choose to be prostitutes. But in later stages women were deceived or even forced into prostitution and some of them were "bought" by brokers from their parents. ^[2][3][4] In some cases it has been documented that the Japanese military itself recruited women by force. ^[5]

The size and nature of sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II is still being debated, especially in Japan. Many military brothels were run by private agents and supervised by the Japanese Army. Some Japanese historians, using the testimony of ex-comfort women, have argued that the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were either directly or indirectly involved in coercing, deceiving, luring, and sometimes kidnapping young women throughout Japan's Asian colonies and occupied territories.^[6]

Other Japanese historians argue that there is no hard evidence to prove Army's order to coerce the women. In their view there was violent treatment of comfort women by private agents, which would make the Japanese Army only responsible for insufficient supervision.^{[citation needed]}

After its defeat the Japanese military destroyed many documents for fear of war crimes prosecution.^[7] There is hard evidence proving official orders from the Japanese Ministry of War to destroy evidence.^[8] The testimony of Japanese Army officers that they kidnapped women is disputed. Some of the testimony from self-identified victims state that they were kidnapped by somebody like a soldier, but they didn't know who they were.

Historians have searched for evidence of the Army and Navy's coercion, and some written proof has been discovered, such as documents found in 2007 by Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi ^[9] Some others found documents giving instructions not to treat comfort women violently.^[10]

Number of comfort women

Lack of official documentation has made estimations of total numbers of comfort women difficult, as vast amounts of material pertaining to matters related to war crimes and the war responsibility of the nation's highest leaders were deleted on the orders of the Japanese government.^[11] Historians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation which indicate the ratio of number of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women, as well as looking at replacement rates of the women.^[12] Historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who conducted the first academic study on the topic which brought the issue out into the open, estimated the number to be between 50,000 and 200,000.^[13]

Based on these estimates, most international media sources quote about 200,000 young women were recruited to serve in Japanese military brothels. The BBC quotes "200,000 to 300,000" and the International Commission of Jurists quotes "estimates of historians of 100,000 to 200,000 women."^[14]

However, historian Ikuhiko Hata estimates the number to be more likely between 10,000 and 20,000.^[13] Because, in the 1930s, there were 200,000 prostitutes in mainland Japan where there were more than 30 million customers, while the number of soldiers was only 3 million in all Pacific front.

Country of origin

The proportion of countries of origin of the women are also in dispute.

Internationally, it is generally quoted that most of them were from Korea and China.^[15][16] Others came from the Philippines, Taiwan, Dutch East Indies, and other Japanese-occupied countries and regions.^[17] Some Dutch women, captured in Dutch colonies in Asia, were also forced into sexual slavery.^[18][19]

Historian Ikuhiko Hata's study concludes that 40% of them were from Japan, 20% from Korea, 10% from China, and others making up the remaining 30%.^{[citation needed]}

According to Kanto Gakuin University professor Hirofumi Hayashi, the majority of the women were from Japan, Korea, and China.^[17]

To date, only one Japanese woman has published her testimony. This was done in 1971, when a former "comfort woman" forced to work for showa soldiers in Taiwan, published her memoirs under the pseudonym of Suzuko Shirota.^[20]

Establishment of comfort women system

Japanese military prostitution

Given the well-organized and open nature of prostitution in Japan, it was seen as logical that there should be organized prostitution to serve the Japanese Armed Forces.^[21] Japanese authorities hoped that by providing easily accessible prostitutes, the morale and ultimately the military effectiveness of Japanese soldiers would be improved. Also, by institutionalizing brothels and placing them under official scrutiny, the government hoped to control the spread of STDs.

In spite of the analysis made by the author George Hicks mentioned in the preceding paragraph, military correspondence of Japanese Imperial Army shows that the aim of facilitating comfort stations was prevention of rape crimes committed by Japanese army personnel and thus preventing rise of hostility among people in occupied areas.^[13]

Recruitment

Fig.1. Recruitment advertising for Comfort women in newspapers in Korea.
(Right: Keijō nippō, July 26, 1944) "Urgent! Huge Recruitment of Comfort Women!" Age: 17-30. Place of Employment: non-frontline unit [obscured]. Monthly Salary: More than 300 yen. (You can receive an advance on salary up to 3000 yen.) From 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., ...[obscured]. [Contact at] [Address(unreadable)] Imai [Employment] Registry. (Headline on left half) "Emergency Recruitment of Military Comfort Women."

In the early stages of the war, Japanese authorities recruited prostitutes through conventional means. Middlemen advertised in newspapers circulating in Japan and the Japanese colonies of Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo, and mainland China. Many who answered the advertisements were already prostitutes and offered their services voluntarily. Others were sold by their families to the military due to economic hardship. However, these sources soon dried up, especially from Japan.^[22]

On 1 March 2007, veteran soldier Anji Kaneko admitted to The Washington Post that the women "cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor's soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance."^[23]

On April 17, 2007, Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi announced the discovery, in the archives of the Tokyo Trials, of seven official documents suggesting that Imperial military forces, such as the Tokeitai (naval secret police), directly coerced women to work in frontline brothels in China, Indochina and Indonesia. These documents were initially made public at the war crimes trial. In one of these, a lieutenant is quoted as confessing having organized a brothel and having used it himself. Another source refers to Tokeitai members having arrested women on the streets, and after enforced medical examinations, putting them in brothels.^[24]

On 12 May 2007, journalist Taichiro Kaijimura announced the discovery of 30 Netherland government documents submitted to the Tokyo tribunal as evidence of a forced massed prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang.^[25]

In other cases, some victims from East Timor testified they were forced when they were not old enough to have started menstruating and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers. ^[26]

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs resisted further issuance of travel visas for Japanese prostitutes, feeling it tarnished the image of the Japanese Empire.^[27] The military turned to acquiring comfort women outside mainland Japan, especially from Korea and occupied China. Many women were tricked or defrauded into joining the military brothels.^[28] The US Army Force Office report of interview with 20 comfort women in Burma found that the girls were induced by the offer of plenty of money, an opportunity to pay off the family debts, and on the basis of these false representations many girls enlisted for overseas duty and were rewarded with advance of a few hundred yen.^[29]

In urban areas, conventional advertising through middlemen was used alongside kidnapping. However, along the front lines, especially in the countryside where middlemen were rare, the military often directly demanded that local leaders procure women for the brothels. This situation became worse as the war progressed. Under the strain of the war effort, the military became unable to provide enough supplies to Japanese units; in response, the units made up the difference by demanding or looting supplies from the locals. Moreover, when the locals, especially Chinese, were considered hostile, Japanese soldiers carried out the "Three Alls Policy", which included indiscriminately kidnapping and raping local civilians.^[30][31][32]

Treatment of comfort women

As a victim of the incident, Jan Ruff-O'Hearn testified to a U.S. House of Representatives committee, "Many stories have been told about the horrors, brutalities, suffering and starvation of Dutch women in Japanese prison camps. But one story was never told, the most shameful story of the worst human rights abuse committed by the Japanese during World War II: The story of the “Comfort Women”, the jugun ianfu, and how these women were forcibly seized against their will, to provide sexual services for the Japanese Imperial Army. In the so-called “Comfort Station” I was systematically beaten and raped day and night. Even the Japanese doctor raped me each time he visited the brothel to examine us for veneral disease."^[33][6]

According to Unit 731 soldier Yasuji Kaneko^[34] "The women cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor's soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance."^[35] Beatings and physical torture were said to be not uncommon.^[33]

Ten Dutch women were taken by force from prison camps in Java by officers of the Japanese Imperial Army to become forced sex slaves in February 1944. They were systematically beaten and raped day and night in a so called "Comfort Station". Even the Japanese doctor visiting the brothel "Comfort Station" to examine for veneral disease participated in the rape.^[33][6]

Although they were returned to the prison camps within three months upon protest of the Dutch prisoners against the Imperial Army, the Japanese officers were not punished by Japanese authorities until the end of the war.^[36] After the end of the war 11 Japanese officers were declared guilty with one sentenced to death by the Batavia War Criminal Court.^[36] It decided that the case was not crime organized by the Army and that the ones who raped violated the Army’s order to hire only voluntary women.^[36]

History of the controversy

Disputed testimony of an ex-soldier

In 1983, Seiji Yoshida published Watashino sensō hanzai - Chōsenjin Kyōsei Renkō (My War Crimes: The Impressment of Koreans), in which the author confesses to forcibly procuring women from Jeju Island in Korea under the direct order from the Japanese military. In 1991, Asahi Shimbun, one of the major newspapers of Japan, ran a series on comfort women for a year. This is often regarded as the trigger of the on-going controversy over comfort women in Japan. In this series the Asahi Shimbun repeatedly published excerpts of his book. Consequently, it was regarded as evidence of "forced comfort women" and cited in the U.N. report by Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy.

But some people doubted Yoshida's "confession" because he was alone in admitting to such crimes. When Prof. Ikuhiko Hata revisited the villages in South Korea where Yoshida claimed he had abducted many women, nobody confirmed Yoshida's confession and the situation was contradictory to his confession. When Hata questioned Yoshida on this matter, the latter admitted that he had taken artistic licence in respect to the places mentioned.^[37]

Initial government response and litigation

Initially the Japanese government denied any official connection to the wartime brothels; in June 1990, the Japanese government declared that all brothels were run by private contractors.

In 1990, the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery filed suit, demanding compensation. Several surviving comfort women also independently filed suit in the Tokyo District Court. The court rejected these claims on grounds such as statute of limitations, the immunity of the State at the time of the act concerned, and non-subjectivity of the individual of international law.^[38]

Kono statement

However, in 1991, the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered incriminating documents in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency. According to Yoshimi they indicated that the military was directly involved in running the brothels, for example by selecting the agents who recruited.^[39] The Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese national daily, published these findings as a front-page article "Japanese Army abducted comfort women" on 11 January 1992. This caused a sensation and forced the government, represented by Chief Cabinet Secretary, Koichi Kato, to acknowledge some of the facts the same day. On January 17 1992, Prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa presented formal apologies for the suffering of the victims during a trip to South Korea.

After some government studies into the matter, Yohei Kono, the Chief Cabinet Secretary of the Japanese government, issued a statement on 4 August 1993. By this statement the Japanese government recognized that "Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military of the day", that "The Japanese military was directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of the women" and that the women "were recruited in many cases against their own will through coaxing and coercion". The government of Japan "sincerely apologize[d] and [expressed its] remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable psychological wounds". In the statement, the government of Japan expressed its "firm determination never to repeat the same mistake and that they would engrave such issue through the study and teaching of history".^[40]

Asia Women's Fund

In 1995, Japan set up an "Asia Women's Fund" for atonement in the form of material compensation and to provide each surviving comfort woman with a signed apology from the prime minister, stating "As Prime Minister of Japan, I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women."^[41] The fund is funded by private donations and not government money, and has been criticized as a way to avoid admitting government abuse.^[42][35] But because of the unofficial nature of the fund, many comfort women have rejected these payments and continue to seek an official apology and compensation.^[43]

Abe controversy

On 2 March 2007, the issue was raised again by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, when he denied that the Japanese military had forced women into sexual slavery during World War II in an orchestrated way. He stated, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion." Before he spoke, a group of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers also sought to revise Yohei Kono's 1993 apology to former comfort women.^[44][42] Abe's statement provoked a negative reaction from Asian and Western countries. The New York Times editorial said, "These were not commercial brothels. Force, explicit and implicit, was used in recruiting these women."^[45] On 26 March 2007 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his regrets for the violations of human rights with regard to comfort women.

U.S. Congressional debate

In 2007, Mike Honda of the United States House of Representatives proposed House Resolution 121 which stated that Japan should formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner, refute any claims that the issue of comfort women never occurred, and educate current and future generations "about this horrible crime while following the recommendations of the international community with respect to the 'comfort women'."^[46] Honda has stated that "the purpose of this resolution is not to bash or humiliate Japan."^[47] However, the Japanese embassy in the U.S. stated that the Resolution was erroneous in terms of the facts and that it would be harmful to the friendship between the US and Japan .[2]

On July 30, 2007, the resolution passed through the House of Representatives after half an hour of debate in which there was no opposition voiced.^[48] Honda was quoted on the floor as saying, "We must teach future generations that we cannot allow this to continue to happen. I have always believed that reconciliation is the first step in the healing process."^[48]

See also

• Trafficking is A Long Standing Crime - US Troop Use of Japan's Trafficked Women WNN - Women News Network Sept 29,2007
• Japanese war crimes
• List of War Apology Statements Issued by Japan
• Anti-Japanese sentiment
• Anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea
• Trafficking in human beings
• Joy Division (World War II)
• Recreation and Amusement Association
• Historical revisionism (negationism)
• United States House of Representatives House Resolution 121
• Rosa Henson, a Filipina who told her story as a comfort woman.

References

Footnotes

Print media

Some recent work on the comfort women issue include:

• Tanaka, Yuki Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation, London, Routledge: 2002. ISBN 0-415-19401-6.
• Yoshimi, Yoshiaki Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, Columbia University Press, 2001. (mentioned RAA too) ISBN 0-231-12032-X.
• Molasky, Michael S. American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-19194-7, ISBN 0-415-26044-2.
• D. Kim-Gibson, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, 1999. ISBN 0-931209-88-9.
• Hicks, George L. The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, 1997. ISBN 0-393-31694-7.
• Schellstede, Sangmie Choi. Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military, 2000. ISBN 0-8419-1413-3.

A review of the Tanaka text can be found in the academic journal Intersections, Issue 9:

• Morris, Narrelle. Review of Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation. [3]

A review of some of these books and a history and historiography of the issue, from a critical viewpoint, can be found in issue 58:2 of Monumenta Nipponica:

• Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashii "Comfort Women: Beyond Litigious Feminism"

A work of literature on the issue was created by Korean American writer Nora Okja Keller:

• Nora Okja Keller "Comfort Woman", London, Penguin: 1998. ISBN 0-14-026335-7.

A Filipina woman writes of her experiences as a comfort woman for Japanese troops

• Maria Rosa Henson "Comfort woman: Slave of destiny", Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism: 1996. ISBN 9718686118.

Web

• Asian Women's Fund web site
• Comfort-Women.org
• www.Support121.org 121 Coalition
• "The Victims" (from the South Korean Ministry of Gender and Family Equality)
• Photo gallery at the Seoul Times.
• A Public Betrayed - How the Japanese Media Betrays its Own People
• Coop, Stephanie (December 23, 2006). Sex slave exhibition exposes darkness in East Timor (Newspaper article). The Japan Times. Retrieved on 2006-12-23.
• Nakamura, Akemi; Ikuhiko Hata (denies that sex slavery existed) & Yoshiaki Yoshimi (vocally supports the position that sexual slavery occurred) (March 20, 2007). Comfort Women: Were they teen-rape slaves or paid pros?. The Japan Times. Retrieved on 2006-03-23.

Academic research

• The Comfort Women project
• Hayashi Hirofumi's papers on comfort women
• Responsibility Toward Comfort Women Survivors: Japan Policy Research Institute Working Paper 77.
• Japan's Comfort Women, Theirs and Ours: Book review, Japan Policy Research Institute Critique 9:2.
• Journal of Asian American Studies 6:1, Feb 2003, issue on American studies of comfort women, Kandice Chuh, ed.
• No Organized or Forced Recruitment: Misconceptions about Comfort Women and the Japanese Military :Critical study on comfort women problem.

Japanese official statements

• Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama on the occasion of the establishment of the "Asian Women's Fund" (1995, Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
• Letter from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to the former comfort women (2001, Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

United States historical documents

• House Concurrent Resolution 226 (June 23, 2003, 108th United States Congress), introduced by Rep. Lane Evans (Illinois 17), referred to House Committee on International Relations; not passed.
• Japanese Comfort Women (1944, United States Office of War Information)