Comfort women

Comfort women (Japanese: 慰安婦, ianfu) or military comfort women (Japanese: 従軍慰安婦, jūgun-ianfu) is a euphemism for some 200,000 women who served in the Japanese army's brothels during World War II. The majority of them were from Korea, as well as China and other occupied territories, recruited by force or deception to serve as sex slaves.

Japanese historians, using the diaries and testimony of military officials as well as official documents from the United States and other countries, have been able to show that the military was directly or indirectly involved in coercing, deceiving, luring and sometimes kidnapping young women throughout Japan’s Asian colonies and occupied territories.[2] Accounts of abuse by the military — including the kidnapping of women and girls for use in the brothels — have been backed up by witnesses and victims, as well as by former Japanese soldiers. Many victims say they were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops, and historians have said evidence unearthed in Japanese documents in 1992 showed that military authorities had a direct role in working with contractors to forcibly procure women for the brothels.

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.

Number of comfort women

Estimates vary from 50,000 to 300,000, but most sources indicate about 200,000 young women were recruited to serve in Japanese military brothels.

It is generally recognized that most of them were from Korea.

Others came from the Philippines, Taiwan, Dutch East Indies, and other Japanese-occupied countries and regions.

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. 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.

Recruitment

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. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs resisted further issuance of travel visas for Japanese prostitutes, feeling it tarnished the image of the Japanese Empire. 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. 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. [3]

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.

Treatment of comfort women

As a victim of the incident, Jan Ruff-O'Hearn testimonied to the U.S. House of Congress, "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." [4][5]

According to Unit731 soldier Yasuji Kaneko[6] "The women cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor'soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctances." Beatings and physical torture were said to be not uncommon.

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 so called "Comfort Station". Even the Japanese doctor visiting the brothel "Comfort Station" to examine for veneral disease participated in the rape. [7][8] Although they were returned to the prison camps within three months upon protest of the Dutch prisoners against the Imperial Army, the officers were not punished by Japanese authorities until the end of the war.[9] After the end of the war 11 Japanese officers were declared guilty with one sentenced to death by the Batavia War Criminal Court.[10] 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.[11]

History of the controversy

Yoshida and Hata

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 as well.

But some people doubted Yoshida's "confession" because nobody other than him told of 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 these problems to Yoshida, he admitted that his confession was not a true story. Since then nobody quotes Yoshida's book as evidence.

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.[12].

Kono statement

However, in 1992, the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered incriminating documents in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency indicating that the military was directly involved in running the brothels (by, for example, selecting the agents who recruited). When Yoshimi's findings were published in the Japanese media on January 12, 1993, they 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, Prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa presented formal apologies for the suffering of the victims during a trip to South Korea.

On August 4 in 1993, Yohei Kono, the Chief Cabinet Secretary of the Japanese government, issued a statement by which it 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 apologizes and (expresses its] remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable psychological wounds". In that 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".[13]

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."[14] The fund is funded by private donations and not government money, and has been criticized as a way to avoid admitting government abuse.[15][16] 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.[17]

U.S. Congressional debate

In 2007 the problem occurred because of the resolution by assembly member HONDA of the American House of Representatives . In the resolution to Japan that they prepared, it was , saying that "Admit young women to have been changed to the sex slave compulsorily", "Educate over the generation in the future", and "Prohibit and suppress an opposite insistence".

Abe controversy

On 2 March 2007, the issue was raised again by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, in which he denied that the 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.[18][19] 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.”[20]

Fig.1. Recruitment advertising for Comfort women in newspapers in Korea.
(Right: Keijō nippō, July 26, 1944) "Comfort Women Wanted, Urgent!" Age: 17-30. Place of Employment: entertainment for 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

See also

• Japanese war crimes
• List of War Apology Statements Issued by Japan
• Anti-Japanese sentiment
• Trafficking in human beings
• Joy Division (World War II)
• Historical revisionism

References

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. Warwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue9/morris_review.html

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.

External links

Asian Women's Fund web site Comfort-Women.org "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 2006-12-23. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |accessyear=, |coauthors=, and |month= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link) 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. 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) Footnotes