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Japan's "Comfort Women": A Continuing Source of Official Discomfort
"Twelve soldiers raped me in quick succession, after which I was given half an hour rest. Then twelve more soldiers followed... I bled so much and was in such pain, I could not even stand up... I felt much pain, and my vagina was swollen... 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."
(From the autobiography of former comfort woman Maria Rosa Henson, cited by Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women, p. 1.)
On January 11, 1992, a major Japanese national daily, Asahi Shimbun, published a front-page article, entitled "Japanese Army Abducted Comfort Women." It contained the findings of historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi who, it claimed, had found incriminating evidence in the archives of Japan's Defense Ministry of direct military involvement in the running of brothels in Japanese occupied areas of Asia, from the early 1930s to the end of World War II. Over the previous year this paper had run a lengthy series on "comfort women" (jugun ianfu), thus exposing a topic that was largely unknown to the wider public.
The brothels, or ianjo (comfort stations), housed women from Korea, China, Japan, the Philippines, and several other countries, many of whom were abducted or enticed with false offers of jobs to serve the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army as sex slaves. The 1992 article caused a sensation, and after decades of attempts to suppress the stories of surviving comfort women, forced the Japanese government to acknowledge some of the facts that same day. Although the Japanese government has issued several apologies to the victims, it has never accepted legal responsibility for what is considered the biggest organized military rape in history (at least in terms of number of rapes, if not in women). This article seeks to offer some explanations as to why the subject of comfort women has never been resolved and continues to remain in the shadows of the history of both human rights and war crimes atrocities.
Scope and Modus Operandi
Since the Japanese military destroyed much documentation in August 1945 when it surrendered to the Allies, estimates of the number of comfort women vary widely, from 100,000 to 400,000 (the latter cited by Chinese researchers). However, there is wide agreement that it was probably around 200,000. Only about one-quarter survived the war since many of the victims were executed toward its end or were left to die. Some 80−90 percent of the comfort women came from Korea, which Japan occupied from 1910 to 1945. According to the Swiss-based women's rights organization Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, comfort women generally received little or no medical treatment even if they were injured in the process of rape and torture or became pregnant or infected with venereal disease. After the war, many women never attempted to return home because they did not know how or were afraid to meet their families out of shame and humiliation.
In his book Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation, Yuki Tanaka traces the historical process that led to collaboration between the various arms of the Japanese military and government ministries, and the prostitution industry in Japan and Japanese-controlled Korea. Originally, the first comfort women were professional Japanese prostitutes and destitute Japanese and Korean women. However, as Japan expanded its empire local women were forcibly recruited through deception (job offers to work as nurses, laundrywomen, and factory workers) and intimidation, as well as abduction.
Based on the evidence of military correspondence, it seems that the purpose of the ianjo, the first of which were set up in Shanghai in 1932, was first and foremost to prevent the rape of civilians and check venereal disease. They were also intended to raise the morale of the troops and curb military espionage. Japanese officials admitted that the first two goals were not met. Reflecting on the Japanese invasion of Wuhan in 1938, for example, General Okumura Yasuji admitted that random rape had occurred despite the existence of ianjo. Moreover, as noted, women with venereal disease went untreated while soldiers failed to report they were sick for fear of punishment.
After they were rounded up, the women, some as young as 12, were usually given a rough medical examination, following which they were raped by officers; they were then sent to the comfort stations, often thousands of miles from their homes, and sometimes in combat zones. They worked day and night, servicing ordinary soldiers, NCOs, and officers, seven days a week, with maybe Saturday afternoon off. Testifying before the US House of Representatives in 1990, Jan Ruff-O'Hearn, who as a young Dutch girl was taken from a prisoner-of-war camp in Java in February 1944 to serve as a sex slave in a Japanese military brothel, said that for four months she and nine other Dutch girls were systematically raped and beaten up to 30 times a day. They became pregnant and were forced to miscarry. Ruff-O'Hearn was unable to bear children after she married due to the physical damage she suffered as a comfort woman.
In 1983, Seiji Yoshida published a book, My War Crimes: The Impressment of Koreans, in which he confessed that he had forcibly procured women in Korea under direct orders from the military. It was not until 1991 that a South Korean woman, Kim Hak Soon, became the first victim to speak publicly about the existence of comfort women. About 50 other South Korean women followed suit. After a Task Force on Filipino Comfort Women was set up in the Philippines, some 150 women came forward in 1993 when a radio station called on them to make contact. One woman, Felicidad de Los Reyes, related that she was just 14 when Japanese soldiers invited her to receive a reward for her singing at her school. Her "reward" was violent mass rape over a period of three days. Fortunately, she survived the rest of the war in hiding, but her sister was not so lucky and died in a comfort house.
Attempts at Redress
On August 4, 1993, the Japanese government issued a detailed statement admitting that the military was directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of the women, many of whom were recruited against their will. It expressed its sincere apologies and remorse "to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable psychological wounds." However, it stopped short of accepting legal responsibility and Japan continued to maintain that the ianjo were not a system, nor were they a war crime or a crime against humanity. Moreover, rape, Japan has always claimed, was not a crime before 1945. Prior to this statement, prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa had made a public apology while on a visit to South Korea in January 1992. "I apologize from the bottom of my heart, "he said at a press conference, "and feel remorse for those people who suffered indescribable hardships." Similar, non-state-committal apologies have been issued over the years, particularly in relation to South Korean comfort women.
In 1995, Japan set up the Asian Women's Fund, run by independent trustees and intended to compensate women forced to work as comfort women. From the outset, the fund was controversial. While Japanese right-wingers opposed anything that smacked of an apology or compensation, activists in the former occupied territories decried the fund's lack of official status and the fact that most of it was made up of charity not state money. Moreover, letters of apology signed by the prime minister were distributed to surviving women by the fund rather than by diplomats, raising criticism that the letter was personal rather than official. In South Korea and Taiwan about 50 percent of the women were persuaded by activists to refuse the Japanese funds and accept compensation instead from their own governments. No women in the People's Republic of China received compensation because their government did not cooperate in setting up an authorization mechanism for the victims.
The controversy re-emerged in March 2007 when prime minister Shinzo Abe tried to revise the governmental apology from 1993, and denied that the women were coerced. However, under severe American diplomatic pressure, he was forced to backtrack and apologize for Japan's violation of human rights in regard to comfort women.
A month later the Japanese Supreme Court effectively closed the door on further legal action on the subject when after a legal process of 11 years it rejected the demand for reparations made by six plaintiffs acting on behalf of two Chinese women forced to work as comfort women. The grounds given for the court's verdict were the 1972 Joint Communiqué of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China which renounced Chinese claims for war reparations from Japan. A number of class actions, such as the lawsuit of Maria Rosa Henson together with other comfort women from South Korea and China, had been attempted in the past, but all had failed.
Responding to international pressure, in 2007 the US Congress passed Resolution 121, calling on Tokyo to "formally apologize and accept historical responsibility" for the comfort women issue. The motion, sponsored by Japanese-American Mike Honda was fiercely opposed in Tokyo, with the largest newspaper Yomiuri stating there was not "one shred of evidence to substantiate" the claim that the Japanese government systematically coerced and recruited the women. Similar resolutions were passed in the Netherlands, Canada, the European Union, and Britain.
The Search for Explanations
Military brothels were not unique to the Japanese. During the war some 34,000 East European women were estimated to have been apprehended and forced to serve Wehrmacht and SS soldiers as sex slaves in German military and camp brothels. Since the countries of the Soviet bloc (except for the Soviet Union itself) did not benefit from the reparations agreements in regard to forced labor (under which these women would likely fall) signed between West Germany and the Allies after the war, one can assume that they have received neither compensation nor an official apology for their particular suffering.
The Allied countries were also aware of their soldiers' sexual needs. In fact, in an attempt to demonstrate that "everyone was doing it," Tanaka likens the comfort women system to the situation among the Allies by pointing out that some local commanders from the United States, Britain, and Australia designated certain brothels in the Middle East, India, and Africa as "safe houses" for soldiers. The difference, however, is that although a minority were impoverished girls enticed by offers of money, the majority of women "serving" there were professional prostitutes.
Perhaps a more valid, though partial, explanation for the continued neglect of the comfort women issue was the inferior status attributed to Asian women on the part of Westerners. This was the legacy of decades of imperialism, one of whose pillars was the supremacy of the white race. As a result, Asian (and African) women were often just servants or sex objects for Westerners. This attitude may have prevailed during the postwar Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (aka International Military Tribunal for the Far East), which heard masses of evidence regarding the ill-treatment, rape and murder of Allied soldiers and civilians, but almost nothing about Asian comfort women. For their part, the Japanese attributed a lower status to non-Japanese Asian women. Although, as noted, Japanese prostitutes were initially sent to serve the imperial soldiers in Asia, they soon discontinued this practice, allegedly in order not to stain the reputation of Japanese women.
At the Dutch-run Batavia War Crimes Tribunal in 1948, charges of war crimes were brought by 35 Dutch women who had been victimized as comfort women in Indonesia against twelve Japanese army officers. One of the accused was condemned to death and the others were sentenced to imprisonment ranging from 2 to 15 years. This was the only trial in history that gave justice to some comfort women; significantly, all the women were Dutch citizens.
A third possible explanation is the silence of the women concerned. The revelations at the Batavia tribunal caused hardly a ripple at the time, when so many war horrors were coming to light. Rape continues to stigmatize a woman, even in many contemporary societies. The multiple rape and abuse that these women endured shamed them into keeping their terrible secret. An additional factor was that many of them lived lonely and impoverished lives, without the support of families, and some continued to live thousands of miles from their towns and villages. Almost five decades passed before Kim Hak Soon stepped forward in South Korea to tell her story in 1991.
Conclusion
Colonialist attitudes, racism, sexism and chauvinism all seem to have played a part in the continuing neglect of the comfort women issue. On Wednesday January 20, 2011, 87 surviving South Korean women, who originally made up the bulk of sex slaves, marked their 900th weekly protest vigil outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, a tradition they had begun in 1992. With an average age of 85, they continue to demand an apology from the Japanese Diet (parliament), representing the emperor and the people, and punishment of those who raped them. Their request for the erection of a memorial to their suffering in Japan has, however, been met. In August 2005, the 60th anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II, the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace was opened in Tokyo. Entering the foyer the visitor immediately encounters a portrait gallery of black and white photographs of elderly women, with their names listed below. These are the women who came forward to tell their stories of being sex slaves of the Japanese Imperial Army. The rooms of the museum contain hundreds of their testimonials.
The existence of the museum may go some way to assuaging the pain of the comfort women. However, the prospects of a Japanese apology that includes either the acceptance of legal responsibility for the crimes perpetuated against them or state reparation seem dim.
References
Anthony Brown, "Japanese Comfort Women: One Woman's Story − the Account of Felicidad de Los Reyes," KASAMA 9, no. 4 (July-Aug.-Sept. 2006), http://cpcabrisbane.org/Kasama/Archive/FelicidadDeLosReyes.htm.
Chris Hogg, "Japan's Divisive ‘Comfort Women' Fund," April 10, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6530197.stm.
"Japan Supreme Court Denies Compensation to Chinese 'Comfort Women'," April 27, 2007, http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2007/04/japan-supreme-court-denies-compensation.php.
"Japanese Sex Slavery before, during and after World War II," n.d., http://www.religioustolerance.org/sla_japa.htm.
Suvendrini Kakuchi, "New Museum Documents Lives of Japan's 'Comfort Women'," October 31, 2005, http://www.womensenews.org/story/the-world/051031/new-museum-documents-lives-japans-comfort-women.
Jeff Kingston, "Power Play in the Far East," review of Changing Power Relations in Northeast Asia: Implications for Relations between Japan and South Korea (2011), edited by Marie Soderberg, May 22, 2011, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20110522a1.html.
Jeff Kingston, "Continuing Controversy of ‘Comfort Women," review of The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Post-colonial Memory in Korea and Japan (2009), by C. Sarah Soh, May 10, 2009, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20090510a1.html.
David McNeill, "Korea's Comfort Women: The Slaves' Revolt," April 24, 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/koreas-comfort-women-the-slaves-revolt-814763.html.
Narrelle Morris, review of Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (2002), by Yuki Tanaka, August 2003, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue9/morris_review.html.
Seth Mydans, "Maria Rosa Henson, 69, Dies; Victim of Japanese Brothels," August 27, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/27/world/maria-rosa-henson-69-dies-victim-of-japanese-brothels.html.
"A Primer on the International Women's War Crimes Tribunal, Tokyo, Japan, December 8-12, 2000, http://www.globalaging.org/elderrights/world/primer.htm.
"Sex Slaves for the Emperor: ‘The Comfort Women'," on Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (1995; trans. 2000), by Yoshimi Yoshiaka, http://www.warbirdforum.com/comfort.htm.
"S Korean 'Comfort Women' Mark 900th Protest at Japanese Embassy," January 20, 2011, http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/s-korean-comfort-women-mark-900th-protest-at-japanese-embassy.
Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (London/New York: Routledge, 2002).
"Women's Active Museum on War and Peace Tokyo," January 15, 2010, http://naehauf-wayhoose.blogspot.com/2010/01/womens-active-museum-on-war-and-peace.html.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hvuw5nQwds.
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