Japan's Comfort Women

Japan’s Comfort Women

This groundbreaking and highly controversial book reveals how sex is used and abused to maintain military morale and discipline. It reveals the story of the “comfort women” who were forced to enter prostitution as sexual slaves of the Japanese Imperial Army in the period immediately before and during World War II.

Using previously untapped personal testimonies and an unprecedented range of archival and documentary research, Yuki Tanaka exposes Japanese military and political leaders who ordered and controlled this regime of sexual exploitation, and movingly describes its devastating effects on the lives of scores of thousands of Asian women victims.

Controversially,
Japan’s Comfort Women
also examines the sexual conduct of the Allied forces in this period and the nature of the postwar “comfort women”

system that Japan created to service US soldiers during the Occupation. The author’s exhaustive research in Japanese, American and Australian archives reveals how the US government, for reasons of political expediency, failed to prosecute as war criminals those responsible for the “comfort women” system.

This book offers unique insights into this terrible episode in Japanese, Asian and American history and the broader dimensions of military violence against women.

Yuki Tanaka
is a Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima City University, Japan. He is the author of the provocative, bestselling book
Hidden
Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II
, and was the historical advisor on a recent BBC TV documentary film series,
Horror in the East
.

Asia’s Transformations

Edited by Mark Selden

Binghamton University and Cornell University, USA
The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asia’s twentieth-century transformations. The series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyze the antecedents of Asia’s contested rise.

This series comprises two strands:

Asia’s Transformations
aims to address the needs of students and teachers, and the titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include:
Debating Human Rights

Opium, Empire and the Global

Critical essays from the United States and

Political Economy

Asia

Carl A Trocki

Edited by Peter Van Ness

Chinese Society

Hong Kong’s History

Change, conflict and resistance

State and society under colonial rule

Edited by Elizabeth J Perry and Mark Selden
Edited by Tak-Wing Ngo

Mao’s Children in the New China
Japan’s Comfort Women

Voices from the Red Guard generation

Sexual slavery and prostitution during

Yarong Jiang and David Ashley
World War II and the US occupation

Yuki Tanaka

Remaking the Chinese State

Strategies, society and security

Edited by Chien-min Chao and Bruce J Dickson
Routledge Studies in Asia’s Transformations
is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include:
1. The American Occupation of
3. Internationalizing the Pacific
Japan and Okinawa
*

The United States, Japan and the Institute of

Literature and memory

Pacific Relations in war and peace, 1919–1945

Michael Molasky

Tomoko Akami

2. Koreans in Japan

4. Imperialism in South East Asia
Critical voices from the margin

‘A fleeting, passing phase’

Edited by Sonia Ryang

Nicholas Tarling

* Now available in paperback

Japan’s Comfort Women

Sexual slavery and prostitution during

World War II and the US occupation

Yuki Tanaka

London and New York

What our fathers did not tell us

First published 2002 by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

© 2002 Yuki Tanaka

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Tanaka, Toshiyuki, 1949– Japan’s comfort women: sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the U.S. occupation / Yuki Tanaka.

p. cm. — (Asia’s transformations)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Comfort women—Asia. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Women—Asia. 3.

Japan—History—Allied occupation, 1945–1952. 4. Soldiers—Japan—Sexual behavior. 5.

Soldiers—United States—Sexual behavior. I. Title. II. Series.

D810.C698 T36 2001

940.54 ′05′0922519—dc21

2001048307

ISBN 0-203-30275-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34456-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–19400–8 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–19401–6 (pbk)

For Mika and Alisa

Contents

List of figure and tables

xi

List of plates

xii

Foreword

xv

Acknowledgments

xvii

Author’s note

xx

Introduction

1

1

The origins of the comfort women system

8

The initial establishment of comfort stations
8

A rapid increase in comfort stations after the
“
Rape of Nanjing
”

12

The organizational structure of the comfort women system
19

Why comfort women?

28

2

Procurement of comfort women and their lives as

sexual slaves

33

The colonization of Korea and the growth of the prostitution
industry

33

Procurement of Korean and Taiwanese women
37

Procurement of women in China and the Philippines
44

Life as a comfort woman

50

3

Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies

61

Japan’s invasion of the Dutch East Indies and military violence
against women

61

Exploitation of existing prostitutes by the Japanese troops
64

Procurement of Dutch women

67

x

Contents

Enforced prostitution at comfort stations in Semarang
72

The Dutch military authorities’ indifference towards Indonesian
comfort women

77

4

Why did the US forces ignore the comfort women issue?

84

US military indifference towards comfort women
84

US military policies on the prevention of venereal disease in
World War II

87

The Brumfield Report and military-controlled prostitution
92

Military prostitution in the Caribbean, Australia and elsewhere
99

Criticism, cover-up and a change in the War Department’s attitude
106

5

Sexual violence committed by the Allied occupation forces against Japanese women: 1945 –1946

110

Sexual violence prior to the Allied occupation of Japan
110

Fear and confusion before the landing of the Allied occupation
forces

112

Official reports on sexual violence committed by the occupation
forces against Japanese women
116

Testimonies of victims of sexual violence committed by the
occupation troops

127

6

Japanese comfort women for the Allied occupation forces 133

The Japanese government creates a comfort women system for the
occupation forces

133

The Recreation and Amusement Association
141

Occupation policies and the spread of prostitution
150

VD problems and the failure of GHQ’s VD prevention policies
155

Epilogue

167

From karayuki-san to comfort woman
167

Sexual slavery, social death, and military violence
173

Imperialism, the patriarchal state, and the control of sexuality
180

Notes

183

Index

206

Figure and tables

Figure

1.1

Japanese Imperial Army chain of command

22

Tables

1.1

Number of comfort stations and comfort women,

east-central China, 1938–1939

15

1.2

The distribution of comfort stations and the sanitary conditions [southern China, 1939]

17

2.1

Established rates of South Sector Billet Brothel [ Manila, c. 1943 or 1944]

54

4.1

Incidence of VD, Australian Infantry forces in the Middle East, 1940–1942

97

5.1

Reported cases of rape and attempted rape in the Tokyo and Kanagawa areas, March–September 1946

125

Plates

1.1

Japanese comfort women in northern China

9

1.2

Japanese officer beside victims of the Nanjing Massacre 12

1.3

Comfort women being transferred to a barge for landing 17

1.4

Comfort women and Japanese soldiers on a military ship 25

1.5

The image of Japanese womanhood: healthy baby contest 31

2.1

Comfort woman entertaining a drunken member of the Japanese Imperial Navy

36

2.2

Korean comfort women captured in Burma

41

2.3

Taiwanese nurses leaving Taipei, some of whom were later exploited as comfort women

43

2.4

A Filipina girl who was stabbed with a bayonet

48

2.5

Japanese soldiers waiting outside a comfort station in China 58

3.1

Japanese soldiers cycling in Batavia, Java

63

3.2

A woman and children in a house at Kampon Makassar Internment Camp, Batavia

67

3.3

Houses at Kampon Makassar Internment Camp

68

3.4

Women at the Kampon Makassar Internment Camp

70

3.5

Forty-six Javanese comfort women found by Australian troops in the southwest of Timoa Island

81

3.6

A Javanese comfort woman on Timoa Island after the Japanese surrender

82

4.1

Allied soldiers queuing outside a brothel in Cairo during World War II

94

4.2

RAAF soldiers in a nightclub in Cairo with some of the club’s women “entertainers”

95

4.3

US soldiers with Australian girls in Melbourne

104

4.4

Japanese propaganda leaflets designed to exploit the tension between US and Australian troops over Australian women

105

5.1

A US soldier fondles the hair of an Okinawan girl 111

5.2

General MacArthur arrives at Atsugi airport,

August 30, 1945

117

5.3

Japanese policemen in Yokohama

119

Plates

xiii

5.4

Commander US 8th Army, R. L. Eichelberger, General MacArthur and H. Robertson, Commander-in-Chief BCOF

review the US Independence Day parade, Tokyo

123

5.5

Japanese women employed as telephone operators at the headquarters Signal Regiment, BCOF, Kure