Japan's Comfort Women (10 page)

36

Procurement of women and their lives
amount paid for a Japanese woman.12 In other words, destitute Korean families had to sell their daughters to brothels even though the return was small. In short, brothel owners could “employ” several Korean women for the same cost as one Japanese woman. It was quite common also for owners of “restaurants,” “cafes,”

and “bars,” who operated clandestine prostitution businesses, to pay far less – between 50 and 100 yen in advance – in order to employ Korean women under the pretence of being “waitresses” and “barmaids.”13 This “pricing mechanism,”

which was closely interlinked with chronic poverty caused by colonization, seemed to be one of the main reasons for a rapid increase in the number of Korean prostitutes under Japanese rule.

It was in March 1916 that the Government-General introduced in Korea a licensed prostitution system similar to that in Japan. In June 1922, the law regulating “prostitute employment agencies” was also enacted in Korea.14 In other words, both brothel owners and “employment agents” had to obtain a license from the police to operate their business. Both Japanese and Korean proprietors were involved in the Korean prostitution industry. However, it was necessary for the Koreans to be seen as pro-Japanese by the authorities in order to secure a license and run a business smoothly. Thus, the licensing system created a tendency for the prostitution industry to be exploited by the Japanese administrators as a tool to foster Koreans who would collaborate with the Japanese. In the mid-1920s there were between 5,000 and 6,000 such “employment agents” in Seoul alone, “selling 30,000 women yearly for prices from 50 to 1,200

Plate 2.1
A comfort woman entertaining a drunken member of the Japanese Imperial Navy. The date and location are unknown.

Source
:
Mainichi Shimbun
Procurement of women and their lives
37

yen.”15 In addition, many women were deceived by labor brokers who gave false promises of employment, such as factory work, and ended up as prostitutes.16

The prostitution industry in Korea was affected by the world depression in the late 1920s and 1930s. The economic depression contributed to an increase in the relatively cheap clandestine prostitution business, while the high-class brothel business declined. Partly because of the economic conditions in Korea and partly because of the rise of business opportunities provided by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, brothel proprietors in Korea started moving into Manchuria.

This began in late 1931. As the war in China dragged on, draining the Japanese treasury, the Government-General of Korea imposed austerity measures on the general population. For example, in April 1938, the tax rate on leisure services, food and drink was raised. This naturally included the services provided by brothels. As a consequence of the tax increase, the prices of alcohol and restaurant meals went up. In July that year, restaurants, cafes, bars and the like were ordered to shorten business hours. The police also changed their policy of toler-ance. They started cracking down on clandestine brothels. It is strongly believed that such wartime stringency encouraged the brothel proprietors and clandestine operators to move out of Korea to seek business opportunities in China.17

Incidentally, the Korean situation turned out to be advantageous for the Japanese military forces stationed in China. As we have seen in the previous chapter, they had operated the comfort women system as an official policy since the early 1930s. The large number of Korean and Japanese proprietors, who moved to various places in China where Japanese troops were stationed, brought Korean women with them. Many of the women were bound by large debt through their “advanced payment.” An example of this influx is seen near military camps in Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province, where 16 comfort stations and 46

restaurants were opened in 1940. Half of these newly opened comfort stations, and two of the restaurants, were run by Korean proprietors. As stated in the previous chapter, 24 comfort stations had operated in Jiujiang since mid-1939.18

In Hankou, where there were only a few Koreans before Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, the number of Korean residents increased to 1,614 by the end of March 1940. Most of these were owners of restaurants, comfort stations, small general stores and the like. Already by the end of 1939, Hankou had 20 comfort stations and more than 250 restaurants, cafes and bars at which prostitution operated mainly for civilian employees of the military.19 It is therefore believed that by the early stages of the Asia-Pacific War many Japanese and Korean proprietors who had been operating prostitution businesses in Korea had moved to China due to economic problems in the colony and had started operating there for the Japanese troops and the military’s civilian employees.

Procurement of Korean and Taiwanese women
As the war in China became deadlocked, the comfort women system, which had been firmly established as a matter of military policy, required more comfort women to be allocated to each unit of the Japanese Army stationed in China. It 38

Procurement of women and their lives
seems that “voluntary migration of proprietors and prostitutes” from Korea to China could no longer provide the army with a sufficient pool of comfort women.

Thus, from 1938 the army itself became involved more closely in the procurement of women.

In March 1938, the army began carefully selecting and controlling “recruiting agents.” By and large, there seemed to be two tiers of “recruiting agents.” One group was those people who were directly selected by the Army and ordered to secure a specified number of women. These were mainly owners or managers of comfort stations already operating in China. In addition there were some private brothel owners from Korea and China. The other group was those who were commissioned by these brothel owners/managers to actually procure women – sub-contractors. The majority of these sub-contractors were local Korean “employment agents,” labor-brokers, small proprietors in the prostitution business and the like. It is believed that most of these sub-contractors had already been operating businesses in the procurement of Korean women for prostitution, and many of them had been closely engaged in illegal trafficking of women.20

Some of the agents directly selected by the army, in particular the Koreans, returned to Korea to procure by themselves without using sub-contractors. In some cases Japanese and Korean proprietors collaborated to procure women in Korea. However, most “recruiting” seems to have been done by local Korean sub-contractors. Usually a Japanese or Korean owner/manager of a comfort station in China would go to Korea and stay in a port city, such as Pusan or Inchon. He would stay at an inn for some weeks or even a few months – long enough for his sub-contractors to secure enough women for him, and take them in at his lodging.

In some cases, he would move from one city to another city, taking all the “recruits”

with him. They would stay in an inn, again for a certain period until more women were procured. Once he had secured enough women they would travel to China. This “recruiting” procedure is verified by testimonies of many former Korean comfort women.21 According to their testimonies, it was quite common for between 40 and 50 young women and girls to be “recruited” at once.

The most common expedient used in Korea was deceit – false promises of employment in Japan or in other Japanese occupied territories. Typically, a daughter of a poor peasant family would be approached by a labor broker and promised employment as a factory worker, assistant nurse, laundry worker, kitchen helper, or the like. While staying at an inn and waiting to be transported out of Korea, she would be relatively well treated. She would get good food and not need to work, but her physical freedom would be restricted. She would not find out the real nature of the work until she was taken into a comfort station and raped by members of the Japanese armed forces. This system provided many women from rural Korea. Jong Jingsong conducted research on 175 Korean women who came forward in 1993 as former comfort women. Of these, 105 out of 170 women whose birth places were identified had been “recruited” from rural areas in Kyongsang and Cholla Provinces.22 In other words, sub-contractors had targeted young daughters of poor peasant families, knowing that it was relatively easy to trick them.

Procurement of women and their lives
39

Kim Tokchin was a victim of this kind of deceit. She was one of five children of a poor peasant family living in South Kyonsang province. Her father had been arrested and beaten to death by the Japanese police over the illegal possession of tobacco leaves for his private consumption. After his death, her family’s life became harder. She testifies:

Making a living was not easy by any means. We were desperate for food.

We dug up the roots of trees to eat, and my mother would work on a treadmill all day to bring back a few husks of grains as payment which we would boil with dried vegetables for our supper. . . .

. . .

It was the middle of January or perhaps a little later, say the beginning of February 1937. I was 17 years old. I heard girls were recruited with promises of work in Japan. It was said that a few had been recruited not long before from P’yongch’on, where we had lived with my uncle. I wished that at that time I had been able to go with them, but then I suddenly heard a Korean man was in the area again recruiting more girls to work in the Japanese factories. I went to P’yongch’on to meet him and promised him I would go to Japan to work.23

Yi Sunok, a 17-year-old girl in North Kyongsang, also became a victim of a false promise. According to her testimony, in 1938 she met a Korean man called Oh, who said that he had come to recruit young girls to work at a silk factory in Japan. She claims:

He added that the factory would pay travel expenses and that many girls would be going. He also said that I could leave at any time if I didn’t like the work there. Oh came and asked me if I wanted to go, and I answered that I would like to, given such good terms.24

Kim Tokchin was taken to a comfort station in Shanghai, and spent the next three years in China as a comfort woman. Yi Sunok was first taken to a comfort station in Guangdong, where she spent three years. Then she was taken to Singapore and forced to continue to serve Japanese soldiers there before being allowed to travel to Japan as a nurse on a Japanese hospital ship in 1944.

Some testimonies of former comfort women indicate that Japanese police in Korea collaborated with sub-contracted labor brokers. It is believed that the military authorities asked the police in Korea to assist local sub-contractors, to whom the work of procurement was commissioned by comfort station owners/

managers. The following testimony by a former comfort woman, Mun P’ilgi, for example, endorses such an interpretation.

In our village there was a man in his fifties who worked as an agent for the Japanese. One day he approached me and told me he would give me an introduction to a place where I could both learn and earn money. I had 40

Procurement of women and their lives
been so resentful that I hadn’t been able to study, and his proposition was so attractive, that I told him I would like to take him up on the offer. . . . It was autumn 1943 and I was 18. . . .

. . .

After a few days, the man came to see me at dusk and told me to follow him. He said he wanted to take me somewhere for a few minutes. So I crept out of the house without saying anything to my parents. We walked for a little while, to a place not far from home. It was quiet; there were few houses around. There I saw there was a truck parked,
with a Japanese policeman,
Tanaka, who worked at the village police station.
25

[Emphasis added]

In the case of the “recruitment” of Yun Turi, a young girl in Pusan, it seems that local policemen themselves were acting directly for a comfort station.

According to Yun’s testimony:

I was on my way home at about 5.00 or 6.00 p.m., and was passing the Nambu police station in front of Pusan railway station, when a policeman on guard duty called me over. He asked me to go inside, and I dutifully followed him in, thinking nothing could happen because I hadn’t done anything wrong. It was sometime in early September 1943. There were three or four girls of my age already inside, and the policeman asked me to sit down. When I asked why, he said he would find me work in a nice place and told me to wait quietly. . . . At 11.00 p.m., a military truck arrived, and two soldiers loaded us on board.26

Yun was taken to No. 1 Comfort Station in Yongdo, an island just off Pusan, which was managed by a Japanese man called Takayama. Her mother and sister later found that Turi had been detained at this station, but they could not rescue her as the station was guarded by Japanese soldiers.

The fact that the police were involved in the “recruitment” in the cases of Mun P’ilgi and Yun Turi (both in late 1943) implies that, towards the end of the war, the military authorities used the police force to procure women. This probably was due to the scarcity of young women at the time.

Mobilization of the Korean labor force into war-related industries was greatly strengthened from 1943. In 1943 alone, nearly 140,000 people were mobilized by the Government-General.27 In September 1943, the “Women’s Voluntary Labor Service Corps” was organized throughout Korea. Through the corps many young, unmarried women were forced to “volunteer” for various types of work in wartime industries. In August 1944, a new law – the “Women’s Voluntary Labor Service Law” – was enacted. This allowed the Governor-General of Korea to force any unmarried woman between 12 and 40 years old to engage in war-related labor for 12 months.28 Under this law a vast number of young girls were mobilized and many were sent to Japan to work at large industrial factories. This policy probably created the situation in which procurement of young