Japan's Comfort Women (15 page)

Japanese troops seem to have committed sexual violence against Dutch women at various places in the Dutch East Indies immediately after the invasion. For example, when they entered Tjepoc, the main oil centre of central Java, “women were repeatedly raped, with the approval of the [ Japanese] commanding officer.”3 The following are some extracts from the testimony on this case given by a Dutch woman after the war, which was subsequently presented at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal as one of numerous pieces of evidence of war crimes that the Japanese troops committed against Allied civilians.

On that Thursday, 5 March 1942, we remained in a large room all together.

The Japanese then appeared mad and wild. That night the father-in-law and mother-in-law of Salzmann. . . . were taken away from us and fearfully maltreated. Their two daughters too, of about 15 and 16 had to go with them and were maltreated. The father and mother returned the same night, 62

Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
fearfully upset, the girls only returned on Friday morning, and had been raped by the Japanese.

On Saturday afternoon, March 7, 1942, the Japanese soldiers (odd soldiers) had appeared in the emergency hospital where the women and children were seated together. The ladies were here raped by the Japanese, in which connection it should be mentioned that this happened where the children were not present. These ladies were myself, Mrs. Bernasco, Mrs.

Mebus, Mrs. Dietzel, Mrs. de Graaf, Mrs. van Bakerghem, Mrs. Verbeek, Mrs. Warella.

This occurred from March 7 to 17, 1942; generally the Japs came at night, but by way of exception, also during the day. It was a mass, continuous merciless rape. The first afternoon that this happened, as mentioned, three enlisted men came, and everything took place under threat. After this happened, we managed to tell the Chinese doctor Liem. He went to the Commandant, whereupon that afternoon, Mrs. Dietzel, myself and one or two others had to appear before the Commandant. The Commandant said that we would be given an opportunity to point out the Japs who had misconducted themselves, and that they would be shot dead before our very eyes.

However, nothing happened and after an hour we were sent back to the emergency hospital.

That evening, at 8 o’clock, we were transferred to a classroom in a school near by. According to what we were told, this was done for our own safety, since the Japs would not come there.

Between 10 and 12 o’clock that night, when we were all asleep, a whole mass of Japanese soldiers entered with the above-mentioned commandant at the head. The Commandant sat on a table in our classroom and then watched how each of the women was dragged away, one by one, to be raped. He himself did not join in this.4

As only a part of this testimony was read at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, it is not clear what happened to these women after this incident. However, Lieutenant Colonel Damste, a Dutch prosecutor who submitted this testimony to the Tribunal, claimed that this was “the same as happened when the Japanese entered the oil town of Balikpapan”5 in southwest Borneo.

According to a Dutch government report, rape of Dutch women was also committed by the Japanese in Tarakan, Menado, Bandung, Padang, and Flores during the invasion and the early stage of the occupation.6 It is also reported that at Blora, a place near Semarang on Java, about 20 European ( presumably Dutch) women were imprisoned in two houses. Of these, 15, including mothers and their daughters, were raped several times a day for three weeks by the Japanese troops passing by. This was finally ended by a high-ranking Japanese officer who happened to visit.7

There is hardly any official record concerning sexual violence against Indonesian women committed by the Japanese at the time of invasion. Thus it is very

Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
63

Plate 3.1
Japanese soldiers on bicycles moving along a road in Batavia, Java, in October 1942.

Source
: Australian War Memorial, transparency number 127909

difficult to speculate how prevalent rape of Indonesian women was by the Japanese troops in various places of the Dutch East Indies, where many Dutch women became the victims of sexual violence.

There is no evidence of sexual molestation of Indonesians in the early period of the Japanese occupation. It seems that the initial Japanese behaviour towards Indonesians was relatively benign. This could mainly be attributed to the initial impression of Indonesians that the Japanese occupation would liberate Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule. In almost every town and city where the Japanese troops made their triumphant entry, crowds of local Indonesians lined the streets, greeting the victors with Japanese flags and
merah-putih
( Indonesian flags) and singing
Indonesia Raja
, the then national anthem.8 Many Indonesians viewed the Japanese as their liberators from Dutch colonial rule. This was a totally different situation from that experienced in China or in the Philippines, where there was often deep-rooted local resistance against the Japanese military occupation from the beginning.

The peaceful honeymoon period between the Japanese invaders and the Indonesian population lasted only a short time, as the local people soon realized that the Japanese had no intention of giving them autonomous political power. Yet, it may not be wrong to speculate that Japanese sexual violence against the local Indonesian women was not a widespread problem
in the early stage
of the Japanese military occupation of the Dutch East Indies.

64

Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
Exploitation of existing prostitutes by the Japanese

troops

There is very little first-hand information available on the operation of comfort stations in the Dutch East Indies. There seem to be a number of relevant archival documents housed in the Dutch National Archives, but apart from a small number of war crimes tribunal documents which have so far been released, most are closed until 2025. In January 1994, the Dutch government published a short study report on this issue both in Dutch and in English.9 This report has only a very short bibliography and no footnotes. None the less, when we combine this limited number of archival documents with other available information in Japanese and Indonesian, the following general picture of the comfort women issue in the Dutch East Indies emerges.

According to the above-mentioned Dutch official report, between 200 and 300 “European women” worked in the comfort stations in the Dutch East Indies during the war. Of these, 65 were “most certainly forced into prostitution.”10 The report uses the word “European” when referring to both Dutch and Eurasian (i.e. Indo-Dutch) women. But, given that there were well over 300

Indo-Dutch prostitutes anyway, the reference to “two to three hundred” women, most likely means Dutch women only. As we will see later, there were some Dutch professional prostitutes working, mainly in Java, before the war, and it can be presumed that some of these women were the professionals who continued business for the Japanese after the Japanese invasion. Some others might have been the so-called “volunteers” who reluctantly agreed to serve the Japanese in order to avoid the harsh living conditions they faced as captives of the Japanese.

The cases of forced prostitution using Dutch civilian women increased from mid-1943. Apart from the above-mentioned rape cases, there is little evidence that the Japanese between 1942 and early 1943 forcibly used Dutch girls and women in comfort stations.

This does not mean, however, that the Japanese military forces stationed in the Dutch East Indies did not set up comfort stations in the early stage of occupation. The following extract from the memoirs written by a former NCO, Nakamura Hachir
d
, testifies to the fact that the Japanese established comfort stations not long after their invasion into the territory: [One day in March 1942, at Meulaboh on the west coast of Sumatra] I was ordered by my commander to set up a comfort station. I consulted with a medical officer who was assisting in the settlement of our troops in this area and decided to establish the facility. An appropriate place was found quite easily. We decided to use a vacant hotel which had been used by Dutch travelers. It was a new Western-style building which had seven rooms, and I thought it was too good for a comfort station. My next task was the recruitment of women. This was not difficult either
as there were many
Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
65

unemployed women remaining in town after the departure of the Dutch forces
. However, it would cause a serious problem if they had VD. Therefore, our medical officer conducted VD inspection on the women who turned up for the job. We selected only four who passed the medical check and put them in the hotel. The fee was set and thus I could start operating the comfort station.11

[Emphasis added]

The above memoirs indicate the presence of professional prostitutes in the Dutch East Indies before the war, and describe how the newly arrived Japanese troops used some of these women as comfort women. In this particular case, it seems that these women were Indonesians.

However, the memoirs of a Japanese journalist, Kuroda Hidetoshi, reveal the fact that white Dutch women were also used by the Japanese as comfort women, in particular at officers’ comfort stations, from the early stage of Japanese occupation. Between November 1942 and May 1943, Kuroda traveled to various parts of Southeast Asia, with a group of Japanese journalists and writers, at the request of the Imperial Military Headquarters in Tokyo. He was to travel this region and report back to the Japanese populace about “the liberation of Asian nations from Western Imperialism.”

When they visited Batavia in mid-November 1942, a public information officer took Kuroda and other members of the traveling group to one of these army officers’ comfort stations in the city, where Dutch women were working as comfort women. According to Kuroda, the army also had officers’ comfort stations staffed solely with Indonesian women. He states that the navy had Eurasian and Indonesian comfort women but did not have Dutch women at their officers’

comfort stations. Kuroda believes that this was probably due to the fact that Java was controlled mainly by the army and that the army monopolized the Dutch women. Kuroda was also informed by an army medical officer in Batavia that many high-ranking army officers, such as staff officers of the Headquarters, had Dutch concubines.12

It was not only army officers who exploited both Dutch and Indonesian women.

According to another journalist, Got
d
Motoharu, the well-known Japanese writer
i
ya S
d
ichi operated the “White Horse Riding Club” and “Black Horse Riding Club” at a large mansion in Batavia where he lived.
i
ya was one of a few civilian writers who were sent to Batavia with the first Japanese Army contingent to the Dutch East Indies in order to engage in local propaganda activities. In fact, these clubs were “prostitution clubs,” the one using Dutch and Eurasian women and the other staffed by Indonesian women. It is presumed that they were operated for Japanese civilians of high social status such as bureaucrats and businessmen living in Batavia. For a long period, the officers of the Army Headquarters believed that they were genuine “riding clubs,” as there were several horses at this mansion. When army officers found out the real activities of these clubs, some also joined them.13 In this case it is almost certain that the women 66

Comfort women in the Dutch East Indies
who worked at these clubs were “volunteers” as the clubs were initially set up as “prostitution clubs” for civilians and not as military “comfort stations.”

Indeed, prostitution had been widespread in the Dutch East Indies well before the Pacific War. The large number of Indonesian, Eurasian, and Dutch prostitutes in major cities like Surabaya, Batavia, and Semarang in Java served young unmarried Dutch men. Surabaya, where the Dutch naval base and garrison were located, was notorious for extensive prostitution. In fact, until well into the second decade of the twentieth century, many Dutch and Indonesian soldiers kept concubines in their own army barracks. For example, in 1911, 2,372 out of the 10,320 Europeans in the colonial army had concubines, the majority of the women being Indonesians. The existence of European prostitutes in Java was also recorded as early as the late nineteenth century. In Surabaya, Batavia, and Semarang, there were already well-known brothels owned by Europeans, employing white women to cater to European men.14

Under Dutch colonial rule it was quite a common phenomenon for divorced Indonesian women to leave their villages and work as prostitutes in nearby towns or cities for a few months each year over a long period.15 Some of them worked as “house maids” for Dutch men. The work of “house maid” included offering sexual services as well.

As a Dutch medical doctor wrote in 1941, “a switch from the life of a prostitute to the normal life through marriage occurs very easily without deep conflict or radical change and is to be attributed to the great tolerance of the Javanese.”16 These “semi-professional prostitutes” often went back to their own villages, and if they remarried they were accepted back into the village community. Thus, prostitution, while widespread, appears not to have been regarded as an “immoral occupation” by many Indonesians in the colonial period. Perhaps such tolerance towards prostitution was partly due to the general poverty that Indonesians suffered under Dutch colonial rule. Prostitution was accepted as a means of survival for women.