Japan's Comfort Women (36 page)

This “nationwide off-limits” program, however, provided little reduction in VD rates. The following extract from a letter sent by Lieutenant-General R. L.

Eichelberger, then the Commander of the 8th Army, to MacArthur, on January 4, 1947, clearly confirms the point:

The venereal disease rate in the Eighth Army is of deep concern to me. I have utilized every facility at my command within the Army and firmly feel that a reduction of venereal disease in the civilian population is the only remaining factor which will contribute materially to further reductions.98

The commander of the occupation forces, remaining blind to the agency of his own men, continued to insist that it was still the Japanese women who were primarily responsible for the VD problems of the occupation troops.

It was around this time that a second wave of sexual violence by GIs against civilian women hit various parts of Japan. Shortly before the introduction of the nationwide “off-limits,” the number of reported cases of sexual crimes committed by GIs in Japan was down to about 40 per day. It is said that the number suddenly jumped to about 330 cases per day from late March 1946.99 The most well-known case was an incident that occurred on April 4, 1946, at Nakamura Hospital in
i
mori district, not far from the RAA’s comfort station quarter. At around 11:30 at night, three military trucks stopped in front of the hospital, throwing their headlights upon the hospital building. Then, at the signal of a whistle, about 50 US soldiers dashed out of the trucks and invaded the hospital from various directions, breaking windows and doors. They raped all 17 nurses on night duty, about 20 nursing assistants, and more than 40 female patients, including a woman who had just delivered a baby. A two-day-old baby was thrown out of the mother’s bed onto the floor and killed. There were some male patients in the hospital, but two who tried to protect the women were shot. The soldiers left the hospital after about an hour’s sexual orgy.100

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Japanese comfort women for the Allied forces
Plate 6.6
Japanese prostitutes in Tokyo who were rounded up by Japanese policemen and military police of the occupation forces and brought to a hospital for VD

check-ups in November 1948.

Source: Mainichi Shimbun

There were many other reported cases of rape committed by GIs in this and other districts, such as Kamata and Haneda, between April and June that year.

In most cases, the perpetrators were never identified.101

Another large-scale organized rape occurred in Nagoya. At midnight on April 11, one of the blocks in Naka ward of Nagoya city was surrounded by US

soldiers (said to have been between 30 and 60 in number). They had come in a jeep and a truck. They cut off the telephone lines of the entire block and intruded into a number of houses simultaneously, raping many girls and women between the ages of 10 and 55 years.102

Also at this time the number of so-called “special maids,” working for officers of the occupation forces, greatly increased. In October 1945, fewer than 3,000

were employed as “special maids” throughout Japan. By June 1946 more than 19,000 women were working as “special maids.” According to Itsushima Tsutomu, 52 percent of these women were former employees of the occupation troops, 17

percent had been working at dance halls, cabarets, nightclubs and the like, and the rest – 31 percent – were women whom the officers had met in town or through organized activities, such as Christian church functions.103

Of course, some women among them eventually married the officers and migrated to the US, Australia, and other Allied nations. These women numbered less than 5 percent of the “special maids,” the majority performing a role
Japanese comfort women for the Allied forces
165

as “temporary wives” while the officers were stationed in Japan.104 With officers’

privileges and salaries, it was quite easy for them to have such “temporary wives”

and thus avoid the prostitution restrictions. Some low-ranking officers rented apartments in order to keep “temporary wives” and commuted to them almost every day. These women were called “only-san,” as each of them was paid to serve only one particular man. According to a survey conducted by Yokohama city police office in late September 1951 (several months before the occupation officially ended), 1,186 out of 3,895 prostitutes in the city – more than 30

percent – were “only-san.” In addition, 680 (17.5 percent) were so-called “butterflies” – women who entered verbal contracts with several GIs at the same time and served them individually at different times or on different days. The “contracted clients” of these “butterflies” were mainly rank-and-file soldiers of the occupation forces, who could not afford to keep “only-san.” There were also 221 “Y
d
pan”, prostitutes serving only GIs.105

Some years later, during the Korean War, Japan served as the military work-shop for the US and Australian forces fighting in Korea. It was also used for rest and recreation (R&R) for the soldiers. Soldiers were entitled to five days’ holiday for every six weeks’ combat duty in Korea. During these times GIs utilized the services provided by Japanese sex workers. For these soldiers, this holiday scheme was called “I&I” (intercourse and intoxication) instead of R&R. According to one informed estimate, in 1952, there were between 70,000 and 80,000 “Y
d
pan”

in Japan. In Yokosuka city alone, in that year, the total revenue from prostitution serving the US troops was estimated at between 200 million and 300 million yen.106 In his speech at the graduation ceremony of Tokyo University in March 1952, following the end of occupation, Professor Yanaihara Tadao, then the President of Tokyo University and a well-known historian, stated that the US

troops’ exploitation of postwar prostitution had affected Japanese society “no less than that of the destructive power of the A-bombs” dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.107

There is no doubt that the US occupation forces led by General MacArthur brought various progressive policies to Japan, including polices that directly advanced political, educational, social, and job opportunities for women. In the end, they reformed the semi-feudalist and undemocratic social and economic institutions of Japan to a considerable degree. Yet, as far as the prostitution business and the plight of tens of thousands of Japanese women working in this industry are concerned, the occupation forces, far from implementing “democratization policies,” actively participated in their subjugation. Not only did they fail in this regard, but, as we have seen, their VD prevention policies failed both GIs and the women who served them. In this sense, the Allied forces who participated in the occupation of Japan, from ordinary soldiers up to the staff of the PHW Section of the GHQ and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers himself, were all responsible for the tribulation that many Japanese women experienced. As this study has shown, some Japanese men – politicians, policemen, brothel proprietors and the like – who collaborated with the occupation forces behind the excuse of “protecting Japanese women,” were also accountable.108

166

Japanese comfort women for the Allied forces
During the Asia-Pacific War, the comfort women system was established wherever Japanese troops were based across the length and breadth of the Asia-Pacific region. That system was maintained both to prevent rape of local women by Japanese troops and to provide controlled forms of entertainment for millions of draftees fighting and dying far from home. Yet the scheme was a miserable failure in many of its goals. Tens of thousands of Asian women became the victims of systematic military sexual violence,
i.e.
crimes against humanity, which were fraudulently described as “comforting” Japanese soldiers. Thousands more were subject to rape and abuse in military campaigns in contested areas that took women as well as men as the targets for attack and killing.

A system with striking similarities to that of the wartime comfort women system was hastily set up as soon as the war was brought to an end – this time targeting not Asian women but Japanese “prostitutes” for the purpose of “protecting Japanese women and girls” or, stated differently, in order to attempt to control and limit the anticipated rapacious activities of occupying forces. As we have seen, however, the result was a rapid propagation of the sex industry throughout Japan with many unintended consequences, including an uncontrollable VD epidemic. In this system many Japanese women and girls were recruited and harshly exploited. Large numbers of men from the Allied nations took advantage of the socio-economic and power imbalance conditions at the time in order to “comfort” themselves, and some Japanese men benefited by victimizing Japanese women. Such were the grim realities of the comfort women system, about which most of our fathers – not only the Japanese, but also those in the US, Australia, and other Allied nations – have kept silent so long. It would seem, therefore, that from the perspective of these women, both those men who raped them and those who supposedly protected them became exploiters.

Epilogue

167

Epilogue

From karayuki-san to comfort woman

The comfort women system that the Japanese Imperial forces established originally in China in the early 1930s quickly expanded to almost every corner of the Asia-Pacific region following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It became the largest and most elaborate system of trafficking in women in the history of mankind, and one of the most brutal.

The scale of the operation was unprecedented in several ways: the number of women involved, the international scope of the operation, the scale of the military-organized system required for procuring women, the length of time over which the system operated, and the geographical breadth of Japan’s wartime empire wherein the system was administered.

But this was not the first time that Japan had engaged in widespread trafficking in women in the Asia-Pacific region for the purpose of sexual exploitation. From the final years of the Tokugawa regime in the mid-nineteenth century, the authority of the Shogunate over daimyo (feudal lords), then in decline, finally collapsed over the long-standing policy of national isolation. This was due to the increasing number of foreign ships that visited Japanese ports and the pressure to open up the country for trade. It was around this time that young women began to be smuggled out of Japan and sold to brothels in neighboring countries, in particular China and the east coast of Russia. These women were called karayuki-san, which literary means “a person travelling to China.” Originally coined by the people of northern Kyushu to refer to those who sought work overseas, the term came to be applied specifically to the impoverished rural women sold into prostitution far from home.

Shortly after the Meiji Restoration – the establishment of the modern Japanese state in 1868 – the number of karayuki-san increased rapidly. Within the following few decades, their destinations included various parts of Southeast Asia, India, Australia, Hawaii, the east coast of the US, and even as far as Cape Town in South Africa. However, the major business centers for this Japanese sex industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Vladivostok, Shanghai, and Singapore.1

When a Japanese government trade representative, Sewaki Kazuto, first visited Vladivostok in 1875, only eight years after the new Meiji government was 168

Epilogue

established, he found a brothel run by a Japanese proprietor in which Japanese prostitutes served Russian clients. By 1887, the number of Japanese residents in Vladivostok had increased to between 4,000 and 5,000, over 200 of whom were karayuki-san. Many of these women were from Shimabara in Kyushu, one of the most impoverished regions in Nagasaki prefecture.2 In the late Tokugawa period, Nagasaki was one of several Japanese ports of call for foreign ships, including Russian navy ships. There brothels were frequented by foreign visitors.

It seems that brothel proprietors in Nagasaki soon found that operating the business for foreigners, in particular Westerners, was far more profitable than serving domestic clients. Thus they took their business off-shore to port cities like Vladivostok, Shanghai, and Singapore.

From the mid-nineteenth century, prostitution began to thrive in the foreign settlements of Shanghai, where mainly Chinese prostitutes served Westerners, in particular sailors from Britain, the US, and France. As a result, Shanghai was selected as a major destination for Japanese brothel owners. By 1882 the population of karayuki-san in Shanghai was as high as 800.3 The Japanese consulate in Shanghai regarded this sudden increase in Japanese prostitutes as “a national disgrace.” As a consequence, in 1883, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs adopted a policy of cracking down on the prostitution business in Shanghai in order to force karayuki-san to return to Japan. Following this, more than 500

karayuki-san were sent back to Japan in the years 1884 and 1885. However, about 200 women remained in the city, secretly engaging in the business. Later, in the mid-1910s, recognizing the difficulty of suppressing Japanese prostitution, the Japanese consulate in Shanghai changed its policy to one of “control” and introduced a licensing system.4 As mentioned in Chapter 1, it was some of these government-regulated Japanese brothels operating in Shanghai that were used by the Japanese Imperial Navy as
Ianjo
(comfort stations), shortly after the Shanghai Incident in 1938.