Japan's Comfort Women (39 page)

percent) of the cases he and his colleagues examined could be categorized as power rapes, while about 40 percent were anger rapes and 5 percent were sadistic rapes.33 The feeling of helplessness is particularly enhanced while men are involved in fierce combat. In war, soldiers frequently feel that their own fate is beyond their control and that they could be killed at any time. They need to feel powerful and many resort to aggressive behavior in order to overcome this feeling of helplessness. To achieve this goal, sex becomes their weapon and its consequence is the destruction of women. However, the sexual exploitation of women provides only momentary relief from such debilitated feelings, and it does not solve the problem of vulnerability. Thus, soldiers have to continually rely upon these self-deceptive, temporary measures of “power rape.” This helps to explain the frequent brutality of Japanese soldiers towards comfort women, particularly after returning from battle. They needed someone to vanquish in order to feel that they were the master of their own fate, although the satisfaction gained from such victimization of women was brief and illusory. In the Philippines and many parts of China, as we have seen in Chapter 2, the comfort women system revealed its real nature – power rape. When it was set up and operated in these places where the Japanese military could not destroy the enemy and control its own fate, it was not even disguised as a “commercial transaction.”

For a soldier who is placed in a life-or-death situation, and whose humanity is threatened by merciless war, abstract moral concepts such as “international law”

or “crimes against humanity” may have little immediate or effective meaning. It was not only in World War II, but also in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Chechnya, among many others, that international law was ignored and many women were victimized by rape and massacre. This is because, as we have seen, the sexual abuse of women is 178

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one of the inevitable aspects of war. In order to prevent military violence and forced prostitution (the Japanese comfort women system providing an extreme example), it is necessary to re-examine the very nature of the organization of military forces and of war in general.

Although military violence against women is heightened to extreme levels during war, such a firm-rooted tendency towards the sexual exploitation of women by military men is not limited to wartime. The fact that soldiers are possessed of a strong propensity to commit sexual violence even in peacetime is well supported by studies of base area prostitution, including numerous criminal cases involving soldiers. For example, it is well known that sexual violence committed by US military personnel was long endemic at its Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines, which it operated until the end of 1992. It remains a serious concern for residents living near the US military bases in Okinawa and Korea. Military violence against Okinawan women continued after the Battle of Okinawa, despite a widespread clandestine prostitution that was regulated by the US military authorities. For example, in 1955, a 6-year-old girl, Nagayama Yumiko, in Ishikawa city, was abducted, raped, and murdered by a GI stationed at Kadena Base. This is only one, if the most shocking, of numerous cases of sexual crimes committed by American soldiers in Okinawa over the past half century.34 One of the most widely publicized cases was the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl on her way home from shopping by three US servicemen in September 1995. The incident triggered massive demonstrations against the location of US military facilities on Okinawa.35 In Korea, too, in the 20 years between 1967 and 1987, there were 72 reported cases of rape, in addition to numerous cases of physical violence against women committed by the members of the US troops stationed there. The most shocking case in Korea is probably the murder of Yun Kumi, a 26-year-old employee at one of the US military recreation clubs. She was killed by a young US soldier in October 1992. Her dead body was covered with heavy bruises, two beer bottles and a coke bottle being inserted in her vagina.36

However, the fact that many sex workers serving US soldiers in Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines, Japan and elsewhere are also confronting sexual violence every day receives little public attention simply because they are “prostitutes.”

Yet, the sex industry around the military bases continues to function with no sign of disappearing. As Cynthia Enloe clearly demonstrated in her study of contemporary military prostitution, military organizations in general require the service provided by prostitutes in order to confirm and reconfirm a militarized masculinity.37 Soldiers are expected, indeed trained, to constantly demonstrate their masculinity and dominant power over the potential enemy, even in peacetime, and the notion of masculinity naturally involves the expectation of vigorous, even exploitative, sexual activity as a “tough guy.” Therefore, military prostitution is different from other types of commercialized sex in the sense that “there are explicit steps taken by state institutions to protect male customers without undermin-ing their perception of themselves as sexualized men.”38 In other words, military and state authorities are predisposed not only to tolerate military-controlled

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prostitution, but also to encourage soldiers’ macho involvement in sexual activity, in order to enhance their aggressiveness. It is not surprising, therefore, to find high levels of sexual violence committed by soldiers against women living near military bases, despite provision of military-controlled prostitution. The fundamental cause of sexual violence committed by soldiers both in war and peacetime is this military culture of sexualized masculinity, a phenomenon common to military organizations regardless of nationality.

Have any military organizations broken the pattern of militarized and sexualized masculinity? Only further research will provide a satisfactory answer to this question. The slender available evidence, however, suggests that some national liberation movements fighting for independence, including China’s People’s Liberation Army in the anti-Japanese resistance and the civil war of 1937–1939, and the Vietnamese forces resisting the US and its allies in the 1960s and 1970s, worked to curb and punish rape. Cases of serious sexual crimes committed by members of the Chinese and Vietnamese liberation armies appear to have been rare. It may be argued that this is because they were hardly faced with “women belonging to the enemy” given the geopolitical situation of their conflict. Yet it is true that, while a large number of Japanese women left in Manchuria at the end of the Asia-Pacific War were raped by invading Russian troops, very few Japanese women have testified to rape by Chinese soldiers. It also appears that neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese liberation armies had extensive access to prostitution services, whether organized by the military or the market, in contrast to the Guomindang and South Vietnamese and American forces that were their foes. The limited evidence suggests that the sexual morale and conduct of these national liberation forces were superior to those of their enemies, even in the face of protracted punishment by foes with superior weapons and resources. So, what kept their morale high and their conduct disciplined under punishing conditions? The answer lies in no small part in their nationalist commitment to the cause of resisting the military domination, colonization, and systematic barbarism of the invading forces. Those in the liberation movement were well aware of the consequences of occupation and colonization of their nations. They must have been conscious of what would happen to the women in the course of their nations being colonized or occupied by enemy troops, i.e., the frequently barbarous treatment of their nation’s women.

The Chinese people were familiar with the plague of rapes committed by the Japanese and their puppet soldiers, though the extent of their familiality with the comfort women system is not certain. So, too, the Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, and especially DRV and NLF forces, knew of the sexual misconduct of American soldiers stationed in Vietnam. In other words, consciously or unconsciously, they perceived the indissoluble link between sexual exploitation and colonization. It is possible that this knowledge of the sexual exploitation of their enemies and the nature of the patriotic independence struggle contributed to the creation and maintenance of an attitude that kept sexual abuse in check at least for the duration of the liberation and independence wars. This is a subject that merits further study.

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Imperialism, the patriarchal state, and the control
of sexuality

The colonization of one race by another or subordination of one racial group to another frequently involves the sexual exploitation of the women of the subordinated group by the men of the dominant one. For example, in the early stages of the British colonization of Australia, a large number of Aboriginal women were raped by white settlers, which caused widespread VD among the Aboriginal women. This consequently made many young Aboriginal women infertile, which eventually led to a rapid decrease in the Aboriginal population.39 An almost identical phenomenon can be found in the modern history of the Ainu – the Japanese aboriginal people – whose population quickly declined after the movement of Japanese men – Wajin – from the main island to the Ainu homeland, the island of Hokkaido, in the late Tokugawa era.40

Colonization also frequently gives rise to widespread prostitution involving indigenous women. This happened in Korea and Taiwan after Japanese colonization, in India under the British,41 and in the Dutch East Indies under the Dutch colonial government,42 to name but a few. These are examples of the interlinkage of political and sexual domination, often with terrible and long-lasting physical and emotional effects on the colonized. The power over female members of a subjugated people is emblematic of the power exercised by colonial administrators to dominate colonial subjects. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria illustrates the parallel between changing political and sexual relationships. Before the Japanese gained control, Japanese prostitutes in the territory served non-Japanese as well as Japanese clients. But that changed under Japanese rule, when the authorities prohibited Japanese prostitutes from serving non-Japanese customers. In the eyes of Japanese power holders, the bodies of women of their own racial group should not be penetrated by foreigners – an act symbolizing the invasion and deprivation of the motherland. This is the converse of the phenomenon of the active sexual exploitation of women of an invaded nation by the conquering force. Sexual exploitation affects the psyche of the occupied nation; it becomes de-masculinized, feminized, and subjugated. What the Japanese leaders were really trying to avoid by providing so-called “professional women” for the Allied forces following the end of the Asia-Pacific War was not the loss of the virginity of Japanese young women but the feminization of themselves by the occupation forces. They sought to avoid the humiliation of being feminized by sacrificing a limited number of “prostitutes,”
i.e.
women viewed as marginal to the nation-state. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this scheme to contain the occupying forces failed miserably. Eventually, all of Japan came to be seen by the Allied soldiers as “one big brothel.” Surely these patriarchal politicians could not have conceived a more humiliating situation. By corrupting one of the most private and intimate aspects of human life into humiliatingly open and impersonal conduct, the systems of imperialism and militarism establish political authority.

Conversely, therefore, popular slogans of political movements resisting colonization or military occupation by a foreign nation often use rhetorical expressions

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to symbolize the purity of their nation. For example, in South Korea during the recent campaign against SOFA,43
i.e.
the security agreement with the US, the slogan “Let us keep the virginity of our race” was repeatedly used in order to gain popular support for the movement . When the above-mentioned murder of a Korean sex worker, Yun Kumi, by a US soldier occurred in 1992, condemna-tion of the crime by the mass media promoted Yun Kumi as a “virgin victim.”

Thus, the symbolic victim of sexual violence by members of the occupying military forces must not be someone already rendering sexual service to them.

She must be an innocent whose virginity embodies racial purity.44

Iris Young identifies the following five faces of oppression to which prostitutes are generally subjected: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.45 These five apply not only to all forms of prostitution, but with particular force both to the comfort women system and to rape. Indeed, the comfort women system was a highly organized, systematic form of military rape. In its essence, as I have argued, the comfort women system was no different from any other type of prostitution or rape. However, it was clearly different in degree when measured against the above-mentioned five aspects of oppression. In all the areas where they were used, comfort women undoubtedly experienced the most extreme degrees of oppression. (Another, more recent, group of women who suffered a similar degree of oppression were the rape victims in Bosnia-Herzegovina.)

The comfort women system also differed from many other types of organized prostitution in the sense that it was organized at the highest echelon of the military, which planned and implemented it in co-operation with the state authorities. (In this sense too, the Yugoslavian military forces and the government seem to have organized sexual atrocities as a deliberate policy.) It was indeed different from any other forms of sexual exploitation in the sense that tens of thousands of women – Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipinas, and other Asian women as well as some Dutch women – became victims of military rape and were forced to endure intense physical abuse over a long period. In other words, it was an unprecedented case in terms of the violation of the basic human rights of so large a number of women of different nationalities who were violated and abused as “sex slaves” over a considerable period.