ERECTING THE PACIFIC

ERECTING

COMFORT

STATIONS

“Comfort woman”, also known as military comfort women, Japanese jūgun ianfu,
is a euphemism for women who provided sexual services to Japanese Imperial Army troops.

During Japan’s militaristic period, that ended with World War II, “comfort women” generally lived under conditions of sexual slavery. To emphasize that these girls were recruited when they were still minors at the time of their recruitment.

The girl’s age ranges from 12-24.

The “comfort women” were treated as “military supplies” but relevant documents were either hidden or destroyed at the end of the war. It is impossible to know, therefore, how many women were exploited. The best estimates range from 80, 000 to 100,000. According to the Japanese military plan devised in July 1941. 20,000 “comfort women” were required for every 800,000 Japanese soldiers, or one every 40 soldiers. There were 3.5 million Japanese soldiers sent to China and Southeast Asia during the war, and therefore, by this calculation, an estimated 90,000 women were mobilized.

Of these women, 80 percent are believed to have been Koreans, but many also came from Taiwan, China and the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Why were “comfort women” almost invariably from Taiwan, China or various places in Southeast Asia, and above all Korea? This might seem odd at first, given that the Japanese were notorious for their racism towards the people of other Asian countries. However, racial prejudice provides part of the answer to the question – that very racism helped make these women suitable for the role of comfort women.

Japan invading Manchuria during the Japanese Russo War.

Why did Japan start using “Comfort Women” within the Military Culture?

Before Japan would invade and spread across China and the other nearby nations, the japanese had a brief conflict with the Russian army. It was during this time the origins of the comfort women system would find its roots. The Japanese would expand into Russian-occupied territory and claimed it as their own. During the Serbian expedition, the majority of the Japanese troops sent to Siberia had very low morale, as well as the goals of the mission being unclear to all except commanders.

The discipline of these troops was slack. Widespread looting and rape by Japanese troops on Russian soil gravely concerned Japanese military leaders.

The Japanese commanders in Siberia were also troubled by the high Venereal Disease rate amongst their troops. In order to tackle this problem, the “kempeitai” (the Japanese military police force) were authorized to regulate private prostitution in Sakhalin and to force the prostitutes to have periodical medical examinations. It can be said, therefore, that the establishment of military brothels in Shanghai in the 1930s, by both the Japanese Navy and Army, was a natural development from regulated prostitution in Siberia.

Recruitment of Japanese Women

Around the Shanghai Incident, General Okamura Yasuji requested the Governor of Nagasaki prefecture (Kyushu) to send a group of comfort women to Shanghai. Many so-called karayuki-san (Japanese prostitutes working at overseas brothels) of poor family background in Nagasaki had previously been sold by their parents to procurers and sent to various places in the Asia-Pacific region. It is clear from Okamura’s private records that the army intended to use Japanese professional women, rather than Koreans, as “comfort women” at this stage.

Japanese military leaders did not believe Japanese women should be in that role.
Japanese women with an abundance of Japanese babies.

Japanese prostitutes did serve the military abroad during the war, but most were in a different position from the “comfort women”. The Japanese prostitutes mainly worked in comfort stations that served high-ranking officers, and they experienced better conditions than the Asian comfort women. Apart from the difficulty in recruiting Japanese women into comfort stations, Japanese military leaders did not believe Japanese women should be in that role. The Japanese wartime government took its lead from Nazieugenic ideology and policy in these matters. In 1940 the National Eugenic Law was proclaimed. The purposes of the law were to prevent miscegenation and there production of the “unfit,” such as those with mental illness that was believed to be inherited.

So hypocritical was the Japanese military leaders’ attitude that on the one hand they strongly demanded that Japanese women be chaste, while on the other they did not hesitate to preside over the extreme sexual exploitation of other Asian women.

Their mission was to bear and bring up good Japanese children, who would grow up to be loyal subjects of the Emperor rather than being the means for men to satisfy their sexual urges.

Recruitment within the Colonies

Military leaders soon realized, however, that the recruitment of large numbers of Japanese professional women was far from easy. The exploitation of Korean women was then planned and implemented. Initially Koreans resident in Japan, and in particular from Kyushu Island, were used for this purpose, then massive numbers of young women from Korea were mobilized.

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 seems that the “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.” However, the demand for women skyrocketed as the empire continued to expand.

KOREAN

TAIWANESE

DUTCH EAST INDIES

CHINESE

FILIPINA

Procurement of Korea Women

Korean girls were lured with false promises of employment in Japan or in other Japanese occupied territories. For these girls recruited from Korea and Taiwan, labor brokers rarely told the girls and their parents the truth. They would give a false impression that the girls would be working as nurses, housemaids or factory workers. A survey of 20 Korean women captured in Burma, conducted by the Psychological Warfare Team attached to the US Army forces in the India-Burma theater, reveals that they were deceived and made to believe that their service would pay off family debts.

In Korea, 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, or a kitchen helper. 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 poor peasants families, knowing that it was relatively easy to trick them.

The most common expedient used in Korea and Taiwan was deceit

In the case of the “recruitment” of Yun Turi, a young girl in Busan, 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 Busan 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.”

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.

Recruitment of Taiwanese Women

It seems also that in Taiwan (another colony of Japan) the most common tactic used for the recruitment of young Taiwanese women was false promises of employment in Japan or other Japanese occupied territories. Unfortunately, detailed information regarding the experiences of Taiwanese comfort women is not available. So far 50 former comfort women have been identified, of whom 30 are still alive.

The “high salary” promised by the labor broker was also an attraction for these poorly paid women.

However we do know that, according to a report in June 1993 prepared by an organization called the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation, 18 of the women had been working as either waitresses at restaurants or cafes, as bar hostesses or as maids at inns. It seems that most of these women had been sold to these places due to their families’ desperate financial straits. About half of these women had been, in reality, working as prostitutes. They were approached by a labor broker and offered a job as a kitchen helper or a waitress at a military canteen, or a hostess at an officers’ club. Another group of 12 women had been working as laundry workers, cleaning ladies, factory workers and the like.

These 12, also approached by a labor broker, had been promised jobs as a nurse helper, kitchen helper, or laundry worker for the Japanese troops. Labor brokers came from both Japan and Taiwan, and, as was the case in Korea, it was common for a Japanese and a local to work as a pair.

Recruitment of Dutch East Indies Women

In Korea and Taiwan, the “recruitment” of women was usually carried out by Japanese or local labor brokers. In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where the local population generally welcomed the entrance of the Japanese Imperial forces into the territories.

The Japanese Imperial forces were seen as “liberators” from Dutch colonialism.

Deceit was also a common tactic employed by the Japanese to procure local women. Forcible recruitment by intimidation or violence, such as the case of Dutch women and girls who were forcibly taken out of the detention camps in Java and pressed into comfort stations, was not a common method in this region.

From various testimonies of former “comfort women”, it is strongly believed that kidnapping and abduction were not widely used as methods. This would mean, in the rest of Japan’s colonial territories that they did use this method to procure these women.

Recruitment of Chinese Women

Comfort stations used Chinese comfort women, who it is strongly believed were local residents, not prostitutes. About 12,000 women had taken shelter at the university to escape Japanese atrocities. The collaborator tried to persuade the women to become comfort women, claiming that their safety would be guaranteed and that they would be rewarded for their service. This attempt failed. Then the Japanese troops and their collaborators raided civilian homes and abducted about 300 women, of whom about 100 were selected to work as comfort women.

It was not long before comfort stations in China were staffed with Koreans rather than local Chinese women. This shift in the army’s policy was probably made for three main reasons. Firstly, it seems that pressing local civilians into military prostitution was seen by the military authorities as an unwise strategy, as it would further arouse anti-Japanese sentiment among the local Chinese civilians. Secondly, Koreans were regarded by the Japanese as the people who were culturally and ideologically much closer to the Japanese than the Chinese were. The fact that many Koreans could understand the Japanese language – a result of Japan’s colonization – was seen as another advantage of using Korean girls. It also seems that the Japanese were very concerned about the danger of local Chinese women, who they feared could be used as spies by the Chinese forces. Thus, at almost all of the officially approved comfort stations established in China from Manchuria in the north to Guangzhou in the south, Koreans were the most commonly exploited comfort women.

Li Xiumei was 15 years old when she was abducted by four Japanese soldiers from her home in a small village called Lizhuang, in Yu prefecture in September 1942. In her testimony:

“
While I went to fetch firewood with my uncles and neighbors for my family, I was caught and raped by three Japanese, one of whom seemed to be an officer. After two weeks I was again raped by the same Japanese officer, while fetching firewood. I felt strong anger toward the Japanese military, and joined the HUKBALAHAP, an anti-Japanese guerilla group. A year passed. In April 1943 I was arrested by Japanese at a check point in the suburbs of Anheles and taken to the headquarters. There I was forced to be a “comfort woman.”

Recruitment of Filipina Women

When we closely examine the testimonies of the former Filipina comfort women, we note similarities between the procurement methods used in China and in the Philippines. Several official documents which refer to comfort stations in the Philippines have been found in archives in Japan and the US. According to one of these documents, in Manila alone, in early 1943, there were 17 comfort stations for the rank-and-file soldiers, “staffed” by a total of 1,064 comfort women. In addition, there were four officers’ clubs served by more than 120 women. No information is available as to the nationality of these comfort women. Other documents reveal the fact that comfort stations were also located at Iloilo on Panay Island, Butuan and Cagayan de Oro on Mindanao Island, Masbate on Masbate Island,and Ormoc and Tacloban on Leyte Island. It is almost certain that there were comfort stations at many other places in the Philippines. These documents do not disclose much information about the comfort women, but a few, such as those referring to comfort stations in Iloilo, mention a number of Filipina comfort women, including several girls between 16 and 20 years old. It is almost impossible to know from the archival documents how these women were “recruited” and under what conditions they were forced to serve the Japanese troops.

In areas of the Philippines where resistance was strong, Japanese troops tended to regard any civilian as a “possible guerilla collaborator,” and therefore felt justified in doing anything to “women belonging to the enemy.”

The main reason for such direct action by the Japanese troops in the Philippines may lie in the fact that the anti-Japanese guerilla movement was strong and widespread throughout the occupation period, as in “liberated districts” in China. It is said that there were more than 100 guerrilla organizations at the peak, involving about 270,000 activists and associates. Hukbalahap, which Maria Rosa Henson joined, was one of the largest of these guerrilla organizations. It was comprised predominantly of peasants and workers under the influence of the Communist Party. As a result of this strong anti-Japanese movement, the Japanese were able to control only 30 percent of the Philippines. Guerrilla activities were particularly strong on Luzon and Panay. The fact that the majority of the people who have so far been identified as former comfort women were residents of these two islands also suggests the close link between Japanese sexual violence against civilians and the strength of popular guerrilla resistance.

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Engulfing the Pacific
Living Conditions
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