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Imperial War
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Commons
"Comfort women" were women
provided to Japanese troops by the Japanese
Army for sexual purposes. While Japanese military leaders were not alone in
providing prostitutes to their men (at least one American division in Australia set up its own brothel),
there is clear and convincing evidence that the majority of comfort
women were recruited either under false pretenses or by force, then
treated with great cruelty.
Chin Jinyu, a Chinese woman who was sixteen years old in 1944, was ordered by Japanese occupation troops to report to a "battlefield rear-service group." She did not understand what this meant and welcomed the opportunity to escape a hard agricultural life. A week later, she learned the true nature of her new assignment when she was gang-raped by Japanese troops. Her first attempt to run away was foiled when a Japanese interpreter threatened her family if she did not return to her duties. In June 1945, she escaped a second time to the mountains until word came that the war was over.
The evidence suggests that comfort women were recruited both by private contractors and by the Army itself. The Kempeitai has been accussed of doing much of the pimping for the Army. However, the Japanese Army destroyed most of its records on the announcement of the surrender, and little written documentation regarding the comfort women remains. Japanese nationalists argue that the number of comfort women was small and that they were all ordinary prostitutes. They point to contradictions in testimony given decades after the fact as evidence that the women involved are lying about the circumstances of their recruitment. However, the majority of historians, including some Japanese historians, have concluded that there were as many as 200,000 comfort women and that the overwhelming majority of them were involuntary participants in the system. According to these historians, about 80% were Koreans.
Surviving comfort women testify of appalling treatment. Some were forced to have sex with as many as 50 men per day. Those who were not cooperative or contracted venereal disease were beaten, and those who became pregnant were often murdered. Tan Yudong, a nineteen-year-old comfort woman, reported the fate of a comrade who failed to take contraceptives and became pregnant (Hastings 2007):
They didn't want this baby to be born so they hung this poor girl from a tree. They killed her by cutting her open with a knife in front of all the people of our village. I was quite close, only six or seven meters away. I could see the baby moving.
If the mainstream historical estimates are correct, then the
Japanese Army's recruitment of comfort women constituted a mass rape
historically exceeded only by that carried out by Soviet troops in eastern and central
Europe in the closing months of the European war.
The Japanese government also recruited 55,000 Japanese women for the
"Recreation and Amusement Association" following the surrender. These
women were expected to form a "sexual dike" to protect the rest of
Japanese
womanhood from the appetites of their occupiers. There is evidence many
of these women were recruited by coercion. It is unclear how much the
U.S. occupation authorities knew about the program, but in March 1946
the RAA brothels were declared off-limits to U.S. personnel.
References
The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2008-2009 by Kent G. Budge. Index
