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Topic: RSS FeedSex Slaves for the Emperor. - Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation - book review
Contemporary Review , Sept, 2002 by Raymond Lamont-Brown
Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation. Yuki Tanaka. Routledge. [pounds sterling]55.00. ISBN 0-415-19400-8.
To the servicemen of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy of World War II they were Jugun Ianfu. To the foreign media they have become 'comfort women', legions of damned young women who had remained in anonymous shadows of hardship and shame for almost sixty years until in the 1990s a shocked world heard their horrific stories. This was a consequence of publicity surrounding a lawsuit in a Tokyo court in December 1991, in which three Korean women, who had been abducted into Rikugun Ianjo [military brothels], filed a claim for reparation against the Japanese government. They predictably failed in their endeavours, but did succeed in attracting world attention to a further Japanese war crime against humanity.
It is estimated that from the 1930s to 1945 between 100,000 and 200,000 women -- mostly from Japan's colony of Chosen [Korea] -- were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. Women, some as young as twelve when their ordeal began, endured years of coercion, violence, abduction, rape and wrongful imprisonment at the hands of the Japanese. Successive post-war Japanese governments refused to acknowledge what had taken place, a situation compounded by the indifference to the former comfort women's plight by the wartime Allies. A coalition of Korean women's groups, church organisations and Japanese feminists have combined to publicise the sufferings of these, now elderly, survivors and have endeavoured to correct a historical wrong.
During World War II the Japanese Imperial Forces Ministries, the Foreign Office, the secret police, the military and naval police and local 'recruiters' ran a highly organised prostitution network to supply the military brothels with Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese and Filipino women. It should be added that this trafficking also included Dutch women from PoW camps, Eurasian and Indonesian females. It is important to note, too, that this trafficking was carried out by official Imperial Edict and was an established policy known and approved by such as convicted Class A war criminal and General Vice-Minister of War, Yashijiro Umezu.
Japanologists will be familiar with the research of Yuki Tanaka, Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima City University, Japan, who has already produced provocative work on Japanese World War II war crimes. In this new book he brings welcome attention to the extant sources on comfort women in Japanese archives and elsewhere. This detective work is particularly useful as a vast number of official records were deliberately destroyed by both the Japanese and the Allies immediately after Japan's surrender in August 1945. Further, much World War II material in such archives as the Gyomu Nisshi [Records of Military Plans and Operations] are not open to the public at the Research Library of the Japanese Defence Agency. There is no Freedom of Information Act in Japan.
Yuki Tanaka begins by introducing the historical process that spawned the comfort women system which scholars agree began proper in China after the 'Shanghai Incident' of 1932, and how it was expanded and exploited in Japanese occupied territories from Manchuquo [Manchuria] to Shonan [Singapore]. His subject matter also reveals the linking of this system with that of the karayuki-san network of overseas prostitution involving large numbers of Japanese women.
Professor Yuki's book is doubly welcome because he brings fresh attention to the extent and nature of sexual violence perpetrated by American and Australian occupation servicemen immediately after the landings in Japan following Operation Olympia and Coronet of August-September 1945. Further, he examines how and why the military prostitution system, which had certain similarities to the wartime comfort women network, was devised to serve Allied troops in occupied Japan. In all this he shows how the Japanese prostitution industry, the civilian police and the Japanese government of such as Soridaijin [Prime Ministers] Baron Kijuro Shidehara and Shigeru Yoshida collaborated with the GHQ of the Allied Occupation Force in this matter. This cooperation, by the by, contributed to the expansion of the prostitution system in postwar Japan.
Prof. Tanaka recounts a tragic, cruel and heart-rending story which adds much to the pool of knowledge in English on Japanese war atrocities. Further, he sets out a cogent theoretical analysis of the basic structure of military violence against women in general.
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