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Comfort women (慰安婦, ianfu) or military comfort women (従軍慰安婦, jūgun-ianfu) is a euphemism for women who were forced to work as sex slaves in military brothels in Japanese-occupied countries during World War II.

The majority of the women were Korean and Chinese. Others came from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Dutch East Indies, and other Japanese-occupied countries and regions, according to Kanto Gakuin University professor Hirofumi Hayashi.

Estimates of the number of comfort women during the war range from 80,000 to 200,000, with testimony by surviving comfort women suggesting a number at the higher end of the scale.

Most of the brothels where comfort women served were located in Japanese military bases but were managed by local people, not troops.

This aspect of World War II has received relatively little international attention or mention in textbooks and encyclopedias. The Japanese government has refused to take responsibility for the policy or to apologize to and compensate the victims, many of whom have been left in a difficult financial, social, and emotional position.

Brothels as part of Japanese military policy

Historical research into Japanese government records documents several reasons given for the establishment of military brothels. First, Japanese authorities hoped that by providing easily accessible prostitutes and sexual slaves, the morale and ultimately the military effectiveness of Japanese soldiers would be improved. Second, by institutionalizing brothels and placing them under official scrutiny, the government hoped to control the spread of STDs. Lastly, creating brothels in military bases directly on the front line removed the perceived need to grant leave to soldiers.

In the early stages of the war, Japanese authorities recruited prostitutes through conventional means. Middlemen advertised for prostitutes in newspapers circulating in Japan and the Japanese colonies of Korea, Manchukuo, and mainland China. Many who answered the advertisements were already prostitutes and offered their services voluntarily. Others were sold by their families to the military due to economic hardship.

However, these sources soon dried up, especially from Japan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs resisted further issuances of travel visas for Japanese prostitutes, feeling it tarnished the image of the Japanese Empire. The military turned to acquiring comfort women outside mainland Japan, especially from Korea and occupied China. Many women were tricked or defrauded into joining the military brothels. Others were kidnapped. Japanese prostitutes who remained in the military brothels often became karayukisan, or brothel managers, leaving the non-Japanese comfort women to suffer serial rapes.

The military also sought comfort women from local sources. In urban areas, conventional advertising through middlemen was used alongside kidnapping. However, along the front lines, especially in the countryside where middlemen were rare, the military often directly demanded that local leaders procure women for the brothels. This situation became worse as the war progressed. Under the strain of the war effort, the military became unable to provide enough supplies to Japanese units; in response, the units made up the difference by demanding or looting supplies from the locals. Moreover, when the locals, especially Chinese, were considered hostile, Japanese soldiers carried out the "Three Alls Policy", which included indiscriminately kidnapping and raping local civilians.

Accounts from surviving comfort women paint a grim picture of Japanese military brothels. Beatings and physical torture were not uncommon. A single woman could expect to be raped a dozen to forty times a day, often resulting in injury to the genitals. Women were divided into three or four categories, depending on their length of service. The "freshest" women were the least likely to suffer from STDs and were placed in the highest category. Virgins were usually given to officers for first rape. As time went on, the comfort women were downgraded as the likelihood of their acquiring STDs became more certain. When they were considered likely to be too diseased to be of any further use, they were abandoned, oftentimes far from home, or even in a different country, as the comfort women were shipped wherever deemed necessary. Many women reported having their uteruses rot from the diseases acquired from being raped by thousands of men over several years, at times requiring surgical removal.

As the Japanese war effort suffered reversals and the military evacuated their positions in South-East Asia, non-Japanese comfort women were often left behind. Many comfort women starved to death on desert islands thousands of miles away from home. A few managed to make incredible treks thousands of miles across mainland Asia to return to their homes in Korea and northeastern China.

Responsibility and compensation

Japan regards all World War II compensation claims to be settled.

Both South Korea and Japan mutually confirm that all claims between the countries and their people have been settled completely and finally by the Treaty on Basic Relations and Agreement of Economic Cooperation and Property Claims between Japan and the Republic of Korea in 1965. Both countries confirmed that the treaty includes all claims from South Korea on a government to government basis, but private or corporate compensations are still not settled. The female victims more than anything would like an official apology by the Japanese government. Many women have declined offers of money for compensation and would perfer acknowledgement of their ordeal.

Despite this, in 1990, the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery filed suit, demanding official apologies and crimes against humanity compensation. Several surviving comfort women also independently filed suit in the Tokyo District Court. More suits followed in the ensuing years. It was widely expected that the court would reject all of these claims on the basis of the statutes of limitation or on the basis that the state is immune from civil suits in court on the matter of war time conduct. However, these suits have helped to revive and sustain the issue of comfort women in Japan as well as in the international media.

Initially the Japanese government denied any official connection to the wartime brothels; in June of 1990, the Japanese government declared that all brothels were run by private contractors. However, in 1992, the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered incriminating documents in the archives of Japan's National Defense Agency indicating that the military was directly involved in running the brothels (by, for example, selecting the agents who recruited or coerced women into service). Since then, Japan's official position has been one of admitting "moral but not legal" responsibility.

Following official admission of a military connection to the brothels in 1992, the debate has shifted to consideration of evidence and testimony of coercive recruitment of comfort women during the war. In a number of mock trials (without cross-examination), surviving women have testified of being subjected to coercion and rape. In 1995, Japan set up an "Asia Women's Fund" for atonement in the form of material compensation and to provide each surviving comfort woman with an unofficial signed apology from the prime minister. But because of the unofficial nature of the fund, many comfort women have rejected these payments and continue to seek an official apology and compensation.

However, on 17 January, 2005, additional documents detailing the minutes of Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and South Korea were released by South Korean government. They suggest that the South Korean government agreed not to demand further compensation, either at the government or individual level, after receiving $800 million in grants and soft loans from Japan as compensation for its 1910-1945 colonial rule, and to take all responsibility for individual cases instead of Japan. This further reduces the likelihood of legal proceedings resulting in any formal admission of responsibility.

Clearly time is on the side of the Japanese government. The number of surviving comfort women has dwindled from many thousands to a mere handful, all of whom will have died in another few years.

The ongoing debate over comfort women

The popular conception of "comfort women" outside Japan is that all comfort women were kidnapped by Japanese soldiers to serve as sex slaves under direct order from the Japanese government. The Japanese who are familiar with the issue believe that there are aspects that are missed.

Prostitution and bonded labour were both legal when the events of World War II unfolded. Apologists for the Japanese government assert that if the middlemen were coercing women, then much of the blame, whether legal or moral, can be shifted to them. While there is no dispute that the sexual slaves were acquired at the behest of the Japanese, they argue that many of these middlemen were local Koreans and Chinese, not Japanese, that women were sold to middlemen by their parents out of financial privation, and that many local community leaders used trickery or coercion to provide their own local women to the Japanese. Since forcible procurement by direct action occurred alongside procurement by private middlemen, it is often difficult to separate the two.

Pointing to the complicity of locals allows those who have an incentive to absolve Japan of its war guilt and to defeat compensation claims to deflect the responsibility away from the Japanese military. They claim that Japan had merely taken advantage of an already accepted local practice. The issue is extremely controversial, especially in regard to Korean comfort women. Subsequent research strongly suggests that Japanese soldiers on the frontline did indeed force women into military brothels. However, apologists for the Japanese government suggest that somehow the context in which such acts were carried out changes the nuance of the moral responsibility for the rapes. Moreover, the existence of middlemen makes it difficult for ex-comfort women to pursue compensation claims.

In 1991, Asahi Shimbun, one of the major newspapers of Japan, ran a series on comfort women for a year. This is often regarded as the trigger of a revived controversy over comfort women in Japan, also coinciding with re-examinations of other wartime atrocities such as the Nanking Massacre. In this series the Asahi Shimbun published excerpts of the book published in 1983 by Kiyosada Yoshida Watashino sensō hanzai - Chōsenjin Renkō Kōsei Kiroku (My War Crime; The Record of the Forced Removal of Koreans), in which the author confesses to forcibly procuring women from Jeju Island in Korea under the direct order of the Japanese military. (The veracity of the events portrayed in the book has been disputed, most notably by Dr. Ikuhiko Hata.)

In 1992, the paper also published the discovery of the documents in the archives of Japan's National Defense Agency indicating that the military was directly involved in recruitment of comfort women. The article implied that the document proves the Japanese government's complicity in the forcible kidnapping of women. The article was published five days prior to a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa to South Korea (Miyazawa made a formal apology during that visit).

There is debate over how much blame should be placed on the military hierarchy, or for that matter, the Japanese government. Common defenses of the Japanese government at the time are the lack of a document proving that the Japanese military ordered middlemen to procure comfort women by force, that the purpose of military brothel system was to prevent rape, and that the military issued the directive to select agents carefully in order that these agents would not get involved in illegal methods of procurement. Those who wish to deny official responsibility admit that abuse at a local level might have occurred, but this is often blamed on failure of oversight, confused policy in regard to a suspected guerilla force, and a lack of resources at the front line. Former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone (in)famously stated in his memoir that he set up a comfort house for his troops of about 3000 when he was a navy lieutenant in charge of accounting. When criticised, he claimed that he was unaware that the women were forced into service.

See also

• German Soldier's House
• List of War Apology Statements Issued by Japan
• Joy Division (World War II)
• Recreation and Amusement Association
• Sexual slavery
• Trafficking in human beings

References

Some recent work on the comfort women issue include:

• Tanaka, Yuki Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation, London, Routledge: 2002. ISBN 0415194016.
• Yoshimi, Yoshiaki Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, Columbia University Press, 2001. (mentioned RAA too) ISBN 023112032X.
• Molasky, Michael S. American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0415191947, ISBN 0415260442.
• D. Kim-Gibson, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, 1999. ISBN 0931209889.
• Hicks, George L. The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the World War II, 1997. ISBN 0393316947.
• Schellstede, Sangmie Choi. Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military, 2000. ISBN 0841914133.

A review of the Tanaka text can be found in the academic journal Intersections, Issue 9:

• Morris, Narrelle. Review of Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation. Warwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue9/morris_review.html

A review of some of these books and a history and historiography of the issue, from a critical viewpoint, can be found in issue 58:2 of Monumenta Nipponica:

• Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashii "Comfort Women: Beyond Litigious Feminism"

A work of literature on the issue was created by Korean American writer Nora Okja Keller:

• Nora Okja Keller "Comfort Woman", London, Penguin: 1998. ISBN 0140263357.

External links

Footnotes

1. range? Japanese Times password required
2. Japan court rules against 'comfort women' Reuters report on CNN March 29, 2001

• History of Indonesia
• History of Korea
• History of Taiwan
• History of Thailand
• History of the Philippines
• Japanese war crimes
• Prostitution
• Women in World War II