Comfort women Totally Explained

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or is a euphemism for women forced into prostitution and sexual slavery for Japanese military brothels during World War II. Around 10,000 - 200,000 are estimated to have been procured, but there's still some disagreement about exact numbers. Historians and researchers have stated that the majority were from Korea and China, but women from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, and other Japanese-occupied territories were also used in "comfort stations". Stations were located in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, then Malaya, Thailand, then Burma, then New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and what was then French Indochina.
   Young women from countries under Japanese imperial domination were reportedly abducted from their homes against their will. In some cases, women were also recruited with offers to work in military canteens and factories and subsequently forced to sexual service. It has been documented that the Japanese military itself recruited women by force.
   The size and nature of sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II is still being actively debated, especially in Japan.
   Many military brothels were run by private agents and supervised by the Japanese Army. Some Japanese historians, using the testimony of ex-comfort women, have argued that the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were either directly or indirectly involved in coercing, deceiving, luring, and sometimes kidnapping young women throughout Japan's Asian colonies and occupied territories.

Establishment of the Comfort Women System

Japanese military prostitution

Given the well-organized and open nature of prostitution in Japan, it was seen as logical that there should be organized prostitution to serve the Japanese Armed Forces. Japanese authorities hoped that by providing easily accessible prostitutes, the morale and ultimately the military effectiveness of Japanese soldiers would be improved. Also, by institutionalizing brothels and placing them under official scrutiny, the government hoped to control the spread of STDs.
   In spite of the analysis made by the author George Hicks mentioned in the preceding paragraph, military correspondence of Japanese Imperial Army shows that the aim of facilitating comfort stations was prevention of rape crimes committed by Japanese army personnel and thus preventing rise of hostility among people in occupied areas.
   On April 17, 2007, Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi announced the discovery, in the archives of the Tokyo Trials, of seven official documents suggesting that Imperial military forces, such as the Tokeitai (naval secret police), forced women whose fathers attacked the Kempei Tai (Japanese military police), to work in front line brothels in China, Indochina and Indonesia. These documents were initially made public at the war crimes trial. In one of these, a lieutenant is quoted as confessing having organized a brothel and having used it himself. Another source refers to Tokeitai members having arrested women on the streets, and after enforced medical examinations, putting them in brothels.
   On 12 May 2007, journalist Taichiro Kaijimura announced the discovery of 30 Dutch government documents submitted to the Tokyo tribunal as evidence of a forced massed prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs resisted further issuance 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. The US Army Force Office report of interview with 20 comfort women in Burma found that the girls were induced by the offer of plenty of money, an opportunity to pay off the family debts, and on the basis of these false representations many girls enlisted for overseas duty and were rewarded with advance of a few hundred yen.
   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.
   South Korean government designated Bae Jeong-ja as pro-Japan collaborator (chinilpa) in September 2007 for recruiting comfort women.

Number of comfort women

Lack of official documentation has made estimates of the total number of comfort women difficult, as vast amounts of material pertaining to matters related to war crimes and the war responsibility of the nation's highest leaders were deleted on the orders of the Japanese government. Historians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation which indicate the ratio of the number of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women, as well as looking at replacement rates of the women. Historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who conducted the first academic study on the topic which brought the issue out into the open, estimated the number to be between 50,000 and 200,000.
Based on these estimates, most international media sources quote about 200,000 young women were recruited or kidnapped by soldiers to serve in Japanese military brothels. The BBC quotes "200,000 to 300,000" and the International Commission of Jurists quotes "estimates of historians of 100,000 to 200,000 women."

Country of origin

Internationally, it's generally thought that most of the women were from Korea and China. Others came from the Philippines, Taiwan, Dutch East Indies, and other Japanese-occupied countries and regions. Some Dutch women, captured in Dutch colonies in Asia, were also forced into sexual slavery. According to Kono Statement in 1993, the origin of those comfort women who were transferred to the war areas, excluding those from Japan, those from the Korean Peninsula accounted for a large part.
According to Kanto Gakuin University professor Hirofumi Hayashi, the majority of the women were from Japan, Korea, and China.

Treatment of comfort women

According to Unit 731 soldier Yasuji Kaneko "The women cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor's soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance." Beatings and physical torture were said to be not uncommon. After the end of the war 11 Japanese officers were declared guilty with one sentenced to death by the Batavia War Criminal Court. However, some victims from East Timor testified they were forced when they were not old enough to have started menstruating and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers. Hank Nelson, emeritus professor at the Australian National University’s Asia Pacific Research Division has written about the brothels run by the Japanese military in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea during WWII. He quotes from the diary of Gordon Thomas, a POW in Rabaul. Thomas writes that the women working at the brothels “most likely served 25 to 35 men a day” and that they were “victims of the yellow slave trade.”
Nelson also quotes from Kentaro Igusa, a Japanese naval surgeon who was stationed in Rabaul. Igusa wrote in his memoirs that the women continued to work through infection and severe discomfort, though they “cried and begged for help.” There is hard evidence proving official orders from the Japanese Ministry of War to destroy evidence.
Historians have searched for evidence of the Army and Navy's coercion, and some written proof has been discovered, such as documents found in 2007 by Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi. The surviving sex slaves wanted an apology from the Japanese government. Abe Hiroshi, the prime minister at the time, stated that there's no evidence that the Japanese government instituted a brutal sex slave industry. His statement was proved incorrect in 2006.

History of the controversy

Disputed testimony of an ex-soldier

In 1983, Seiji Yoshida published Watashino sensō hanzai - Chōsenjin Kyōsei Renkō (My War Crimes: The Impressment of Koreans), in which the author confesses to forcibly procuring women from Jeju Island in Korea under the direct order from the Japanese military. 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 the on-going controversy over comfort women in Japan. In this series the Asahi Shimbun repeatedly published excerpts of his book. Consequently, it was regarded as evidence of "forced comfort women" and cited in the U.N. report by Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy.
But some people doubted Yoshida's "confession" because he was alone in admitting to such crimes. When Prof. Ikuhiko Hata revisited the villages in South Korea where Yoshida claimed he'd abducted many women, nobody confirmed Yoshida's confession and the situation was contradictory to his confession. When Hata questioned Yoshida on this matter, the latter admitted that he'd taken artistic licence in respect to the places mentioned.

Initial government response and litigation

Initially the Japanese government denied any official connection to the wartime brothels; in June 1990, the Japanese government declared that all brothels were run by private contractors.
In 1990, the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery filed suit, demanding compensation. Several surviving comfort women also independently filed suit in the Tokyo District Court. The court rejected these claims on grounds such as statute of limitations, the immunity of the State at the time of the act concerned, and non-subjectivity of the individual of international law.

Kono statement

However, in 1991, the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered incriminating documents in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency. According to Yoshimi they indicated that the military was directly involved in running the brothels, for example by selecting the recruiting agents. The Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese national daily, published these findings as a front-page article "Japanese Army abducted comfort women" on 11 January 1992. This caused a sensation and forced the government, represented by Chief Cabinet Secretary, Koichi Kato, to acknowledge some of the facts the same day. On January 17 1992, Prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa presented formal apologies for the suffering of the victims during a trip to South Korea.
After some government studies into the matter, Yohei Kono, the Chief Cabinet Secretary of the Japanese government, issued a statement on 4 August 1993. By this statement the Japanese government recognized that "Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military of the day", that "The Japanese military was directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of the women", "The recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military. The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will through coaxing and coercion". The government of Japan "sincerely apologize[d] and [expressedits] remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable psychological wounds". In the statement, the government of Japan expressed its "firm determination never to repeat the same mistake and that they'd engrave such issue through the study and teaching of history".

Asia Women's Fund

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 a signed apology from the then prime minister　Tomiichi Murayama, stating "As Prime Minister of Japan, I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women." The fund is funded by private donations and not government money, and has been criticized as a way to avoid admitting government abuse.

United Nations Human Rights Commission

On June 22 1998, Gay J. McDougall, Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, released Contemporary Forms of Slavery, a report based on prior UN investigation by Linda Chavez documenting systematic rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices in wartime in general but which was mainly aimed at bringing wider attention to the deep harm to human rights caused by Japan's comfort women program during World War II. The report detailed the official Japanese government stance as well as the UN's own legal position. MacDougall was awarded a MacArthur Fellows Program "genius" grant the year after her analysis.

Guilt and liability

The 1998 UN report listed their findings regarding Japan's guilt and liability:

The system of comfort women used by the Japanese government during WWII falls under the international definition of slavery at the time, and slavery (sexual or otherwise) was illegal at the time. The 1926 Slavery Convention embodies one such definition. International prohibition of slavery was included in the Tokyo Charter which was used to make the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. On 26 March 2007 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his regrets for the violations of human rights with regard to comfort women. According to Kyodo news, Abe's step back and announcement that he should stand after all to Yohei Kono's 1993 statement was made after firm warning by U.S. ambassador Thomas Schieffer.
Following Abe's declarations, former education minister Nariaki Nakayama declared he was proud that the Liberal Democratic Party had succeeded in getting references to "wartime sex slaves" struck from most authorized history texts for junior high schools. "Our campaign worked, and people outside government also started raising their voices." , He also declared that he agreed with an e-mail sent to him saying that the "victimized women in Asia should be proud of being comfort women".

The use of the term

Taiwan's English-language newspaper Taipei Times says that the first exposure of the use of Korean comfort women can be found in Japanese writer 's 1947 novel A Prostitute's Story.
Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun stated that commfort women were not treated as "paramilitary personnel", unlike military nurses.
Senda’s book became a best seller.

U.S. Congressional resolution

In 2007, Mike Honda of the United States House of Representatives proposed House Resolution 121 which stated that Japan should formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner, refute any claims that the issue of comfort women never occurred, and educate current and future generations "about this horrible crime while following the recommendations of the international community with respect to the 'comfort women'." Honda has stated that "the purpose of this resolution isn't to bash or humiliate Japan." However, the Japanese embassy in the U.S. stated that the Resolution was erroneous in terms of the facts and that it would be harmful to the friendship between the US and Japan.
On July 30, 2007, the resolution passed through the House of Representatives after half an hour of debate in which there was no opposition voiced. Honda was quoted on the floor as saying, "We must teach future generations that we can't allow this to continue to happen. I've always believed that reconciliation is the first step in the healing process."

Canadian Lower House resolution

Canada's lower house unanimously approved a draft motion on November 28, 2007 that urges the Japanese government to make a "formal and sincere apology" to women who were forced by the Japanese military to provide sex for soldiers during World War II. The text of the motion said the Canadian government should call on the Japanese government "to take full responsibility for the involvement of the Japanese Imperial Forces in the system of forced prostitution, including through a formal and sincere apology expressed in the Diet to all of those who were victims; and to continue to address with those affected in a spirit of reconciliation."
It also said, "Some Japanese public officials have recently expressed a regrettable desire to dilute or rescind the 1993 statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the 'comfort women,' which expressed the (Japanese) Government's sincere apologies and remorse for their ordeal."
The motion, though nonbinding, also said the Canadian government should call on Japan to abandon any statement which devalues the expression of regret from the Kono statement and to clearly and publicly refute any claims that the sexual enslavement and trafficking of the "comfort women" for the Imperial Japanese Army never occurred.

European Parliament resolution

Following a campaign by Amnesty International to press the EU on making a statement about the issue, on 13 December 2007 the European Parliament in Strasbourg passed a resolution calling for the Japanese government to formally acknowledge its historical responsibility over the Comfort Women issue, as well as apologize and compensate victims.
The motion was submitted by Jean Lambert, a Green member of the European Parliament, and was voted through by 54 Member of the European Parliament's. The resolution, while acknowledging past statements by the Japanese government, noted that "some Japanese officials have recently expressed a regrettable desire to dilute or rescind those statements" and called for the Japanese government to "formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical and legal responsibility, in a clear and unequivocal manner". The resolution also called for the Japanese government to remove legal obstacles to compensation for the victims, and to take steps to educate people about these events.

Revisionists and other deniers

The main opposition to the mainstream ideas about comfort women is perhaps the view held by Ikuhiko Hata and other revisionist historians. They question the credibility of certain evidence used to prove the existence and scope of various warcrimes committed by Japan including the abuse of comfort women. These Japanese historians argue that there's no evidence to prove the Japanese military's direct involvement in coercion of the women. In their view, there was violent treatment of comfort women by private agents, which would make the Japanese Military only responsible for insufficient supervision. A comic book, On Taiwan by Japanese author Yoshinori Kobayashi, depicts kimono-clad women lining up to sign up for duty before a Japanese soldier. Kobayashi's book contains an interview with Taiwanese industrialist Shi Wen-long who stated that no women were forced to serve, and that they worked in more hygienic conditions compared to regular prostitutes because the use of condoms was mandatory..
   Hata estimates the number of comfort women to be more likely between 10,000 and 20,000 (in contrast to 60,000 to 300,000 estimated by other historians).
   The proportion of countries of origin of the women is also in dispute.
   One argument revisionists use to oppose the mainstream conclusions about the abuse of comfort women is to question the credibility of testimony given by former comfort women. Some Japanese politicians have argued that the former comfort women's testimony is inconsistent and unreliable; making it invalid.
   Some groups in Japan have protested the mainstream ideas about comfort women being broadcast in mass media. This resulted in the NHK controversy in early 2001. What was supposed to be coverage of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery was extremely edited and an interview with Hata was inserted at the last minute to appease the right-wing groups that complained to NHK.

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