The Marmot’s Hole

Since some of the commentors have asked, I’ve quickly jotted down some commentary as to why I find the WaPo ad on the comfort women offensive.

From Fact 1:

No historical document has ever been found my historians or research organizations that positively demonstrate that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese Army. A search of the archives at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records…”

Fact 1 neglects to mention, however, that one reason documentary evidence may be lacking is because Japan had 15 days between surrender and the arrival of the occupation forces to burn its documents:

The difference between the German and Japanese surrenders had a profound influence on each country’s documentation of the army, navy and the war in general. The rapid pace of the Allied advance through Germany meant that a large quantity of historically important material was requisitioned before it could be destroyed. In contrast, Japan had plenty of time to dispose of its records between the announcement of the surrender on 15 August and the landing of Allied forces on 30 August.[1] During this period some 2.5 million Japanese troops remained under the command of the Japanese armed forces, and before the arrival of the Allies they undertook the “Great Incineration Operation” ordered by the government. There is no evidence that measures to stop this destruction of records were taken by the Allies even after their arrival in Japan, though a “strong recommendation” against further destruction was apparently issued from GHQ (according to the Washington Document Centre).

One can only guess at the percentage of documents that was destroyed in the ten weeks between the surrender and the order to halt the incineration. When considering this question in the past I estimated that 99 per cent was incinerated, but I have come to think recently that it is closer to 99.9 per cent. Even the remaining 0.01 per cent has not received adequate historical examination because this period has traditionally been the preserve of political scientists. Recently, however, it has at last become possible for historians such as myself to make advances in this field and to establish the whereabouts of these materials.

More from Fact 1:

On the contrary, many documents were found warning private brokers not to force women to work against their will.

Amazing how those documents apparently didn’t get burnt. And at any rate, the fact that such directives existed on paper doesn’t mean that they translated into practice — the fact that Korea does, in fact, have laws on the books against prostitution and periodically conducts “crackdowns” doesn’t change the fact that the country has long looked the other way at the practice. Even the United States Office of War Information report sited in the WaPo ad says about the recruiting:

Early in May of 1942 Japanese agents arrived in Korea for the purpose of enlisting Korean girls for “comfort service” in newly conquered Japanese territories in Southeast Asia. The nature of this “service” was not specified but it was assumed to be work connected with visiting the wounded in hospitals, rolling bandages, and generally making the soldiers happy. The inducement used by these agents was plenty of money, an opportunity to pay off the family debts, easy work, and the prospect of a new life in a new land, Singapore. On the basis of these false representations many girls enlisted for overseas duty and were rewarded with an advance of a few hundred yen.

Or how about this US Army document, Kunming-REG-OP-3:

With the exception of Mrs.Hwang Nam-suk, all of the 23 women became “comfortgirls”, apparently under compulsion and misrepresentation. The fifteen who left Korea in July, 1943, for example, were recruited through advertisements in Korean newspapers offering employment for girls in Japanese factories in Singapore. The contingent with which they were sent southward included at least 300 girls who were similarly misled.

Those warning didn’t do a whole lot of good, apparently.

From Fact 2:

There are many newspaper articles, moreover, that demonstrate that these directives were dutifully carried out. The August 31, 1939 issue of the Dong-A Ilbo…

Well, if you can’t believe a pro-Japanese newspaper founded by collaborator extraordinaire Kim Song-su in a colony run by a militarist dictatorship, who can you believe? I guess next we’ll be citing the Rodong Shinmun as evidence that Megumi Yokota really is dead. At any rate, I’ll grant for the moment that the Dong-A Ilbo report (as well as the “many other newspaper articles”) may be factually accurate. After all, I’ve read stories about Korean police conducting campaigns to make drivers respect the stop line. I’ve even seen said campaign with my own two eyes. Back to the point, however, both US Army documents (including the one cited in the ad) and testimonies by former comfort women indicate that many of the women who ended up in the camps were tricked into it. So if those directives were “dutifully carried out,” as the ad claims, even the documentary evidence it cites later on (albeit for a different point) says otherwise. Of course, the number of women in the reports and testimonies, even if completely reliable, are only a fraction of the number who served as “comfort women,” so it’s hard to compute actual percentages, and I seriously doubt we’ll ever find actual statistics in whatever Japanese records may have survived the flames of late August 1945.

Going on, from Fact 3:

There were admittedly cases, though, of breakdowns in discipline.

You don’t say. Again, the two reports suggest and testimonies suggest many women were working against their will, and the officers responsible were not punished — in the Burma camp, the colonel in charge of the camp deserted to avoid enemy capture, while there is no mention of the fate of the commanding officers in the Chinese camp in the part of the report I’ve seen. Since they bring up the Indonesian case, however, it does beg the question, as commenter Jing once pointed out, whether serving as a “comfort woman” counts as “rape” only when it involves white women. From Yuki Tanaka (or a review thereof):

Why did the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal hear mass evidence regarding the ill-treatment, rape and murder of Allied soldiers and civilians and fail to consider evidence of systemic crimes against ‘comfort’ women? One explanation, Tanaka suggests, is that as most of the ‘comfort’ women were ‘Asian’, rather than Western—the largest exception being Dutch women in the Dutch East Indies—the invisibility of the ‘comfort’ women provides further evidence supporting the ‘absence of Asia’ remarks often made about the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, where both the aggrieved and those giving justice tended to be Western (p. 87). Yet Tanaka does not reconcile this argument with earlier discussion regarding the ‘various testimonies presented at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal regarding the Rape of Nanjing’ (p. 29). He admits that details regarding the rape of Dutch civilian women in March 1942, for example, were raised at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal but argues this was only to provide evidence that crimes had been committed against Allied civilians (pp. 61-3). A more concrete example of the fixation with Western victims, Tanaka suggests, can be seen in the proceedings of the Batavia War Crimes Tribunal, which was conducted by Dutch authorities in February 1948. In one case this tribunal tried twelve Japanese in relation to the forced prostitution of Dutch women held in internment camps in Semarang, Java in 1943 (p. 76). Although Tanaka does not make it clear, the basis of the Dutch prosecution seemed to be the Geneva Convention of 1929. While not a signatory to the convention, Japan had given a qualified promise to follow the Geneva rules in 1942, one of which prohibited forced prostitution of prisoners-of-war. Disappointingly, Tanaka does not pursue a line of inquiry as to whether Indo-Dutch, Indonesian, Filipino, or perhaps even Korean, ‘comfort’ women could have had a similar status to the Dutch as prisoners-of-war during this period. He merely notes that the Dutch authorities questioned Indonesian, Indo-Dutch and Chinese ‘comfort’ women about their experiences in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies but that only two cases involving non-Dutch women were ever raised at the Batavia War Crimes Tribunal (pp. 78-9). While it might be expected that a separate Dutch war crimes inquiry would focus on Dutch women in this manner, Tanaka seems to imbue the Batavia War Crimes Tribunal with responsibility for a regional jurisdiction, to which it failed to respond adequately. It appears to Tanaka, therefore, that the victimisation of predominantly Asian ‘comfort’ women inevitably took second-place to other war crimes investigated and prosecuted by the Allies.

However, Tanaka’s primary argument is that the Allied nations’ own ’sexual ideology’—their treatment of non-Western women prior to the war, their practice and attempt to cover-up military-controlled prostitution during the war and their complicity in the establishment of a similar ‘comfort’ system for Allied personnel during the Occupation in Japan—is a telling factor in the lack of Allied prosecution (p. 87). Regarding the Dutch East Indies, for example, Tanaka argues that as the Dutch sexually exploited large numbers of Indonesian women while a colonial power in the region, it followed that the sexual abuse of Indonesian and Indo-Dutch women by the Japanese would probably not have been viewed by the Dutch as a serious crime (p. 82). During the war itself, Tanaka clarifies that the Allied ’sexual ideology’ made it ‘quite natural that [the Allies] were completely unable to discern the criminal nature of the comfort women system’ (p. 109). As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of Japan, John Dower, notes in a short review printed on the back of the volume, this is a ’stunning and controversial’ new direction of analysis.

About Fact 4: I find it interesting that it starts by pointing out that the “comfort women” testimony itself supports the notion that the Japanese military did not directly impress women into sexual slavery, but then points out that the women’s testimony is unreliable because it has changed “since the start of the anti-Japanese campaign.” So, are we then to take it that the testimony that they weren’t whisked away by the Japanese Army is reliable, but tales of abuse aren’t?

From Fact 5:

The iafu who were embedded with the Japanese Army were not, as is commonly reported, “sex slaves.” They were working under a system of licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time. Many of the women, in fact, earned incomes far in excess of what were paid to field officers and even generals (as reported by the United States Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Team Attached to US Army Forces, India-Burma Theater APO 689) and there are many testimonies attesting to the fact that they were well treated.

This is the most offensive part, IMHO, owing particularly to that last line — well treated, indeed! It also indicates that the ad goes beyond the usual “redefining coercion” (unless, of course, it’s to redefine “coercion” away from “tricked into it by local pimps,” as I’d like to think Shinzo Abe meant it, to “coerced by poverty”) to present the comfort women as highly paid, well-treated prostitutes. The odd thing is, even the report the ad itself chose to cite (which, coincidentally, I don’t entirely trust — the “personality” description leads me to wonder about the individual who wrote it) to prove how well-paid they were ALSO indicates that many of the women at the Burma camp that was surveyed were deceived into their positions, contradicting Fact 2. Sorry for re-citing, but:

Early in May of 1942 Japanese agents arrived in Korea for the purpose of enlisting Korean girls for “comfort service” in newly conquered Japanese territories in Southeast Asia. The nature of this “service” was not specified but it was assumed to be work connected with visiting the wounded in hospitals, rolling bandages, and generally making the soldiers happy. The inducement used by these agents was plenty of money, an opportunity to pay off the family debts, easy work, and the prospect of a new life in a new land, Singapore. On the basis of these false representations many girls enlisted for overseas duty and were rewarded with an advance of a few hundred yen.

So, is this the form of “licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time?” Tricking girls to Southeast Asia with false advertisements and putting them to work as prostitutes serving the army of the colonial overlord once they got there? And even if it were, would the fact that other colonial powers took sexual advantage of colonial women make Japan’s behavior any better? Would the fact that both Japan and Korea continued the practice for US troops after the war make a difference? I don’t think so.

Also from Fact 5:

There are records of soldiers being punished for acts of violence against the women. Many countries set up brothels for their armies, in fact, to prevent soldiers from committing rape against private citizens. (In 1945, for instance, Occupation authorities asked the Japanese government to set up hygienic and safe “comfort stations” to prevent rape by American soldiers.)

Where there’s an army base, there’s a brothel. Fine. You can even find brothels in areas with no military presence at all. But if the US had, let’s say, supplied its army brothels in Japan with, say, Filipino women tricked into it by local recruiters while US colonial administrators turned a blind eye, it’s a different story. That’s human trafficking and, yes, sexual slavery. And for what it’s worth, in “Embracing Defeat,” John W. Dower included a very disturbing account of those “hygienic and safe” comfort stations set up in 1945 (can’t find my copy at the moment) — if the inclusion of the last sentence was supposed to make be feel better about the comfort women’s plight, it doesn’t.

For the record, I’d think there’s a lot of bullshit going around in Japan, Korea and the United States about the comfort women.

Korea couldn’t have cared less about the comfort women for most of its post-Liberation history (for a number of reasons, including the low social position of women until very recently and the fact that the country was run by Japanese collaborators for much of that history, including 18 years by a man who spent WWII as a second lieutenant in the Japanese Army), and moreover, if it really wanted to be honest about what happened, it would start with the realization that most of the girls were probably sold to the Japanese Army by collaborating Korean brokers.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to make what the current Japanese government (as opposed to the people who ran the ad) is up to, although some of Shinzo Abe’s past statements on the issue don’t bode well.  I’m also afraid — sorry for speculating here — that if a concrete definition of “coercion” isn’t arrived upon soon, “coercion” might get watered down into “coerced by circumstances like poverty,” which might then lead to claims that since Japan “helped modernize and develop Korea during colonial rule,” those circumstances were “native Korean poverty,” completely absolving Japan of any guilt whatsoever.

Lastly, we have the Americans.  I’ve already explained that I think Rep. Honda’s resolution is a bad idea.  Like the United States doesn’t have enough to worry about right now that it’s intervening in the interpretation of other countries’ history.  I might also add that judging from the US Army reports cited above, the US knew women were being pressed into sexual service, but apparently didn’t feel Asians raping other Asians warranted inclusion in the Tokyo Tribunal.  This probably shouldn’t come as a complete surprise — Washington didn’t feel biological warfare experiments and live vivisections on largely Chinese victims warranted inclusion, either (as long as it got its hands on the data), although abuse of Western POWs did.  Moreover, reports indicate US troops would make use of comfort stations during the occupation of Japan and during the Korean War.

In the end, the Korean comfort women suffered abuse at the hands of three governments, including their own.

Anyway, I’ll let the commentors have fun with this.