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March 8, 2014 |
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Comfort women is a euphemism for women who were forced to work as sex slaves in military brothels in Japanese-occupied countries during World War II. In the Japanese language, ianfu (慰安婦, comfort women) is a term coined by Asahi Shinbun in the 1980s to refer to these wartime prostitutes. jūgun-ianfu (従軍慰安婦, "military comfort women"), those who served in Japanese military brothels during World War II in Japanese colonies and war zones, was also used, but is seen infrequently these days. (The word ian means 'comfort' in the sense of 'comfort someone for their arduous duties'; it has the sense of 'recreation' for the troops.) The majority of the women (ages 12+) were from Korea, but a significant proportion were from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, and other Japanese-occupied countries/regions. This particular aspect of the Second World War has historically been given very little importance or prominence in the international scene, and almost always receives no mention in historical textbooks or encyclopedias. It would be inappropriate to compare the magnitude or the level of atrocity to the Holocaust; however, unlike the German government, the Japanese government has absolutely refused to take any responsibility or issue apologies or compensation to the women involved. This has left surviving victims in a difficult position, financially, socially, and in terms of emotional closure. According to research by Dr. Hirofumi Hayashi, a professor at Kanto Gakuin University, comfort women included Japanese, Koreans, China|Chinese, Malay people|Malays, Thailand|Thais, Philippines|Filipinos, Indonesians, Myanmar|Burmese, Vietnamese, Indians, Eurasians, Netherlands|Dutch, and natives of the Pacific Ocean|Pacific islands. Estimates of the number of comfort women during the war vary, ranging from 20,000 to 30,000. Testimony by surviving comfort women suggests the actual number to be on the higher end of the scale. Most of the brothels where comfort women served were located in Japanese military bases, but their management was handled by the local people, not by the Japanese military. According to research of Dr. Ikuhiko Hata, a professor at Nihon University, The Japanese working in the licensed pleasure quarter made up 40% of the total. Koreans made up 20% and the Chinese 10%. The women who joined in Japanese-occupied countries (or from the sites of battles) other than Korea and China formed the remaining 30%. 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 policy known as "purging" (in Japanese 燼滅作戦, in Chinese 三光作???), which included indiscriminately kidnapping and raping local civilians. Accounts from surviving comfort women paint a grim picture of Japanese military brothels. 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. However, 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. Many women reported having their uteruses rot from the diseases acquired from being raped by thousands of men over several years. 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. 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 between Japan and the Republic of Korea|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 North Korea. However, in 1990, the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery filed suit, demanding apologies and compensation. Several surviving comfort women also independently filed suit in the Tokyo District Court. More suits followed in the ensuing years. However, 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. Nevertheless, 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 Japanese National Defense Agency|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. Former Japanese Prime Minister of Japan|Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone famously stated in his memoir published in 1978 that he set up a comfort house for his troops when he was a navy lieutenant in charge of accounting. 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 1910-45 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 passed away in another few years. 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 subtle aspects that are missed. Prostitution and bonded labour were both legal when the events of WWII 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 sens?? hanzai - Ch??senjin Renk?? K??sei 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 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. One criticism of general reporting on the issue of comfort women in Western countries is that the media buzz has subtly altered the image of the military brothel, making it appear that the concept is uniquely Japanese. Military brothels are not unique to Japan, though the Japanese military brothel system during WWII was on a scale and level of organizational sophistication rarely seen in history. However, Western militaries have also utilised such institutions for the same reasons the Japanese military did: to prevent STDs, to maintain the morale of the troops, and to allow soldiers to have sex near the front line. For example, during the American occupation of Japan, the U.S. army used military brothels set up by the Japanese government known as the Recreation and Amusement Association. Many Japanese women worked there under economic hardship and debt bondage.There were also brothels for the exclusive use of U.S. soldiers inside certain camps in the Vietnam War; the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had their own brothels. In recent years, reporters witnessed a rapid increase in prostitution in Cambodia and Bosnia after United Nations|U.N. peacekeeping forces moved into these areas. There was one highly publicised case where members of the U.N. peacekeeping force were accused of direct involvement in procurement of sex slaves for a local brothel in Bosnia. Setting up such an institution in an economically deprived area is bound to involve a degree of forced prostitution, but the use of agents for procurement and management of brothels has allowed the military to believe itself shielded from the issue of sexual slavery and human trafficking. NATO forces have been linked to prostitution and forced prostitution in Bosnia and Kosovo and U.N. forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. See the links below for articles on peacekeeping forces and forced prostitution.
Some recent work on the comfort women issue include:
A review of the Tanaka text can be found in the academic journal Intersections, Issue 9:
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:
A work of literature on the issue was created by Korean American writer Nora Okja Keller:
Academic research
Japanese official statements
Historical documents
Modern peacekeeping and forced prostitution
Category:History of Indonesia Category:History of the Philippines Category:History of Taiwan Category:History of Thailand Category:Prostitution Category:Women in war Category:History of Japan Category:History of Korea de:Trostfrauen fr:Femmes de r??confort id:Perbudakan seks pada Perang Dunia II io:Mulieri di komforto ko:????????? ja:????????? zh:????????? This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Comfort women".
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