Japan's Comfort Women (38 page)

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Japanese government, military and business organizations were established. It

remained for the Japanese military authorities to take direct control and to create a more systematic and comprehensive structure of military sexual slavery.

The karayuki-san system was undoubtedly a repressive system of sexual exploitation. The methods of procuring young women were clearly unlawful and morally unjustifiable. In this sense, they were little different from the methods that were used for the later procurement of comfort women. In both cases, serious criminal acts were involved. The source of karayuki-san was mainly impoverished famil-ies in the lower strata of Japanese society. For political, diplomatic, security, medical, and other reasons, the Japanese military authorities changed the supply source for the comfort women system from the homeland to Japan’s colonies and occupied territories, and adopted methods of direct enslavement to secure the system.

Sexual slavery, social death, and military violence
Japan’s military leaders, the administrators of the comfort women system, viewed it as an extension, indeed a rationalization of the karayuki-san system, in essence comparable to a widely sanctioned system of prostitution elsewhere. Thus, despite the methods used, which included kidnapping and sexual slavery, Japanese military leaders certainly did not regard the establishment of the comfort women system as an organized crime against humanity. The sexual service rendered by women ostensibly took the form of a “commercial transaction” – “an exchange in equal value” between sexual service and financial reward. At times unconsciously and at other times intentionally this “business formality” was used to blur the criminality and coercion of sexual slavery inherent in the military comfort women system. The personal history and social background of individual women behind these “commercial transactions” was equally irrelevant to the brothel keepers, “clients,” and military organizers. In other words, from the perspective of the authorities, it was irrelevant whether or not a woman was forcibly pressed into prostitution, and whether or not she lived as a slave under military discipline.

She was simply a “sexual commodity,” not an individual with human value and dignity. Military leaders viewed the comfort women as “commodities” supplied by “labor brokers” and managed by brothel keepers to be used as instruments to satisfy the sexual appetites of soldiers and sailors, while securing them from contracting VD and committing rape. The fact that comfort women in transit were often listed in the inventory as “cargo” clearly demonstrated how the top military officers regarded these women.

From the perspective of the client, there were important continuities between the karayuki-san system and the subsequent wartime comfort women system. In the comfort women system, soldiers usually purchased a ticket to receive service from a comfort woman. Entering the woman’s room, they personally handed the ticket to her. This action encouraged the belief that their conduct was a legitimate, commercial transaction. Whether or not a woman was properly paid by her “employer” – the brothel keeper – was of no concern to these soldiers, as they 174

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had “paid” for the service in any case. Whatever the misery of her existence, they felt entitled to enjoy the service in the exchange for payment. For them, comfort women were not “slaves,” but “serving women” who were commercially obliged to “comfort” them. If the service was not to his satisfaction, a service-man might consider himself cheated and therefore assume the right to coerce the comfort woman to satisfy him – after all, he had “paid”! Such an attitude contributed to the frequent violence by soldiers against comfort women. This fraudulent notion of “commercial transaction,” which conceals and distorts both the direct role of the military in the system and the elements of coercion, slavery, and deception in which many women were kidnapped or deceived and received little or no payment for their services, even now blurs the perception of former Japanese soldiers and some nationalist historians about the real nature of the comfort women system. The fear of being branded a “prostitute” due to the deceptive nature of this business formality was for a long time a major hindrance preventing former comfort women from coming forward and testifying about their ordeals.

The postwar comfort women system that the Allied occupation soldiers extensively utilized in Japan was based upon the same fraudulent conception of a business transaction. It is therefore hardly surprising to find the behaviour of Japanese soldiers towards Asian comfort women and that of American, British and Australian soldiers towards Japanese comfort women almost identical. Both Japanese and Allied soldiers held comfort women in contempt, calling them “a communal toilet” or “a yellow stool,” yet the soldiers did not hesitate at all to use the “service” rendered by these “cheap whores.” In this context, each comfort woman was reduced to a sexual object.

However, the commodification and depersonalization of women’s sexuality is not unique to the comfort women system. Indeed, it is a universally distinctive characteristic of all forms of prostitution, whether a woman (or, less commonly, a man) is coerced or not. Even when a woman chooses to become a prostitute and is paid the agreed sum by her client, the transaction differs from most other types of commercial business. Being a prostitute means that one’s body and sexuality are objectified, impersonalized, and commodified. One’s entire body becomes the property of the client, and thus one’s personal autonomy is stripped away. In other words, the prostitute is physically alive, but socially dead in each transaction.22 Yet the paradox is that, by paying the prostitute, the client demands that “the prostitute be a person who is not a person.”23 However, a socially dead person is “a person without power, natality or honour.”24 She is powerless “in the sense that the degraded status of the ‘whore’ dissolves any entitlement to the protection and respect accorded to non-prostitutes.”25 Therefore, regardless of the circumstances, any person who acts as a prostitute feels vulnerable because she is dominated by and subordinated to her client, not only in the physical sense but also in a profound personal sense. In this context, there is a fundamental similarity between prostitutes and slaves. The comfort women system and the more recent Bosnian case of “rape factories” are often described as systems of “sexual enslavement.” It can be said, however, that all forms of

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prostitution basically share the universal characteristics of enslavement, although the comfort women system and the Bosnian case greatly deepen the alienation and exploitation of women as systems of a particularly brutal sexual enslavement.

While noting the fundamental, universal characteristics shared by various types of broadly defined “prostitution,” we emphasize the fact that the exploitation of women’s sexuality by military men is particularly notable and for the frequent association with intense violence. We should ask the basic question: Why does sexual exploitation of women invariably increase and take on more terrible forms during wartime?

Sexual activity provides human beings not only with physiological pleasure, but also with an escape from reality – psychological joy – no matter how momentary that joy is. At the same time, through intimate and affectionate physical contact, one rediscovers one’s existence and reaffirms the value of one’s life. Thus, sexual joy is the joy of deep and strong mutual reaffirmation in the lives of two people.

Drinking alcohol is another human activity which has the function of helping one escape from reality, but it lacks the function of reaffirming the value of life’s existence. In war, when facing imminent death, and far removed from home and family, it is not surprising that many men are drawn to strongly seek sexual gratification.

The more dangerous a battle, the more intense a soldier’s sexual desire may become. The following account by an American Vietnam War veteran vividly illustrates the psychological state that many soldiers confront:

A man and a woman holding each other tight for one moment, finding in sex some escape from the terrible reality of war. The intensity that war brings to sex, the “let us love now because there may be no tomorrow” is based on death. No matter what our weapons on the battlefield, love is finally our only weapon against death. Sex is the weapon of life, the shooting sperm sent like an army of guerillas to penetrate the egg’s defenses – the only victory that really matters. War thrusts you into the well of loneliness, death breathing in your ear. Sex is a grappling hook that pulls you out, ends your isolation, makes you one with life again.26

It is therefore a common phenomenon through the history of warfare – not only during World War II – that soldiers desperately seek women. In World War I, British soldiers were given bromide to curb their sexual urges. Despite this, one brothel in Rouen set up by the British Army was visited by 171,000 men in the first year of the war alone. A startling number of soldiers – more than 400,000

British and 340,000 US – contracted VD during that war. VD was the cause of hospitalization for over one-quarter of the British army.27 The medical cost for treating these men must have been astronomical. In the final 11 months of World War II in Europe, one scholar has estimated that the average soldier slept with 25 women, not necessarily all of them professional women.28 In short, the problem of war is intimately intertwined with the problems of sexuality, and sexuality shapes the conduct of men in war.

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The sexual activities of men during war almost always involve heightened violence against women. Soldiers’ survival hinges on their violent action in attacking the enemy as well as in defending themselves. The same can be said for the enemy. Therefore, a soldier has to become more violent than his enemy in order to defend his own life. A vicious cycle occurs, in which violence creates more violence, escalates in intensity, and leads to brutality. Once war breaks out, soldiers are quickly caught up in this psychological process, losing their humanity by brutalizing themselves and, at the same time, dehumanizing the enemy. The brutalization of oneself and the dehumanization of the enemy may lead to the dehumanization of third parties, such as civilians, as well. It is under such relent-less conditions that soldiers seek sexual intercourse as a means of escaping from the fear of death and to reconfirm the value of their lives. They try to gratify this desire even by violating women’s bodies and thus dehumanizing them. For the soldiers involved in a fierce and merciless battle, the dehumanization of women becomes psychologically easier due to the constant and intensive process of dehumanizing “others” and brutalizing oneself on the battlefield. It is a stark irony that, in war, sexual intercourse becomes corrupt and is exploited as a means of dehumanization, while it should provide great joy, reaffirming life, and confirming an intimate relationship with a partner.

Physical domination over women may also spark soldiers’ desires to dominate and humiliate the enemy. This is particularly so if the victims of their sexual violence are “women belonging to the enemy.” This is one of the major reasons that in wartime women are often raped before the very eyes of their fathers, husbands or brothers. For men in battle, the physical violation of their women by the enemy is a most humiliating act; it serves to reinforce their subjugation to the occupying troops.29 It is therefore not surprising that certain vocabulary used on the battlefield corresponds to sexual language. For example, an army “penetrates enemy territory” and the Japanese military-supplied condom brand was “Assault No. 1.”

The internal power relations of armies constitute a strict class system in which enlisted soldiers are always subject to the orders of officers. This creates a contradiction whereby soldiers whose principal task is to dominate and subjugate the enemy must subordinate themselves to the unquestionable authority of their officers. This contradiction is intensified on the battlefield, where the necessity to dominate the enemy is literally a matter of life or death for the individual soldier, and the need for the officer class to dominate and exercise unquestioned authority over groups of soldiers becomes strategically imperative. Such a contradiction creates both a high degree of tension and a context in which violence is the standard mode for the release of tension. Consequently, the rape of women perceived as being the “enemy,” or “belonging to the enemy,” becomes a frequently used form of release – an apparently unruly behaviour, escaping the disciplinary matrix, which is really the underbelly of the disciplinary system. The more absolute the relationship of domination between officers and enlisted men within an army, the greater is the contradiction between their relations to the subjugated enemy and their situation within their own force. As a result, their

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behaviour towards the enemy – soldiers, male civilians and women – becomes more violent. This is one explanation for the comparatively large number of rapes committed by the Japanese troops in the Asia-Pacific War.30

Whether or not rape is committed in wartime, one of its major motives is the “conquest of others,” a phenomenon which Nicholas Groth calls “power rape.”31

This motive is clearly illustrated in the following confession of a rapist (in this case a civilian):

In my rapes the important part was not the sexual part, but putting someone else in the position in which they were totally helpless. I bound and gagged and tied up my victims and made them do something they didn’t want to do, which was exactly the way I felt in my life.
I felt helpless, very
helpless
.32

[Emphasis added]

According to Groth, there are two other types of rape – anger rape, in which sexuality becomes a hostile act, and sadistic rape, in which anger and power become eroticized. However, Groth’s research shows that more than half (55