Extract from "Japan's Comfort Women - Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation" by Yuri Tanaka, page 31
The comfort women were treated as "military supplies", but relevant documents were either hidden or destroyed at the end of the war. It is impossible to know, therefore, how many women were exploited. The best estimates range from 80,000 to 100,000. According to the Japanese military plan devised in July 1941, 20,000 comfort women were required for every 800,000 Japanese soldiers, or one woman for every 40 soldiers. There were 3.5 million Japanese soldiers send to China and Southeast Asia during the war, and therefore, by this calculation, and estimated 90,000 women were mobilized. Of these women, 80 percent are believed to have been Koreans, but many also came from Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia."
...or the hypocrasy of the Allied high command in their differential levels of prosecution and/or treatment applied to western and asian comfort women.
Extract from "Japan's Comfort Women - Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation" by Yuri Tanaka, page 87
"Why was awareness of the comfort women issue as a serious war crime clearly lacking in the minds of the leaders of the Allied forces? One reason probably lies in the fact that the majority of the women victims of this enforced military prostitution were Asians and were therefore neither white women nor civilians of the Allied nations. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Dutch forces, who prosecuted Japanese officers for the crime of forcing Dutch girls and women into prostituion, did not even bother to investigate most cases in which Indonesian women were victimized. Some historians have pointed to the "absence of Asia" in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Probably the comfort women issue was also ignored for the same reason. It took almost half a century for the enslavement of the comfort women to be considered one of the most serious and unprecedented war crimes in history.
Another reason can be sought in soldiers' common perception of women (ie. their sexual ideas), which we find more or less universally in military ideology, regardless of it nationality. A common refrain is the idea that women are morally obliged to offer amenities to soldiers who are fighting at the risk of their lives, to defend their people and the nation. This kind of androcentric ideology has been, and still is, deeply rooted in most military forces and the societies that support them. For this reason, military men are generally quite insensitive toward the services rendered by women. American soldiers and officers during World War II were undoubtedly tainted with these attitudes, and this was probably one of the major factors that hindered them from correctly understanding the comfort women issue."
Shocking too is the amount of rape by US troops during and after the battle for Okinawa and by the Allied occupation troops after the Japanese surrender and the subsequent "comfort" stations provided for the occupation troops by the Japanese government in the attempt to reduce wanton rape of civilians.
Relating to GI misbehaviour in the first year of Occupation 1945-1946;
There are a number of similar testimonies of women employed by the occupation forces. In fact, according to some Japanese men who worked as interpreters for the occupation troops at various camps, lists of names of officers and junior officers were put up on the wall in the officers' club and in their canteen. Next to each officer's name appeared lip marks signifying how many Japanese women that officer had "conquered".
At Camp Sendai, there were two different kinds of lists. One was similar to the above mentioned officers' lists with "MV" (abbrevation of Military Victory) marks instead of lip marks. The other was a series of pictures of all the female Japanese workers. These pictures were pinned on the wall and above some of the picture a cross was marked to identify that that woman had lost her virginity. According to Itsushima Tsutomu, one of the former interpreters at this camp, of the 200 photos only about ten photos did not have cross marks; they were all newly employed women. These lists were organized by a group called "Charming Members to Musumesan." This group consisted of about 500 officers, including all the junior officers at the camp. They completed with each other over how many women they had "conquered". GIs called this competition "hunting for moose," punning on the similarity of "musumesan" ("young women" in Japanese) and "moose". Holding parties was only one of their various strategies to create opportunities for them to rape Japanese female workers. According to another former interpreter, he often heard GIs discussing how to take the "virginity" of newly employed women. Indeed, some GIs proudly gave him detailed accounts of the rapes they had committed."
A reported statement by a (unmentioned) high-ranking officer of the 11th Airborne Division of the US 8th Army to a Japanese policeman shortly after his arrival in Atsugi. The US officer said;
"It is expected that women in our home country would blame us, if we asked you to set up pleasure facilities. Therefore we cannot request you to do so... However, if you do not provide us with such facilities voluntarily, many troubles tend to occur. As far as these kinds of facilities are concerned, our MP is prepared to co-operate with you if necessary. I presume that the occupation of Japan by our troops will be about three yeat at maximum if no trouble occurs, but if there are many troubles, I am afraid that it might be 10 to 15 years."
American GIs called these Japanese women "yellow stool", and the attitude of US medical officers of the PHW section charge with VD inspections viewed the women they processed as "defective sexual commodities."
The Japanese Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyokai (the Special Comfort Facilities Association), renamed the Recration and Amusement Association (RAA) put ads into the local papers to in a call for national service, to recruit young women for the new comfort stations for American troops in an effort to reduce the incidences of rape.
Yomiuri Hochi & Mainichi Shimbun - September 3 & 5
"Urgent Notice
Special female workers wanted
Free meals & accomodation, high salary, advance payment also available
Travel expenses paid for applicants from countryside
Tokyo, Kyobashi, Ginza 7-1
The Special Comfort Facilities Association
Phone: Ginze 919-2282"
Recruitment poster in front of the RAA Ginza office;
"Announcement to New Japanese Women! We require the utmost co0opoeration of new Japanese women who participate in a great project to comfort the occupation forces, which is part of the national emergency establishment of the post war management. Female workers, between 18-25 years old, are wanted. Accomodation, clothes and meals, all free."
The chief of Yokosuka Police, Yamamoto Yoshiji when given the nationwide call to setup brothels and recruit comfort women for US troops is quoted to have said;
"... contribute to building peace in Japan by softening the American soldiers' wild feeling."
Many Chinese and Korean women were tricked with promises of factory work and advance payments to parents to leave their homes only to find themselves thousands of miles away in Burma or Borneo or Saipan, locked into a room with lines of Japanese soldiers waiting to enter one at a time.
The Americans apparently weren't any better. Troops in Japan went on a raping spree, usually scouting houses in the day time on the pretext of inspections but in actuality to identify houses where young women lived, and returning in the night to rape. Japanese policemen were powerless to act against US occupation troops. Out of frustration, the government decided to build comfort stations and the Japanese police were tasked to setup and run such stations. Some took it beyond reason and resorted to colluding with the Yazuka to provide women for the troops to safeguard the rest. Unfortunately two incidents stand out where unscrupulous individuals collected teenage female students from domitories and factories on the premise of doing some specified duty for the peace effort only to find themselves locked in within US army barracks with soldiers.
4th April 1946 Nakamura Hospital in Omori district. At 11:30 at night, three military trucks stopped in front of the hospital throwing their headlights upon the hospital building. Then, at the signal of a whistle, about 50 US soldiers dashed out of the trucks and invaded the hospital from various directions, breaking windows and doors. They raped all 17 nurses on night duty, about 20 nursing assistants, and more than 40 female patients, including a woman who had just delivered a baby. A two-day-old baby was thrown out of the mother's bed onto the floor and killed. There were some male patients in the hospital, but two who tried to protect the women were shot. The soldiers left the hospital after about an hour's sexual orgy.
There were many other reported cases of rape committed by GIs in this and other districts, such as Kamata and Haneda, between April and June that year. In most cases, the perpetrators were never identified.
Another large-scale organized raped by US troops on Japanese women happened in Nagoya. At midnight on April 11, one of the blocks in Naka ward of Nagoya city was surrounded by US soldier (said to have been between 30 and 60 in number). They had come in a jeep and a truck. They cut off the telephone lines of the entire block and intruded into a number of houses simultaneously, raping many girls and women between the ages of 10 and 55 years.
Also at this time the number of so-called "special maids," working for officers of the occupation forces greatly increase. By June 1946, more than 19,000 women were working as "special maids" throughout Japan. According to Itsushima Tsutomu, 52% of these women were former employee of the occupation troops, 17% had worked in dance halls, cabarets, nightclubs and the like and the rest, some 31% were women whom the officers had met in town or through organized activities such as in Christian church functions.
