Japan's Crimes Against Women

[manfredzhang]

When we talk about claims that comfort women were forced slaves or were lured to work in comfort stations, I think it makes sense that we should take into consideration of the followings:

1, The whole Chinese/East Asian culture promoted filial piety and discouraged free will. If the so-called forced sex slavery was seen as war crimes, then every arranged marriage should be regarded as against one’s will and technically a rape case. It’s inappropriate to single out comfort women system from the whole Chinese/East Asian culture background and call it war crimes while completely ignored there were no free will given to the women population at that era. The US Army report confirmed the subjects who forced the women into comfort stations were indeed their own parents NOT the Japanese government/military.

2, The comfort women received very high monetary compensation. In other words, there was no motivation for the Japanese government/military to use force to recruit them. With that much reward, they could comfortably have many volunteers.
The comfort women who were described as ignorant, childish and not pretty in the US Army report received an annualized compensation equivalent to 200K-250K USD today.
For comparison purpose, Ontario sugar babies received an average monthly income of 2,400 CAD (Less than 24K USD on annual basis). Many of them are university students with at least average looking.
https://www.ubyssey.ca/features/sex-iss ... mum%20wage.

3, According to the US Army report,
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.

A medical care job e.g. visiting the wounded or rolling bandages would not repay one’s debt of hundreds of Yen at that time.

The most effective way to make a bunch of 17/18 year old boys whose testosterone level was at peak happy is to have sex with them.

Any adult with no disconnection with the society and with normal intelligence should have no issue to figure out what that statement meant.
Prostitution in any society is not regarded as a decent job. By using that term, the Japanese agents avoided embarrassment of the parents and saved their faces. This was not an intentional false statement but rather a more comfortable expression.

Comfort women were allowed to leave comfort stations once their debt was repaid. They were also allowed to have mail communication with their families. It is very hard to keep the nature of their work a secret.

4, Certainly the testimony of Dutch comfort women was very powerful evidence, one should be clear that white women were a fraction of the comfort women population. The vast majority of comfort women came from Japan, Korea, China and to a less degree other Asia countries. The majority of the comfort women came from a culture background as mentioned in the top.

[michael mills]

Thanks for that explanation.

[Nikole McMullen]

Too bad it wasn't available at the time. There's a lot of information about violence against women now. I found articles here on the subject of violence and the psychological trauma that occurred in the aftermath. Now women can be helped by a long course of therapy.

[limited]

Sorry I posted this in another thread earlier, but its more relevant here. The Japanese state committed many crimes against Japanese women themselves before before and after World War II, trafficking them as sex slaves to benefit their economy and fund their military growth.

Japan's militarisation against China was funded by decades of sex trafficking of Japanese girls to Chinese men and western men. Japan was a poor country in both resources and technology before western assistance.

100,000 Japanese girls called "Karayuki-san" were sold by the Japanese government to foreigners including Chinese and westerners across China, Siberia, North america, Australia, British India, British East Africa, British Malaya, British Borneo, Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and the American Philippines, in order to raise money for Japan's militarisation and economy after the Meiji restoration. The Japanese prostitutes also acted as spies in China and Southeast Asia before World War II. They were divided into subcategories like Ameriyuki-san depending on where they went.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karayuki-san

US diplomat Townsend Harris demanded Japan's government provide him with Japanese teenage girls for sex. The Japanese government obliged him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townsend_Harris#In_Japan

Many Chinese merchants, students and exiles in Meiji Japan took Japanese girls as concubines, Sun Yatsen had a 13 year old Japanese concubine and another Japanese woman as another concubine. Meiji Japan allowed sex trafficking and selling of underage Japanese girls to both Chinese and westerners for Japan to earn money. Tokugawa Japan did the same thing on a more limited scale in Nagasaki while Meiji Japan expanded trafficking of Japanese girls to all over Japan and the world. Hideyoshi also did it before them and sold Japanese girls to Chinese merchants in Nagasaki too. The Orandayuki-san Japanese girls served Dutch merchants while Karayuki-san Japanese girls served Chinese merchants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Manshu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Jitao
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaoru_Otsuki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haru_Asada

https://meijiat150.arts.ubc.ca/episode- ... -setsunan/

And at some point, they met procurers, who talked about nice things of America: job opportunities or a chance to have an American education or marry rich landowners in California, who turned out to be peasants or hired hands who forced them into prostitution. I also found that not all women were unaware of what kinds of work they would do in their destinations. Some women had already sold sexual services to local foreigners in Yokohama working as servants in the houses of Chinese merchants. Others worked in brothels and dance halls, catering to foreign sailors and merchants. And in that process, they became familiarized with foreigners and Western cultures, which influenced their decision to follow masters or procurers to the American West.

https://napost.com/2018/karayuki-san-in-the-west/

Based on geography alone, the southern countries would have been the nearby teeming cities of China, specifically the adjoining mainland centers of Shanghai and Hong Kong, and in nearby Taiwan, the capital, Taipei.

Unstated is the labor that the women performed. It was prostitution, the timeless trade of dreams for cash. By the late 19th and early 20th century, the Japanese karayuki business had extended beyond China to the developing Pacific Rim, including the Philippines, Australia, Manchuria, Siberia, and even British India.

That such business also reached western North America has long been k non, if not widely acknowledged. For example, a Seattle Issei describes an apparently organized, vast network: “At the age of 18… I started… work as a dishwasher at a hotel in Spokane. Later I became a [railroad?] cook and went to North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and even as far as to Minnesota and Alaska… To my surprise I found at least two to six Japanese prostitutes in every town where I went between Seattle and St. Paul, a range of two thousand miles. Even when I went to Alaska to… a salmon cannery in 1908, I was surprised to see from two to five or six in such towns as Ketchikan, Juneau, Wrangell, Sitka, and Skagway.”

—Bunshiro Tazuma, in Kazuo Ito’s “Issei”

Japanese government begged Jacob Schiff for loans against Japan during the Russo Japanese war. Japan's economy would have collapsed and they would have lost the war if it weren't for Schiff giving emergency loans to Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff

US recognised and supported Japan colonising Korea in the Taft Katsuura agreement of 1905 in exchange for Japan recognising US colonising the Philippines, with Japan saying that the Philippines shouldn't be under the misrule of the natives. US president Theodore Roosevelt was supported by Jacob Schiff who influenced him to side with Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Katsura_agreement

US military officers helped Japanese attack Paiwan Aboriginals in Taiwan in 1874 and helped them colonise Ainu in Hokkaido.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ ... wan_(1874)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaidō_ ... Commission

Britain helped built Meiji Japan's fleet and its aircraft carriers which were used against China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sempill_Mission

Japan only obtained Chinese naval codes in the Nagasaki incident when Chinese sailors visiting Japanese prostitues were invovled in a brawl with Japanese police and dropped the code book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki_incident

Japan helped France colonise French Indochina by threatening to go to war against China on France's side during the Sino-French war over the Gapsin coup in Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapsin_Coup

At least over 10,000 Japanese girls and women settlers called Zanryu-Fujin were left behind in Manchukuo after 1945 and they were taken by local Chinese farmers as wives, while Soviet soldiers (who raped Japanese nurses and Japanese female settlers) deported Japanese men and soldiers to Siberian gulags to be worked to death. Japan did nothing to save its own people and the women blame the Japanese government for abandoning them.

70,000 Japanese girls including teenage high school students were forced into prostitution by the Japanese government in the "Recreation and Amusement Association" to service western Allied US, UK and Australian soldiers after 1945. Some of the Japanese girls were from families in Hiroshima, after their families were wiped out by the atomic bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreatio ... ssociation

Former Japanese Unit 731 scientists experimented on Japanese babies during tests for the US military after World War II in the 1950s. A Japanese baby girl they experimented on died from infection.

https://theguardian.newspapers.com/arti ... 122763034/

After 1948 Japan forced sterilised 25,000 Japanese women and girls, including a nine year old Japanese girl.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... genics-law

https://www.nippon.com/ja/currents/d00421/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-65958119

Japan didn't respect their own women's rights, treating them as commodities to be sold to foreign men.

Some pro-Japanese on here have tried to use the argument that people moving to Manchukuo proved that Chinese identity didn't exist and there was no nationalism.

Then it follows that Japanese Karayuki-san prostitutes moving to China and other countries proves that China was better run than Japan and Japanese people had no sense of national or ethnic identity.

They also say that Chinese don't value human life because of the alleged death rate during military conscription.

During the battle of Beicang in the Boxer rebellion and land siege of Port Arthur and battle of Nanshan in Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese ordered their own soldiers to go on human wave attacks against outnumbered enemies. Numerically superior Japanese soldiers were machine gunned and slaughtered in the tens of thousands by outnumbered Russians who suffered less casualties on land. Japan only survived the war because of Jacob Schiff's loans and Britain building the Meiji fleet for Japan to fight the Russian Baltic fleet at sea.

During World War II, Japan fed its soldiers methamphetamine and said it would sacrificed 100 million Japanese civilians for the emperor in an Allied invasion of Japan.

Its pretty easy to see which side doesn't value their own people's lives.

Even today Japanese women, including ones married to impotent Japanese men are going to Danish sperm banks for Danish sperm.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/ ... perm-bank/

https://www.progress.org.uk/danish-sper ... ince-2019/

[limited]

The export of baby girls for adoption to the west was started by South Korea exporting Korean girls as part of US policy, just as Japan exported Japanese teenage girls as prostitutes to the US and China. The human trafficking was facilitated by US run orphanages.

https://apnews.com/article/europe-busin ... dc9ad87481

The adopted South Koreans are believed to be the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees. In the past six decades, about 200,000 South Koreans — mostly girls — were adopted overseas. Most were placed with white parents in the United States and Europe during the 1970s and ′80s.

https://apnews.com/article/south-korea- ... 64f07da951

About 200,000 South Koreans, mostly girls, were adopted to the West in the past six decades, creating what’s believed to be the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees.

Most were placed with white parents in the United States and Europe during the 1970s and ’80s. South Korea was then ruled by a succession of military dictatorships, which were focused on economic growth and saw adoptions as a tool to reduce the number of mouths to feed, erase the “social problem” of unwed mothers and deepen ties with the democratic West.

The US pressured other Asian countries to follow suit in these policies in exchange for economic investment.

[wm]

That (legal) human trafficking existed in Japan is really irrelevant here. Especially since the maybe somewhat relevant 1926 Slavery Convention wasn't signed by Japan.

But in occupied China, it was an entirely different story; according to the Hague Conventions (signed by Japan), introducing human trafficking in occupied territories was a war crime and basically a hanging offense.
Unless human trafficking existed there already and the Japanese only "reaped the benefits" of the existing situation.

[limited]

Manfred "Zhang" and Michael Mills are trying to pretend Japan treated its own people as übermensch. Japan treated its own people as subhumans for the benefit of the Emperor and Kazoku. You misunderstand the point of my post. They made bad faith posts trying to insult entire cultures and people meanwhile this is what Japan was doing to their own Japanese people.

Japan didn't respect their own women's rights, treating them as commodities to be sold to foreign men.

Some pro-Japanese on here have tried to use the argument that people moving to Manchukuo proved that Chinese identity didn't exist and there was no nationalism.

Then it follows that Japanese Karayuki-san prostitutes moving to China and other countries proves that China was better run than Japan and Japanese people had no sense of national or ethnic identity.

They also say that Chinese don't value human life because of the alleged death rate during military conscription.

During the battle of Beicang in the Boxer rebellion and land siege of Port Arthur and battle of Nanshan in Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese ordered their own soldiers to go on human wave attacks against outnumbered enemies. Numerically superior Japanese soldiers were machine gunned and slaughtered in the tens of thousands by outnumbered Russians who suffered less casualties on land. Japan only survived the war because of Jacob Schiff's loans and Britain building the Meiji fleet for Japan to fight the Russian Baltic fleet at sea.

During World War II, Japan fed its soldiers methamphetamine and said it would sacrificed 100 million Japanese civilians for the emperor in an Allied invasion of Japan.

Its pretty easy to see which side doesn't value their own people's lives.

Even today Japanese women, including ones married to impotent Japanese men are going to Danish sperm banks for Danish sperm.

[wm]

The world wasn't really that different.
Slavery was legal in (Christian) Abyssinia till thirties, in some Arab countries till seventies.
Avi Shlaim writes that in Iraq in the thirties:

It was very common for men in positions of power to abuse their authority by sexually harassing their female subordinates or by soliciting sexual favours from applicants for jobs.

And I'm rather sure it was true in the Western world, too.

There were the Karayuki-sans, but in Poland, there was an almost identical "Warsaw Society" (later renamed Zwi Migdal) run by an international Jewish mob. They transported tens of thousands (if not more) of entrapped Jewish girls to brothels in Argentina.
For example, in 1929, they "controlled 2000 prostitution brothels and employed 30,000 women."
There is an entire book about it ("The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman" by Nora Glickman)

[gebhk]

For what it's worth, this seems to be a classic discussion that tries to prove that one or another end of a contunuum was the only thing that happened. The reality, I am sure, is that at one extreme some women went into this willingly and some perhaps even cheerfully. At the other, some were grabbed off the streets and carried off kicking and screaming. With a whole gamut of experiences inbetween with, I suspect, most being lured by the promises of unspecified work for good wages and once in the clutches of the system, put to work in the brothels with little option of quitting alive. This of course happens all over the world today and we somehow have little problem with calling it 'sexual slavery'.

In the opera Tosca, the eponymnous heroine is given the option of entertaining the chief of police Scarpia for one night in return for a pardon for her lover, condemned to death for treason. if she agrees to the bargain, is she selling herself (prostitution) or being coerced (rape)? The point being that the two are not mutually exclusive depending on how you define it, but that the onus of responsibility is on the person with the power, the one who creates the situation. I think the relevance to this discussion is obvious, for example with regard to the officer's club European 'hostesses'.

Of course in the opera, Tosca resolves the Gordian knot by stabbing the lecherous scumbag through the heart. Unfortunately, few sex slaves had or have that option in reality.

Oh and BTW, just because abusing women was and is the norm in many societies, that does not make it OK.

[limited]

For what it's worth, this seems to be a classic discussion that tries to prove that one or another end of a contunuum was the only thing that happened. The reality, I am sure, is that at one extreme some women went into this willingly and some perhaps even cheerfully. At the other, some were grabbed off the streets and carried off kicking and screaming. With a whole gamut of experiences inbetween with, I suspect, most being lured by the promises of unspecified work for good wages and once in the clutches of the system, put to work in the brothels with little option of quitting alive. This of course happens all over the world today and we somehow have little problem with calling it 'sexual slavery'.

In the opera Tosca, the eponymnous heroine is given the option of entertaining the chief of police Scarpia for one night in return for a pardon for her lover, condemned to death for treason. if she agrees to the bargain, is she selling herself (prostitution) or being coerced (rape)? The point being that the two are not mutually exclusive depending on how you define it, but that the onus of responsibility is on the person with the power, the one who creates the situation. I think the relevance to this discussion is obvious, for example with regard to the officer's club European 'hostesses'.

Of course in the opera, Tosca resolves the Gordian knot by stabbing the lecherous scumbag through the heart. Unfortunately, few sex slaves had or have that option in reality.

Oh and BTW, just because abusing women was and is the norm in many societies, that does not make it OK.

Manfred is lying, and Chinese and Japanese cultures are VASTLY different when it comes to women and conservatism.

Japanese commoners did not practice Confucianism and were sexually liberal, Japanese sold their daughters to foreign men during Sengoku Jidai in Hideyoshi's era and the Meiji restoration.

Japanese commoners did not live in patrilineal clans, they did not have surnames, they did not practice segregation between the genders, Japanese commoner men allowed their wives to mix with male strangers in public bathhouses and practice adultery with male strangers, and let their daughters get impregnated in yobai by male strangers and then raise the grandchildren (who would have no father) by themselves. Japanese women practiced temporary marriage with foreign men and Japanese men and raised the children themselves. Only Japanese nobles and samurai practiced Confucianism and lived in patrilineal clans and had surnames, which they adopted from China. It was normal for Samurai to rape Japanese peasant women and the Japanese peasant husband couldn't do anything about it or he would be executed if he attacked or disrespected the samurai. Japanese peasant women weren't supposed to defend their honour and their husbands weren't supposed to kill them for adultery. Only samurai did that.

Chinese commoners practiced Confucianism, they lived in patrilineal clans, they all had surnames, they segregated the genders in public, women were not allowed to go outside the house, a man was supposed to kill his wife for adultery or looking at another man, being single mother or practicing temporary marriage was absolutely taboo in Chinese culture. A man or father was supposed to kill his female relatives for doing those things.

Chinese viewed Japanese culture with disgust back then, as sexually loose, degenerate etc.

It was acceptable in Japanese culture to rent your daughter to foreigners and raise the fatherless children, it was unacceptable and regarded as humiliation in Chinese culture.

Manfred "Zhang" who is not familiar with Chinese culture at all despite claiming to be one, is describing Japanese culture, which is most likely his own

Japanese culture finds it acceptable to sell their daughters to foreign occupying soldiers, hence the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) after the war.

Japanese commoners don't have any idea of the concept of cuckoldry or honour killing.

[gebhk]

Hi Limited

Not sure what the connection your comments have to mine. It seems a non-sequitur.

It seems that what you are saying is that in both cultures women were abused, just in different ways. However, not sure how that informs this discussion?

Also, I'm afraid I am highly sceptical of characterisations that assume that entire nations of millions share the same culture. This simply does not happen in reality.