Liberal Japan

A sad story about a Japanese comfort women appeared in the Japan Times today. The article is titled, Memoir of Japanese ‘comfort woman’ recounts ‘this hell’. This article is well worth reading.

Here are some things that I noticed:

Sold by her father into prostitution at age 17, she followed Japan’s troops around the Pacific during World War II. After the war she returned and U.S. troops became her clientele. She became a drug addict, was destitute and institutionalized for decades.

First, note here the complicity of her father. You can be sure that if this happened in Japan, it was happening in Korea and other places as well. We’re talking about the kind of society where parents are willing to sell their children into sexual slavery. I don’t think people like myself, who have been raised with affluence and a liberal education, are really capable of understanding the hardship these people experienced or even the cultural attitudes they possessed. There is a great deal of arrogance involved when we judge people with such different backgrounds.

Second, note who became her new patrons after the war, the American military. Did anybody bother to worry if she’d been exploited or a sexual slave? No. Now, if she’d been white there would have been somebody put up before a war crimes tribunal, but if the girl was Asian … well, we all know how those oriental women can be. The attitude that was taken towards the comfort women by occupational forces was to look down on them and to use them. The system was accepted until it began to affect the health of the soldiers.

Though historians believe there were perhaps tens of thousands more Japanese like her, Shirota is the only Japanese “comfort woman” to have come forward and tell her story.

Initially the comfort women we’re probably mostly made up of Japanese. However, as population decreases became a concern, I think this was discouraged. For more than one reason, I think Koreans became the number one choice. There was clearly some racism involved in this choice.

Now, the government is subtly trying to revise that story. Sixty-two years after Japan’s surrender brought an end to the official sanction of thousands of frontline brothels, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has questioned a key element of a 1993 government apology to the women. Abe and many conservatives claim that, “in the narrow sense,” the women weren’t coerced.

Three theories: One, there was a massive comfort women program run and organized by the government (that made heavy use of subcontractors). Two, it probably explicitly forbid the use of coercion and deception. Three, it probably had very poor and ineffectual structural ways to prevent coercion from actually happening because it was not regarded as an issue of concern.

I just completed reading a book on this issue, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation by Yuki Tanaka, and time permitting will share some of what I learned.