Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, and: Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (review)

For almost 58 years I have, in some form or another, been acquainted with the female sexual slavery practiced by the Japanese imperial military. The ianfu, or "comfort women" (a euphemism in both Japanese and English), first came to my attention when I was a Military Intelligence Service Language Officer in the U.S. Army. It was in the summer of 1945 at General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters under the remains of the grandstand of the Santa Ana Racetrack in Manila when American forces were preparing for the invasion of Japan. ATIS (Allied Translator and Interpreter Section), of which I was one small part, was charged at that time with marshaling intelligence in order to attempt to evaluate the morale of the Japanese armed forces as we prepared our contemplated invasion of the Japanese mainland.

To that end, our Report No. 120, entitled Amenities in the Japanese Armed Forces, included a section on "Amusements" with a subsection on "Brothels." Utilizing captured Japanese documents, the report discussed variously general regulations for brothels, business operations, hygiene, discipline, prices, etc. Although female sexual slavery for the Japanese military had begun decades earlier on the mainland of Asia, the specific locales identified in the ATIS report were the Philippines, Burma, Sumatra, and New Britain. For me personally, as a 20-year-old second lieutenant from a middle-class home in Ohio, this information was both eye-opening and memorable. (This report is briefly alluded to by Yuki Tanaka [p. 84], who I suspect did not understand the original purpose of compiling such a report.) Some ten years ago, the ianfu mondai (sex-slave problem) surfaced in Japan as a result of archival research by Yoshimi Yoshiaki in the files of the Defense Agency. Having retained over all the intervening years my copy of ATIS Report No. 120, I ultimately provided the gaiatsu (foreign pressure) that forced the Government of Japan to admit its role in the propagation of the ianfu.

In considering these two books for review, it seems important to understand at the outset both the human and humane factors at stake in the matter of Japan's ianfu. It is shocking to report that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights meeting in Geneva on April 10, 2003, was once more asked to act in order to seek direct compensation for the victims of Japan's policy of enforced prostitution originally affecting an estimated 200,000 women of multiple nationalities of whom undoubtedly only a few thousand survive. However, as throughout the past decade, the Japanese government, in complete contrast to the German government, has flatly refused to consider any recompense for its myriad wartime atrocities. Relying on the San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan, supported unstintingly by the United States, has contended that all wartime matters, no matter how heinous, were settled at that time. This adamant attitude has been argued not only in the United Nations but in Japanese, American, and other courts where suits have been pursued on behalf of the former ianfu. Unfortunately, none of these suits has succeeded in the courts of Japan, and a proposal in the Diet of a bill "to promote the settlement of the issue of the victims forced into becoming wartime sex slaves" has failed to secure the ruling party's support (Asahi shinbun, August 9, 2002).

Thus, perhaps the books by Yoshimi and Tanaka are ex post facto. A number of books, analogous to these two, recounting the awful plight of the ianfu began to appear in 1995 with George Hicks's The Comfort Women. All of these books, including the two under review, cover generally the same ground-forced...