Researching Japanese war crimes records : introductory essays; chapter 2; pp 39-41 and references therein. 前記事の補足４です。容量を超えたのでここに再録します。
From MassRape to Military “Comfort Women”
The rape of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers has long been identified with Japan’s war atrocities in China. Reports by American missionaries during the Rape of Nanking in late 1937 provided a glimpse into the extent of sexual violence committed by the Japanese Army. Numerous other incidents in China and later inSoutheast Asia further tarnished the reputation of the Japanese forces. The post war trials, however, largely considered rape to be part of a more general violation of law or inhumane treatment, and not a war crime per se.
Japanese authorities were aware of the problem during the war. In fact, Japanese records show that orders were issued to deal with the problem and that a small number of Japanese soldiers had been tried by Japan’s own military courts during the war for rape or other crimes against civilians.97 In part to reduce local resentment againstJapan and in part to prevent the spread of venereal disease among its ranks, the Japanese military contracted private vendors to set up “comfort stations”for the troops as early as 1932.
Again, this practice was known to the Allies but no criminal charges were filed at the trials. There was one exception. After Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies(present-day Indonesia), the Japanese military forced many young women—including Dutch as well as Eurasian—into providing sexual service to theJapanese. Those Japanese responsible were punished by the Dutch authorities after the war on account of the abuse of the Dutch women.
In the 1970s, a few writers in Japan began treating the subject as a crime committed by theImperial Japanese Army.98 It was not until the early 1990s that the case of the military “comfort women” (ianfu) began to attract wide attention, following the first public testimony of a Korean woman who had been forced into military prostitution for the Japanese. Her account galvanized activists around the “comfort women” issue. Most publications on the subject initially appeared in Korean and Japanese. Numerous works have been also published in English.99 Gathering extensive oral histories, SuZhiliang, a historian from Shanghai, published the most comprehensive work on this topic in China and set up a Center for the Study of Chinese Comfort Women at his university.100 In terms of scope and impact, perhaps no other Japanese war crime has reached the level of international publicity since the 1990s as that of the military “comfort women,” a phenomenon helped by new interest in human rights and standards regarding sexual violence toward women.101
Initially, theJapanese government denied official involvement in the operation. YoshimiYoshiaki, a leading Japanese scholar on Japanese war crimes, made headlines by discovering documents in the Japanese Self-Defense Agency’s library that suggested direct military involvement. He went on to publish them in a collection of primary documents, which included numerous ATIS reports fromNARA.102 Under public pressure, the Japanese government admitted its complicity and set up theAsian Women’s Fund (AWF) to compensate former “comfort women” from private sources. AWF established a History Committee in 1996 to gather and examine relevant documents in archives in Japan, the United States, Holland, andTaiwan. Historians hired by the AWF also interviewed former “comfort women” inIndonesia and the Philippines. Their work resulted in a multi-volume collection of documents and a comprehensive bibliography on the subject.103 Many are not fully satisfied, however. As Yoshimi points out, numerous Japanese government documents were either lost or remain classified. Among them are police records belonging to the former Home Ministry that allegedly had been destroyed.104 Private records, such as the journal of army doctor Aso Tetsuo, contributed much to the understanding of conditions in the comfort stations in China, but many others held by the Self-Defense Agency War History Department Library remained closed to the public for privacy reasons.105
Many issues concerning the “comfort women” are still hotly disputed in Japan. e number of women victims remains a subject of disagreement; popular accounts frequently give the figure of 200,000. Takasaki Shohji, an expert on Korean history and chair of the AWF History Committee, emphasized the distinction between theKorean women’s volunteer corps (teishintai), who were sent to work in factories in Japan, and “comfort women.” As he noted, these two terms had been confused by many Korean activists and had led to an inflated estimate of the number of Korean “comfort women.”106 A bigger issue concerns the degrees of coercion and government involvement. Some also question the veracity of the testimony provided by former “comfort women” as well as their motivation to testify in public. Hata Ikuhiko, for one, has taken the lead and published many essays as well as a major work on this subject. Hata essentially equates the“comfort women” system with prostitution and finds similar practices during the war in other countries.107 He has been criticized by other Japanese scholars for downplaying the hardship of the “comfort women.”
References:
98) Senda Kakō, Jūgun ianfu [Military comfort women] (Tokyo: Futabasha, 1973; San’ ichi shobo, 1978; Kim Il-myon, Tenno no guntai to Chōsenjin ianfu [Emperor’s army and Korean comfort women] (Tokyo: Sanichi shobō, 1976).
99) In English, see George Hicks, ComfortWomen: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (NewYork: Norton, 1997); Keith Howard and Korean Council for Women Drafted forMilitary Sexual Slavery by Japan, True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (NewYork: Cassell, 1995); David Andrew Schmidt, Ianfu–The Comfort Women of theJapanese Imperial Army of the Pacific War: Broken Silence (Lewiston, NY:Edwin Mellen Press, 2000); Sangmie Choi Schellstede and Soon Mi Yu, ComfortWomen Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (New York:Holmes & Meier, 2001).
100) Su Zhiliang, Weianfu yanjiu [A study of comfort women] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2001).
101) See Chapter 4: “Why did the US forces ignore the comfort women issue?” in Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women:Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the U.S. Occupation (London: Routledge, 2001), 84–109.
102)
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Jugun ianfushiryōshū [Historical materials on the military comfort women] (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1992).
103) Ajia Josei Kikin (AWF) comp., “Ianfu”mondai kankei bunken mokuroku [Bibliography of materials on the “comfort women” issue] (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 1997). It also published a collection of reports of investigation by commissioned historians into documents relating to “comfort women” in 1999. In addition, an updated version of the bibliography can be found online at http://www.awf.or.jp/. See also Ōnuma Yasuaki, ed., “Ianfu”mondai to Ajia Josei Kikin [ e “comfort women” issue and the Asian Women’sFund] (Tokyo: Tōshindo, 1998).
104) Yoshimi Yoshiaki, “Sensō no kioku, sensō no kiroku: ‘Jugun ianfu’ kankei kiroku no mondai o reitoshite,” (Memory of war, records of war) Archives no kagaku (1) (Tokyo, 2003): 276–96. A Japanese newspaper reported, however, that large quantities of Home Ministry materials were discovered in a building marked for demolition. Mainichi shimbun (Nov. 16, 1994). Some of these documents were included in AWF, Seifuchōsa: “Jugun ianfu” mondai shiryō shūsei [Compilation of government-collected documentary materials relating to wartime “comfort women”](Tokyo: Ryūkei shosha, 1997–1998). According to Professor Nagai Kazu, these documents revealed that even Japan’s local police were shocked by the operation to recruit “comfort women,” which was ordered by the military.
105) Tetsuo Aso, From Shanghai ToShanghai: e War Diary of an Imperial Japanese Army Medical O cer, 1937–1941, trans.Hal Gold (Norwalk: EastBridge Books, 2004).
106)
Takasaki Sōji, “’Hantō jōshiteishintai’ ni tsuite” [Concerning the “peninsula women’s volunteer corps] in “Ianfu”mondai chōsa hōkoku [Reports of investigation into documents relating to“comfort women,”] (1999): 41–60.
107) Hata Ikuhiko, Ianfu to senjo no sei [Comfort women and sex in the battle eld] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1999). A shorter essay of this has been translated into English and published as “ The Flawed UN Report,” JapanEcho (Autumn 1996), 66–73.