``Comfort Women'' have been long-hidden tragedies of the Pacific War until the early 1990s. Some 200,000 young women, about 80 percent of whom were Korean, were turned into ``sex slaves'' for officers and men of the Imperial Japanese Army that occupied far-flung areas of Asia-Pacific.
Why not leave these hidden pasts buried? Because it will simply be unjust to await a ``biological solution'' to the tragedies. There are only about 140 former comfort women still alive today, most of them in grinding poverty and lasting shame, and most of them in poor health in their 70s and 80s.
In the last months of World War II, numerous comfort women were murdered or left to die by retreating Japanese soldiers. The Japanese government, that was ultimately responsible for the unspeakable deeds, has done nothing meaningful to atone for the past cruelties perpetrated on these women.
Why have they become an issue only recently? Though these hapless women provided ``comfort''(read it as sexual release) to Japanese soldiers, it was downright uncomfortable and painful for these women to talk about their dreadful past even after the Pacific War.
Although they were euphemistically called ianfu [comfort women], many Japanese soldiers actually called them kyodo benjo [public toilet]. Up to 40 soldiers relieved themselves on each woman every day in makeshift shacks in the jungles of the Philippines or Borneo and numerous other locations.
These women were ``recruited'' under false pretexts or kidnapped not only from Korea but also from Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia (including some Dutch women), and Australia. But their governments, when they learned about their disgraced daughters quietly turned their backs to them, as did the American authorities who were made aware of their existence in the process of repatriating survivors of the ``comfort stations'' to their home countries.
Thus, comfort women were unknown to the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan, and unknown to the 1965 Basic Treaty between South Korea and Japan. Eager to receive paltry sums of some $300 million in grants and $200 million from Japan, the South Korean government then headed by a former Imperial Japanese Army officer, Park Chung-hee, could not be bothered with comfort women issues, as pointed out in Bonnie Bongwan Oh's and Margaret Setz's ``Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II''.
President Park's regime was then fiercely focused on rapid economic growth at any cost. The Japanese government has generally taken the stance that all pending problems between Korea and Japan, including those of reparations, were resolved by the 1965 treaty. Since Japan became a principal ally of the United States in the Cold War, issues that were uncomfortable to Japan were swept under the rug.
To many Japanese who had the notion that the superior Japanese ``race'' was led by a divine emperor, comfort women presented no problem. These women were ``recruited'' from inferior races to give sexual release and pleasure to officers and men of the Imperial Japanese Army that was engaged in a seisen, or a sacred war, in the name of the emperor.
Just as the emperor gave gifts of cigarettes and wine before his soldiers faced battle, comfort women were similar gifts to them to relieve themselves. The imperial myth, racism, and a culture of male superiority justified the sex slavery, which transported these women as ``military supplies.''
Some Japanese today try to explain away the comfort women problem in terms of Japanese sexuality that has deeply rooted cultural and historical dimensions. Shintoism believed in fertility as a basic tenet. During long warring periods in the Japanese past, fertility was definitely a desirable attribute, and copulation that made fertility possible were seen as natural or even commendable.
Historically, during the long Tokugawa Shogunate [rule by the military commander, 1603-1868], brothels were officially sanctioned and thriving establishments. According to Japanese conservatives today who attempt to belittle the comfort women issue, taking sexual pleasure with courtesans or prostitutes had been nothing unusual in Japan.
It was no accident that erotic paintings [shunga] proliferated in Japan in the Tokugawa period and beyond. These paintings almost always made copulating male and female genitalia prominent. It was a well-known part of the Japanese adult world that had maintained a licensed prostitution system until 1957.
Where else but in Japan, can one see a man in a three-piece suit openly reading X-rated cartoons and magazines in a crowded subway? The apologists of the comfort women system emphasized these historical and cultural facts to suggest that prostitution was widely accepted in Japan and that comfort women during wartime were not at all out of the ordinary.
What ``consenting'' Japanese adults did or do among themselves is not an international concern. However, women from many Asian nations were forced into sex slavery during the Pacific War.
Also importantly, there was a fundamental difference between prostitution in Japan and the comfort women system. The former was essentially a private transaction while the latter was clearly a military (governmental) operation sanctioned by the military commanders, high and low.
According to the Meiji Constitution, the military was ``coordinate'' with the civilian counterpart of the government, and the military had direct access to the emperor himself. All evidence emerging in Korea, Japan and elsewhere in recent decades demonstrates that the chief of staff of the imperial army knew and approved the comfort women network. An inescapable deduction is that the emperor himself was at least aware of the ``comfort stations.''
In 1992, for instance, a Japanese researcher, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, professor of Japanese history at Chuo University in Tokyo, discovered records on comfort women at the Japan's Self-Defense Agency archives. These records showed conclusively that the Japanese government was directly involved in the comfort women system. Professor Yoshiaki's findings were carefully detailed in his ``Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II''.
Revelations of these hidden tragedies accelerated with a number of gradual humanitarian developments and recent feminist scholarship. A series of United Nations Commission on Human Rights hearings began in 1992, and the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Slavery by Japan, among other nongovernmental organizations, became active.
Slowly but surely, the international community began to be involved in human and women's rights issues. The maturing of feminist scholarship in the West and Asia from the 1970s created a milieu in which hitherto taboo subjects were more openly discussed.
A conference on comfort women issues was held at Georgetown University in September 1996, and toward the end of the scholarly conference a surviving sex slave related her experiences through an interpreter and brought tears to the eyes of usually impassive scholars. A similar meeting, this time with the general public, was held at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. in September 2000 and a former comfort woman emphasized that the Japanese government should compensate them for the violation of their human rights.
A modest private fund, the Asian Women's Fund, was established in 1994 in Japan and initially headed by Mutsuko Miki, widow of a former Japanese prime minister. This fund recently paid several Filipina women for their wartime slavery. Korean, Chinese and other women, however, refused to accept money from this private source. They demand that the Japanese government apologize and make official compensations.
If the government of the Federal Republic of Germany can provide compensation to former slave laborers during the Third Reich, why can't the Japanese government take some just and honorable acts for former comfort women and atone for the cruel deeds of imperial Japan? Is the Japanese government cynically waiting for all the surviving comfort women to die?
Source:
http://www.hankooki.com/kt_op/200110/t2001100416382948110.htm