Legalization and Justification
Regulation for the use of Comfort Stations
By: Setara Grey
During World War Two, the Japanese government and army saw it fit to establish stations that would bring a source of comfort for their military across the sea in the different Asian nations. These stations were called Comfort stations, but the only form of comfort that these stations provided were the ‘comfort’ of women.
Japan has had a familiar history with women and sex work all the way back to the time of the samurai. These women were often highly respected, well paid, and even ran brothels and ‘comfort stations’ of their own. However, these women got to choose their partners and who they were paid by. The women that were put into the comfort system did not.
Fallowing the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese army issued a legal document legalizing the recruitment of women to serve in these stations. These women were supposed to be 21 years or older, have permission from their parents to serve, and have already be in the business of prostitution.
A document from the Asia Women’s Fund’s online exhibition called “Military Medical Office at Iloilo ‘On the Result of Examination of Sexual Diseases’ has a list for the first two comfort station women and their ages that are on legal record by a doctor. This document is in Japanese but thankfully the exhibit provides a translation of the document. Comfort station one had three girls that were 16 years old, one 17 year old, three 18 year olds, one 19 year old, one 20 year old, one 21 year old, one 27 year old, and one 31 year old.[1] If the legal age for a woman that was to serve in a comfort station by legal law from the Japanese military was 21 years old, then nine of these girls were underage. I hesitate to call these girls women, not that they do not deserve the recognition for the trauma they went through, but at the time they were just girls who were in their late teens. Four of the nine underage girls hadn’t even reached the age of 18 which is considered an adult by most nations.
There should be no reason that the Japanese military to make a legal sex slave institution to stop their men from committing rapes and attacks on women in the lands that they were imperializing.
The justification could be found in their ideal of imperialism and forming Japan as the biggest power in Asia. For years Japan had already had control of Korea and Okinawa. This control went deep as the nation of Japan controlled their crops, wages, school, and government. To Korea, Japanese prosperity was Korean prosperity. They were told that they were equal citizens and that they mattered just as much as any other Japanese citizen on the main land. However, it is often stated that the Japanese saw the Koreans as lesser. As with many other imperialistic nations, even America, the imperializing nation would put their needs for the resources and land over the wellbeing and the care of the people that were already there.
Because of their ongoing war with China and it had already been proven that the Japanese army had men that had no issues with attacking and raping the women from that nation, it is safe to say that the Japanese did not really see the Chinese citizens as people that were on the same level as their people. One could use the term second class citizen if they want to, but even then they hardly had the same rights and recognition to be called a citizen of the Japanese empire.
Despite the age of the girls and the need to steal women from their imperialized colonies, the system, at least on paper, was rather organized. The document that is pictured above is named Regulation for the use of Comfort Stations. This document was issued by the officers of the 2nd Independent heavy siege artillery battalion that laid out the times, days, and price for each unit to go and receive the services of the stations. Because it is in Japanese the Asia Women Fund from which this image of the document was found, provides a translation of the document. “Chapter IX Regulations for the Use of Comfort Stations
Clause 59 Basic Principle
To help to enforce military discipline by providing ways for relaxation and comfort
Clause 60 Facilities
Comfort stations are set up inside the south walls of Nikka Hall…
Visiting days are appointed to each unit.
Hoshi unit -- Sunday.
Kuriiwa unit -- Monday and Tuesday.
Matsumura unit -- Wednesday.and Thursday.
Narita unit -- Saturday.
Achiwa unit -- Friday.
Murata unit -- Sunday
Clause 61 Price and Time
1 For non-commissioned officers and enlisted men comfort stations are open from 9:00 to 18:00
2 Price
Time limit is one hour for one man.
Chinese -- 1 yen
Korean -- 1 yen 50 sen
Japanese -- 2 yen
Clause 62 Examination
Every Monday and Friday are examination days. On Friday women are examined for sexually transmitted disease ….”[1]
As we can see above, the prices for a particular nationality of woman had a different price. The Chinese being the cheapest of the women. This could be because during World War Two the Japanese were still at war with China, who had now sided with the allies, and the Japanese military men still had a grudge and hatred towards that particular nationality. These girls didn’t get a break between units of men. Say there are 400 men in a unit and 20 girls. If each men actually spends the allotted time of one hour with each girl, then one girl will service at least 20 men in one day. With 24 hours in a day and each man getting an hour, then there is only a small 4 hours of the day the girls get to sleep, eat, do chores, and prepare mentally and physically for the next day. This is if each man only spend the on hour. If a man abuses her for more than that time, the time the girl could spend being raped and abused could be the whole 24 hours of the day.
Justice for these women didn’t come, and some say it still hasn’t come, until the 1990’s when the Japanese government released private apologies to victims. “Up until the late 1980’s, the Japanese government denied any Japanese military involvement in organizing the comfort women system by attributing it to private enterprise.”[2] The Japanese army and government did not want to have this shame on their nation, and themselves, of having had a system of human trafficking and sex slavery for their men. When some of the victims say that they have not gotten the justice that they deserve, they mean that they don’t want to pay off, they don’t want to be seen as someone who did this and is just now getting paid for being a sex slave. One article that discusses the official apology from the Japanese government states “While denying its legal responsibility, the Japanese government established the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995…”[3] The AWF was dissolved in 2006 when the Japanese government chose that these women no longer needed to have an organization to get them ‘justice’ because justice had been done.
The legalization by the Japanese government and military for the creation of comfort stations, while a wrong choice to the reaction of their men committing rapes, started out as an organized structure that on paper seemed to at least have some sort of morals. The justification by them has scattered from it being a private business and not being from the government, but their history with a form of comfort women and the imperialistic ideology of the time gives a small view into why they might have seen this solution as the right choice. Most of these women have since passed without getting the justice they deserve while the Japanese government is just waiting for the victims of the comfort stations to be forgotten.
[1] Asia Women’s Fund. ”The Comfort Women Issue and the Asian Women’s Fund” awf.or.jp
Bibliography
"Documents of Japanese Government." Documents of Japanese Government and the AWF. Accessed October 18, 2018.
Izumi, Mariko. 2011. “Asian-Japanese: State Apology, National Ethos , and the ‘Comfort Women’ Reparations Debate in Japan.” Communication Studies 62 (5): 473–90. doi:10.1080/10510974.2011.588299.
"Who Were the Comfort Women?" Who Were the Comfort Women?-Women Were Collected. Accessed October 18, 2018.
Yangmo Ku. “National Interest or Transnational Alliances? Japanese Policy on the Comfort Women Issue.” Journal of East Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (May 2015): 243–69.
[1] The Life in Comfort Stations, http://www.awf.or.jp/e1/facts-09.html
[2] Yangmo Ku, National Interests or Transnational Alliances? Japanese Policy on the Comfort Women Issue, (Journal of East Asian Studies 15) 244
[3] Mariko Izumi, Asian-Japanese: State Apology, National Ethos, and the “Comfort Women” Reparations Debate in Japan
Oral History
Kim Haksun: Bitter Memories I am Loath to Recall. Oral histories collected by the Korean Council for Women. Edited by Keith Howard
When Kim Haksun was a girl her and her mother traveled back to her mother’s home town of P'yongyang after her father’s death. She recalls many good memories from her childhood and how fond she was of those memories. Her life changed when she was given to a couple that trained performers like singers and dancers. While with this couple, on a trip to china with the man, she and another girl were captured by Japanese military and put into a comfort station. She recalls her first night there being attacked and raped by the commanding officer of the station. She describes that time and how the station was run until she escaped with a Korean man that had made his way into the station. Her life after she moved from place to place until she was back in Korea. There her husband died from a collapsed building, her daughter had died before, and then a few years later her son died of a heart issue at age four. She survived and worked job to job until she became a speaker for the justice of comfort women.