Japanese military comfort women system
In 1937, the Japanese military installed comfort facilities in most military camps, from the Black Dragon River on the north side of Manchuria, to the Pacific Islands; from Pharaoh and Rabaul in the south, to the Burmese front in the east. The women who were accommodated there began to be officially called comfort women.
The system of Japanese military comfort women or comfort facilities had considerable continuity with the previous licensed prostitution system. In Japan, Joseon, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Shanghai, where Japanese troops were stationed before 1937, the existing red-light district, cooking facilities, and cafes were designated as exclusively military comfort facilities. As a result, the existing prostitutes, hostesses, Gisaeng, and waitresses changed their status to comfort women.
After 1937, when the Japanese occupied territory expanded to the Chinese jurisdiction, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, Japanese and Korean prostitute dealers recruited women and set up various hospitality establishments around the military. These were designated as comfort facilities. Among the comfort stations, some were installed and operated by the Japanese military as part of the military’s facilities, but the number was few, and even those were usually entrusted to private companies after a certain period of time.
In either form, the Japanese military had detailed control over the management of the comfort facilities. The date, time, fee, and action in the comfort facilities had to follow predetermined rules. The comfort women were regularly screened for sexually transmitted diseases, and their outgoings were limited to two times a month. Sak, a contraceptive tool and rice as a meal were provided by the military’s supply department.
The comfort facilities’ business owners regularly reported the operation status of the comfort facilities to the Japanese military or the administrative authorities of the occupied areas, on a monthly basis. This included reporting the income and the repayment of the loan per each comfort woman. The management guidelines and control of the Japanese military comfort facilities, the relationship between the business owner of the comfort facilities, the comfort women, the sex work and income of the comfort women were not much different from those of the licensed prostitution system that had existed in the past. In other words, the issue of comfort women in the Japanese military was a form of military mobilization and reorganization of the existing licensed prostitution system.
However, that doesn’t mean there was no difference: the intensity of sex work of the military comfort women was higher than that of civilian prostitutes. For example, the average number of tourists that the prostitutes received in Depan, Japanese in the 1930s was 2.5 per day. In the case of Joseon, there was not even one. By comparison, the average number of comfort women was five. When the Japanese military comfort facilities were established in 1937, one in every 150 soldiers was serviced by the comfort women. From that, one can estimate the intensity of such sex work.
As the intensity was high, the comfort women’s income was also high. According to the U.S. prisoners’ interrogation report, South Korean comfort women who went to Southeast Asia differed from person to person but earned 300 to 1500 yen per month. According to several other records, they usually reimbursed their 1,000-yen loan within a year. The monthly wage of workers working at a textile factory in the 1940s was around 40 yen.
Another difference was inevitable due to the nature of the military comfort women’s environment. Their operating environment was dangerous. Unlike those who were placed in the rear, the comfort women who were at the front, where it was especially dangerous. They moved with the military and were exposed to danger from air strikes and shelling. In the Southeast Asian and Pacific Islands, when the Japanese army was routed and retreated in disorder, the situation of the comfort women involved was unspeakably miserable.
The error of some conventional wisdom
Since the Japanese comfort women issue become widely known in 1991, the movement groups and researchers who have been engaged in the issue have dealt with the issue as an anti-Japanese national movement for Koreans. As mentioned earlier, it is cutting off the head and tail of pre and post history. This led to an error in widespread conventional wisdom.
The first was that the number of Korean comfort women was determined to be 30,000, and as high as even 200,000 women. This theory, which is still in history textbooks, is built solely on fantasy without any evidence. There are some credible grounds for the total number of Korean comfort women, and as mentioned above, 1 for every 150 Japanese soldiers were covered by the comfort women. The proportion of Koreans among former comfort women (Japanese, Chinese, and Southeast Asians) was about 20 percent. The same estimate is possible from the total amount of sak provided to the Japanese army over the year.
Also, there is other regional information. As mentioned above, the number of Korean comfort women who worked in Hwabook, North Korea in 1941, was 219. The total number that were in the Chinese jurisdiction is estimated to be about 700. According to U.S. military records, about 800 Korean comfort women crossed Southeast Asia and the South Pacific after 1942. The total number of comfort women who have been active in Joseon, Japan, Manchuria and Taiwan seems to have fallen short of these two regions. From this information, the presenter estimates the total number of Korean comfort women was around 3,600.
The second was the premise that the officials of the Japanese Government General of Korea or the Japanese army took or kidnapped virgin girls or even housewives of Joseon. This compulsive hypothesis, that was invented in a book called “My War Crimes”, was a sales gimmick by Japanese Seiji Yoshida in 1983, which later proved to be a lie. Japan’s Asahi Shimbun played a big role in spreading the theory and eventually apologized for the misinformation. Japanese left-wing scholars who led the study on the comfort women of the Japanese military have also dismissed this theory as unfounded.
Nevertheless, this compulsive hypothesis is still being played in South Korean movies, theaters, dramas and dominates the historical consciousness of South Koreans. There are a few reasons for this. One, was the confusion between comfort women and the Korean Women’s Volunteer Labour Corps. Korean Women’s Volunteer Labour Corps referred to the female laborers that were mobilized to the munition factories at the end of the war. However, when the Japanese military comfort women issue broke out, South Korean activist groups and media, even researchers, confused the two for a long time.
The recruitment of comfort women by the Japanese military was basically through patriarchs of the poorest class, who guided their daughters into prostitution. In some cases, a runaway girl who escaped from her family, where poverty and violence were rampant, or who was led astray by her friends, were caught by the arranger.
In any case, the organizers sent the comfort women to each region, meeting the formal requirements asked by the licensed prostitution system at the time. It was an inherent historical and cultural phenomenon in that era. If we hold somebody responsible for their actions from today’s point of view, it is a crime that the state, patriarch, men, and prostitute dealers would all be defined as accomplices.
The third is the theory of sexual slavery, which was also made up by Japanese scholars and imported into Korea. The key element of the theory of sexual slavery is that the comfort women had no freedom of action and choice. A Japanese scholar who spread the theory claimed that the sex slaves were, from the beginning, prostitutes under the licensed prostitution system, which is the background of the military comfort women. It is true that a small number of prostitutes were tied to slavish conditions, due to their heavy indebtedness to their pimp, but it is difficult to generalize them.
According to a nationwide survey about the Joseon prostitution industry in 1924, the annual closure rate of prostitutes was 45%, and the average period of continuous service was only about two years. There are several records that report the same for Japanese military comfort women.
The commander of the Southeast Asian Japanese army allowed the return of Korean comfort women who repaid all their loans. As a result, in 1944, 15 out of 20 comfort women, who worked at the comfort facility called Singapore Noodle Club, managed by a Korean, returned to Korea within a year. The choice of return was the right allowed to most comfort women except for a small number, who were placed on the front line when transportation was cut off.
Comfort women among us
After liberation, the U.S. military government abolished the licensed prostitution system in 1946. However, the comfort women system, in fact, continued to exist until 1966. The Korean government classified women who worked as dancers, prostitutes, entertainers and harlots according to the tradition of the previous licensed prostitution system.
Due to the division and poverty caused by the war, the total number of women in these brothels reached 110,642 in 1955, of which 61,833 were comfort women. Considering that the number is only for South Koreans, the scale expanded more than 10 times compared to 1940. Furthermore, in 1965, the total number of comfort women was 250,964.
It was an era when the massive unemployment was widespread in rural areas and women had no opportunity to work. In 1964, the monthly income of comfort women, who worked in Seongdong-gu in Seoul and Gunsan-si, was 1.5 to twice as high as that of female employees engaged in the manufacturing industry, in the same year. As a result, many women were engaged in a hospitality business for long- or short-term prostitution and became the subject of STD screenings. In 1966, women in their 20s who underwent a sexually transmitted disease screening reached 8% of the female population of the same age group.
During the Korean War, the Korean army set up and operated a special comfort band based on the former Japanese army. The total number of women belonging to them was about 700. Their sex-work intensity averaged 6.3 times per day, slightly higher than the Japanese military comfort women. As soon as the war ended, this special comfort band was dissolved.
The official titles of the comfort women of the Korean military were as follows: “Yangsakshi”, “Yanggongju” and “Yanggalbo”. The total number has not been investigated, but it was estimated at about 10,000 in the early 1960s. It is assumed that in the 1950s, the number was several times larger.
The monthly income of US military comfort women was three to four times higher than that of the private comfort women. The monthly cost of living was also high, because in many cases they had a cohabitation agreement, where their sex partners work was fixed. As a result, in 1964, in Gunsan City, the average intensity of sex work of civilian comfort women was 5.5 times a day, while that of the US military comfort women averaged only 1.7 times.
Summarizing this great deal of information, as the history of comfort women unfolded in Korea after liberation, the situation of comfort women was nothing better than that of the Japanese military comfort women or the prostitutes of the licensed prostitution system under Japanese colonial rule. To be brutally honest, the sex worker’s rights, income level, health status, and pimp relationship were much worse.
The life of comfort women, who were not controlled and protected by state power, was too miserable to mention. Here, let me introduce the damage of pregnancy and miscarriage. The Japanese forces strictly forced soldiers to wear sak when they visited the comfort facilities. As a result, the Japanese comfort women’s accidental pregnancy were controlled to a very low rate. Abortions were forbidden by law, and accidental pregnancy usually resulted in either suspension of work, returning home, or natural childbirth.
On the other hand, the US military and the South Korean government did not control the sexual reproduction of the comfort women. This led to a wide range of accidental pregnancies. Accidental pregnancy led to artificial miscarriage due to the pimp’s compulsion that lacked human rights awareness. In 1964, 132 people in the Gunsan-si base camps and 68 US military comfort women experienced artificial miscarriages. 49 women experienced artificial miscarriages three or fewer times, 15 women experienced it four to seven times, and 4 women experienced it more than 15 times and some even 20 or more times.
In 1967, among the 305 civilian and US military comfort women who worked in Wonju City, 254 of them experienced pregnancy. Accidental pregnancies were treated as artificial miscarriages without exception. 148 people experienced artificial miscarriage once, 75 women experienced it twice, 27 women experienced it 3 times, and 4 women experienced it 4 times.
Until the 1960s, 600 to 700 mixed-race children were born annually in the military camp town. Korean society and the government treated them as congenital disabled people, and that is why most of the mixed-race children were adopted to their father’s country, the United States.
Many women in the camp lost their motivation to live and took medicine or jumped into the railway line, mostly due to the shock of adoption, pregnancy and miscarriage. A cemetery was formed around the famous military camp town for the comfort women that did not have family or friends, and until now is a sorrowful sight for all visitors. These historical tragedies were caused by a low level of human rights awareness by contemporary South Korean people.
Inspiration
In 1991, as the so-called “Japanese military comfort women problem” arose, female activists, targeting women in the military base camp, also campaigned for governmental responsibility and demanded compensation. However, the movement was shunned by the Japanese military comfort women movement group. Furthermore, it has not received any response from South Korean society.
The presenter sympathizes with the moral justification of the movement but does not cheer for it, because of this great contradiction. If the demands of the movement are just, they cannot ignore the responsibility and compensation for a much wider number of civilian comfort women, which were as poor as the US military comfort women. This is because almost all Korean men of the same age are defined as accomplices and have to be held accountable. How many Korean men would sympathize with that?
The Japanese military comfort women issue was free from such morality, hypocrisy, and contradictions, as anti-Japanese tribalism, that was shared by Koreans, brilliantly concealed such hypocrisy and contradictions. However, the tangible and intangible costs that have been paid by the South Korean political social culture for the last 30 years is difficult to weigh.
The essence of the political body of the state is, in one word, justice. It is completely broken down. Does the state of reason that Koreans collectively embody have the ability to lead a modern nation? This is an ontological question that the current situation poses to every South Korean.
