Freedom Socialist Vol. 29, No. 2 April-May 2008

VOICES OF COLOR

“Comfort women” of the World War II era: from sex slaves to international human rights warriors

by Merle Woo

Former comfort women and their young supporters demonstrate in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, where the House of Sharing provides a home for the women and a center for organizing weekly protests. Credit The Seoul Times

Japan’s “comfort women” system — the official and extensive enslavement of young women by the imperial government for sexual exploitation — stands out as one of the most egregious examples of how women suffer the cruelest blows of war. To this day, the Japanese government denies its responsibility for this World War II-era atrocity.

The responsibility is not Japan’s alone, however. The U.S. turned a blind eye, as did the Japanese-occupied Asian countries from which the comfort women came.

Then, after a half century of silence, an amazing thing happened. Former comfort women stepped from obscurity and went public with their stories.

For 16 years now, survivors living in South Korea have protested at the Japanese Consulate in Seoul. Their goal is to obtain an official apology, with the hope of preventing this kind of crime against humanity from ever being repeated.

But, as elderly survivors die, time is running out. Support for their endeavor by feminists and human rights activists is now more crucial than ever.

Unimaginable exploitation made real. In the first decades of last century, Japan was a huge expansionist force competing with U.S. and European colonialism in East Asia and the Pacific Islands. The comfort women came from countries Japan invaded — 80 percent of them from Korea, which Japan occupied from 1905 to 1945.

Most of the comfort women, who numbered up to 200,000, were poor. Some were girls as young as 10. Representatives of the Japanese government pressed them into sexual servitude with lies, including promises of education, or simply by snatching them from the streets. Usually taken from their home countries to military brothels elsewhere, they were kept isolated and imprisoned.

Enduring serial rapes at night, the women were often also used as worker-slaves and forced to accompany the soldiers in battle. Grandmother Kim Hak Soon, born in Manchuria and sold by her stepfather to the Japanese military at the age of 16, stepped forward as the first public witness to these horrific abuses in 1991, 60 years after they began. This is what she said:

“During the daytime, we delivered ammunitions, cooked, did laundry and worked as nurses. During the nighttime, we were forced to serve Japanese soldiers. If we rejected to do it, even a little, we were beaten ... or pulled in hair and dragged naked. ... We were never paid. We never saw a penny.”

More than half of the women died while enslaved. Some were tortured to death. Some became ill and were denied medical care. Others died of starvation or from involuntary abortions and sterilizations.

After Japan lost the war, the women were murdered or just abandoned. Many traveled for years to get to their home country, or never returned.

Others besides the comfort women also suffered inhuman exploitation sanctioned by the super-militaristic Japanese government. Japan conscripted huge numbers of forced laborers, probably millions of them, to work in mines and other Japanese industries throughout the region. These were men from Korea, China, and other occupied areas, plus Allied prisoners of war. And more than 100,000 people died as a result of Japanese biochemical warfare experiments.

A wide circle of complicity. One of the stated reasons for the comfort women system was to maintain the “purity of Japanese women.” However, when the Allies occupied Japan in August 1945, the imperial government immediately established comfort stations for them, using poor Japanese women. The stated reasons were to protect “respectable” women, prevent a rampant spread of venereal disease, and placate the occupiers in order to avoid uncontrolled rape and pillage.

Nevertheless, even after the end of the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. soldiers occupying Japan raped, extorted, and murdered with impunity. They called the comfort women “communal toilets” or “yellow stools.”

There is ample, concrete evidence for official Japanese responsibility for the system. Still, the former Allied powers and the victims’ countries of origin have never prosecuted Japan for this war crime, although organizing by and on behalf of the comfort women has stirred some of them to criticism.

Racism is a key reason for this, since most of the women were of color. Even more basic is that all of the countries involved are members of the same capitalist club, despite the brutality with which they have ravaged each other during two world wars.

Specifically, following WWII, the primary interest of the United States was to rebuild Japan into a strong ecopower to help in the Cold War fight against communism. Even as late as 2001, Washington actively opposed a class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. by former comfort women demanding redress from Japan.

Capitalism relies on patriarchal values. Contempt of women is the norm. Crimes against them — like the social and sexual crimes occurring today against Iraqi women, and against female U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq — are not taken seriously by those who hold power.

Moving forward. The surviving comfort women want to change that. Since January 1992, they have picketed in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul every Wednesday. As their number grows smaller, they have continued to demand a formal apology from Japan plus compensation.

In March 2007, after it had become fairly commonly accepted even in Japan that their sexual coercion was official policy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe publicly and flatly denied it. Nationalistic school textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education omit all information related to this and other wartime atrocities by Japan.

Although some measure of justice is yet to be won, the comfort women have increased consciousness and given impetus to raising the status of wartime rapes to an internationally recognized war crime.

Diverse groups around the world have held public hearings, tribunals, and conferences and passed resolutions in support of the comfort women. Ongoing solidarity is needed to support the protests in Seoul and efforts to include the truth in Japan’s textbooks.

Even more important is that feminist and human rights activists fight to end imperialist wars! Men who become soldiers are not naturally the enemies of women brutalized during war. The blame belongs to the social and economic system whose profits depend on both war and women’s subjugation.

Grandma Kim Hak Soon died in December 1997. In an interview with Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, an advocate for comfort women, she had said:

“I want the Japanese to give us a signed document in which they acknowledge that Japanese colonialism was wrong ... a crime, no matter how you look at it — legally, politically or simply humanly.”

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson has produced an excellent film and book, both called Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. For updates and information about how to get involved, readers can visit the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (www.womenandwar.net/english) and the House of Sharing (www.nanum.org).  

Merle Woo, who lives in San Francisco, is a Korean-Chinese American poet and retired college lecturer in Women Studies and Asian-American Studies. She can be reached at woogok@comcast.net.