history: comfort women
On November 23, 1944, Japanese soldiers stormed the town of Mapanique, Philippines. They killed all the men, and herded all the women and girls [some as young as 11] into a red mansion. The women may not have known it then, but they had just been forcibly admitted into the ranks of the so-called “Comfort Women” - women who were tasked with satiating the sexual appetites of the Japanese military.
They were raped repeatedly and tortured. Some of them were brutally killed - with bayonets, with fists, sometimes by accident. They were injected with terramycin to prevent pregnancy, and coerced into abortions when necessary. Most were sterilized, and those survivors who were not were so emotionally scarred anyway, a great majority would never again bear children.
It’s an event the women of this village still talk about. Survivors are now in their 70’s, but they say the memories still haunt them. In one instance, they recall soldiers raping a mother and her young daughter at the same time.
Mapanique was by no means a unique event. The same story is replicated in many towns across the archipelago. [And across east and southeast asia, for that matter.]
This is history that is not yet adequately covered in history books, if it is even mentioned at all.
The irony is that just two generations later, women who could be these comfort women’s granddaughters find themselves tied to the men of Japan all over again. They have flown to the land of the rising sun to become Japayukis, bargirls, dancers, “entertainers” - all popular euphemisms for prostitutes. They don’t have a choice. Pride doesn’t put food on the table, after all.
Aida, a dressmaker in a Manila suburb who asked that only her first name be used, is unapologetic about the decision by one of her daughters to work as a bar girl in Japan.
“Her children are growing up and my daughter was worried she could not feed them well or send them to school,” said Aida, whose father fought the Japanese as a guerrilla. When asked what her father would think of her daughter, Aida replied: “My grandchildren cannot eat the past.”
More background stuff:
During World War II, the Japanese set up “comfort stations” all along east and southeast Asia. These comfort stations were essentially military brothels, stocked with women charged with satisfying the soldiers’ carnal needs.
Initially, the women themselves were Japanese, prostitutes shipped in just for the purpose. As the war raged on, however, the supply of women began to dwindle. Also, Japanese officials decided that shipping prostitutes to other countries reflected badly on the Japanese Empire in general.
Instead, they began to think local. Most of the Asian countries they occupied did not have a tradition of organized prostitution, and the idea of trading for sex met with much resistance. So they advertised for nurses, factory workers, etc. And the women came, not knowing what it was they were really getting into. They stepped right into sexual slavery.
As word got out, the military found it harder to find recruits, so they turned to the famous “Three Alls Policy” - Kill all, burn all, loot all. It was war, after all. Then began the systematic abduction of women for work in these brothels. It is generally estimated that about 200,000 women were forcibly “recruited” to work these stations.
It is estimated that only 25 percent of the comfort women survived and that most were unable to have children as a consequence of the multiple rapes or the disease they contracted. According to Japanese soldier Yasuji Kaneko "The women cried out, but it didn’t matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.“ Beatings and physical torture were said to be common.
Rosa Henson was among the first Filipinas to tell her story. Her ordeal began when she was raped by Japanese soldiers while gathering firewood in what is now Fort Bonifacio. Fearful for her safety, her mother brought her to a village in Pampanga, where Lola Rosa joined the Hukbalahap guerrillas, gathering food and medicine for them, and acting as a courier for messages. While transporting a cartload of guns, she was stopped by a Japanese sentry who forcibly took her to a hospital in Angeles City which had been turned into a garrison. There, at the age of 14, her life as a comfort woman began. For nine months until her rescue by Huk guerrillas, scores of Japanese soldiers raped her everyday.
What’s a tiny bit chilling is that both sides - the saviors and the forces these same saviors were fighting - seem to have agreed to keep quiet about all this. It wasn’t until 1991, when Korean comfort woman Kim Hak-Soon came forward, that the global public finally found out.
There were nameless casualties of war that neither the defeated Japanese Imperial Army nor the victorious American Forces – with the acquiescence of their own government – had agreed to acknowledge, much less account for. A 1994 report by the International Commission of Jurists (a Geneva-based United Nations human rights group which investigated the "comfort women” issue) showed that the Allied Forces had “extensive documentary and other evidence immediately after the war about the comfort stations.” The war tribunals, however, prosecuted only the cases involving 35 Dutch “comfort women” who were in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, when the war broke out.
Originally published on Tumblr, September 2010.