Comfort women system in the Pacific war
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The term comfort women was used in the Japanese army to refer to women who were recruited and used as sex slaves during the 20th-century pacific war. For these women, sex was a source of oppression and brutality. During the Pacific war, many women went through sexual enslavement and had to endure extreme pain as hordes of soldiers lined up to rape them. For these women, sex was monstrously abusive and ugly.
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The issue of comfort women among the Japanese military remained suppressed for a very long time. It is only after the pacific war that many women came out in the open to start recounting the kind of mental and physical suffering that they went through in the hands of cruel, sexually abusive soldiers. For them, the Japanese did more than fight and maintain a colonial-like presence in the pacific region; they committed many crimes against humanity, most of which would rather lay long forgotten rather than be discussed. This is because they raise very many questions that are definitely not available presently.
The extraordinary brutality and scale of the sexual violence that was organized against comfort women, committed by the Japanese imperial forces remains a powerful example of how people can be demeaned in the name of preserving “high ideals”. The high ideals, in this case, were the claim by Japan that she was liberating the Asian people from the ravages of Western colonialism.
The Japanese-style comfort women system was organized by the country’s leaders who were acting on the conviction that they were trying their best to protect the physical and moral integrity of their troops as well as protecting the Asian civilians as well. According to them, the system was very a very necessary means through which the Japanese soldiers could be dissuaded from raping civilian women, who would have contracted venereal diseases, mainly through contact with many unauthorized prostitutes. This conduct, according to these leaders, was honorable. The only problem was that they failed to realize that their action showed absolutely no lack of humanitarian concern for other women. The system that they had decided to set up was victimizing the comfort women irrevocably. In society, every woman felt threatened since it was difficult to tell who would be the next victim to be enlisted in sexual work.
The Japanese military and civilian leaders remained oblivious of the irreparable violation of some of the most fundamental human rights that they were committing towards all comfort women. The focus on a few thousand troops at the expense of a vulnerable social group was indeed an indication of selfishness and narrow-mindedness. The system that they had created violated the basic human rights of a section of the population, thus disrupting the normal social, cultural order of entire societies throughout the duration of the war.
All the comfort women were always drawn from occupied territories as well as other from Japan’s territories. The crimes that were committed against comfort women were attributed to not only the Japanese leaders who created the system, but also the military officers who exploited these women sexually. During these acts, many questions arise regarding the nature of humankind. It is true that people tend to be influenced to behave according to the structures and organizations that have been put in place by the state. In this regard, the military officers who exploited these women may claim that they were merely responding to the provisions made for them by a bad state system.
The acts of sexual exploitation touched on matters of masculinity, nationalism and racism, factors that were at the heart of every nation’s economic, political, social and cultural development during the 20th century, and to some extent, even today. The issue of comfort women should, therefore, be approached from the two different viewpoints: the power structure of Japanese state political machinery and the military on the one hand and the responsibilities and actions of individuals on the other hand.
The Japanese military officers who exploited the comfort women were not forced to do so by anyone. They chose to visit the comfort stations by their own volition. No one would punish them for not using the services offered in the comfort stations. There was clearly a difference in the way these officers were ordered into inflicting violence on all villagers or even to kill them compared to the casual and ‘relaxed’ manner in which these officers were informed about the availability of comfort services.
Women who were exploited felt degraded and had difficulties integrating back into the societies from which they had been separated. After the way, these women had difficulties mending their broken self-esteem. Many of them chose prostitution as the only way in which they could fend their families and other dependants. These women considered these atrocities to be more serious than those that the soldiers committed after receiving orders from their seniors. This is because it was because of the personal choices that they chose to exploit the women. In a way, the comfort women perceived themselves as bearing paying the highest price of the pacific war.
The issue of abuses against comfort women may also require to be examined within the complicated parameters of the intertwined ideologies that existed during the 20the century pacific war. These women came to hate the ideological aspects of militarism and masculinity as depicted within the Japanese military structure. The atrocities also led to focus being directed towards the search for specific features within the Japanese moral system that made provisions for various forms of sexual enslavement. The main question that these women asked themselves was why the soldiers needed to express their power in this way when they were already being given the authority to express it in other ways, including killing innocent civilians. This was a reason enough for every comfort woman to doubt her position in the social, cultural, economic and political structure of the society in which she lived.
Scholars, feminists, and historians have for a long time queried the use of the term ‘comfort women’, says that it gives the wrong impression that these women were voluntarily providing services; that the term masks the violent and sexual aspects of the system. Indeed, the truth of the matter is that comfort women were sex slaves within the Japanese military system. Whichever term is chosen to refer to the women who were made to provide these services, the experience was traumatic and unendurable. They would rather have been out there in the villages experiencing the different types of atrocities that these very same sexual exploiters were unleashing on their kin. This way, they would have felt as if they were part of a larger society.
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In Korea, it is difficult to sufficiently explain the origin of the comfort women system from the perspective of military history alone. It is only comprehensible when examined through an analysis of how young women started being trafficked, a practice that became widely practiced in Korea even before the onset of the pacific war. The trafficking practices preceded the establishment of the Japanese military brothel system. In fact, it was largely viewed as a by-product of the experiences of the colonization of the Korean peninsula. by 1938, the comfort women business had become deeply entangled with the prostitution business that was thriving throughout the pacific region, including China. There were employment agents, subcontractors, brokers, and small proprietors, all of whom were playing an active part in perpetuating atrocities against innocent women. This system of illegally trafficking women and finally exploiting them as comfort women were diverting these people’s attention from genuine ways of searching for livelihood and worries of the war. They seemed to be orientating these women into the world of prostitution by eroding their morals.
In conclusion, the war in the Asian Pacific was typical of the various ways in which women can be politically, socially economically and culturally be affected negatively by various forms of violence. For the women and adolescent girls in this region, working as comfort was something they wish never happened although it did. All in all, long after the Asian Pacific War, thousands of women in this region are still haunted by experiences of witnessing their most fundamental rights being violated.
Works cited
Tanaka, Toshiyuki. Japan’s comfort women: sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II, Routledge: London.
Luong, Hy. Postwar Vietnam: dynamics of transforming society, London: Macmillan,
