Chinese Comfort Women (7 page)

Although the navy’s first comfort stations comprised the Japanese brothels that already existed in Shanghai, they were implemented specifically to achieve Japan’s military goals as it was accelerating its invasion of China. It has been suggested that, because Japanese forces had suffered a high rate of venereal disease during their Siberian expedition between 1918 and 1922, Japanese military leaders considered facilities for sexual comfort essential to strengthening their troops’ morale and preventing the spread of venereal disease.
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However, far from preventing venereal disease, the comfort women system became a colossal host not only of this but also of sexual violence.

Figure 1
Dayi (or
Daiichi
in Japanese) Saloon indicated with an arrow on a 1937 Japanese map. (Photograph courtesy of Fang Yuqiang)

The comfort stations established in big cities at this time were of considerable size. Dayi (
Daiichi
, in Japanese) Saloon, one of the first naval comfort stations in Shanghai, occupied several two-story buildings. As is clearly marked on a 1937 Japanese map, it was located on Dong-Baoxing Road, a street adjacent to Sichuan-bei Road, where the Japanese navy’s land battle units were stationed (see
Figure 1
). Lu Mingchang, a Dong-Baoxing Road resident who worked as a labourer at Dayi Saloon for fourteen years, recalled that, in the beginning, it contained mainly Japanese comfort women and was open to both Japanese naval officers and overseas Japanese civilians. Later, Korean comfort women were taken into Dayi, and, after the outbreak of full-scale warfare in 1937, it was reserved for the exclusive use of the Japanese navy.
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In 1932, the Japanese army followed the navy’s example by establishing its own comfort stations in Shanghai. At the time, about thirty thousand Japanese troops were stationed in the Shanghai area, and the number of rapes committed by them became scandalous.
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On 14 March 1932, Lieutenant-General Okabe Naozaburō, a senior staff officer in the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, wrote about the situation in his diary:

Lately I have often heard obscene stories about our soldiers roaming around in search of women. These incidents are hard to prevent when the troops are not engaged in battle. Therefore, we should act proactively by providing proper facilities. We shall consider various measures for meeting the soldiers’ sexual needs and shall start to implement them. Lieutenant Colonel Nagami is in charge of this task.
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Okabe’s measures were also implemented by Okamura Yasuji, deputy chief of staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army. Okamura not only authorized the establishment of the facilities following the navy’s model but also went a step further and had the governor of Nagasaki Prefecture send a group of women from Japan to China.
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Evidently, from its inception, the drafting of comfort women was carried out with the knowledge and cooperation of the Japanese military and government. After the outbreak of full-scale warfare, Japanese authorities tightened control over travel from Japan and its colonies to Mainland China. Identification papers issued by the Police Bureau were needed in order to obtain permission to travel.
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In other words, without the authorization of high-ranking military officers and government officials, this colossal wartime example of human trafficking across borders would not have been possible.

Despite their early connections to the prewar prostitution system, the Japanese military comfort stations differed from the ordinary brothels and the regimental brothels seen in other countries. They differed in that they were initiated by Japanese military authorities for purely war-related purposes and in that most of them were directly supervised and used by the Japanese military. In addition, the vast majority of the women were drafted into the comfort stations by force and were detained for the purpose of continual sexual exploitation. “Notice from the Adjutant to the Chiefs of Staff of the North China Area Army and Central China Expeditionary Force,”
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issued on 4 March 1938, reveals that, even in Japan, procurement methods “similar to kidnapping” had been used, causing “social problems.”
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To prevent further complaints from the general public, the armies in the field were ordered to take firm control of “recruitment” and to be more careful about whom they chose to carry out this task.
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However, the army’s concern to regulate the methods for recruiting women domestically was mainly to do with protecting its reputation in the eyes of the Japanese people. In occupied areas sexual violence and the kidnapping of local women were commonplace, as is seen in the acts committed by the Japanese unit stationed at Beipiao County. As Japan’s military expansion continued from Manchuria into northern China, the abduction of Chinese women to fill the battlefield comfort stations occurred on a much larger, and extremely violent, scale.

After the 1931 incursion into Manchuria, the Guandong Army, toward the end of 1932, advanced north of the Great Wall. By 1933, all areas north of Beiping (now Beijing) fell under Japanese control, and sporadic fighting lasted until total war broke out between the two countries in the summer of 1937. On 7 July 1937, Japanese forces stationed at Lugou-qiao (also known as the Marco Polo Bridge), about fifteen kilometres from Beiping City, conducted nocturnal exercises, during which one soldier lost his way. The commanding officer demanded entrance to the Town of Wanping near Lugao-qiao to search for the missing soldier but was refused.
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The Lugou Bridge guarded the vital route linking Beiping to the southern area controlled by the Chinese Nationalist forces, and it occupied an important location on the Pinghan (Beiping-Wuhan) Railway. The missing soldier later found his way back to his unit, but the Japanese forces attacked Wanping. Japanese artillery units bombarded Wanping while their infantry and tanks attacked the town as well as the Pinghan Railway Bridge. Chinese troops countered with a fierce defence and retook these strategic posts the following day. Outnumbered by Chinese forces, the Japanese announced that the missing soldier had been found unharmed and asked for a ceasefire and negotiations. However, during the negotiating period, the Japanese army accumulated more troops and, once again, bombarded Wanping. As soon as the negotiations were over, Japanese forces commenced an all-out attack on Beiping, seizing the city and nearby Tianjin within the month.
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After the occupation of these two major cities, Japanese ground forces crossed the Yellow River and began their southward advance. On 9 August 1937, the Chinese Peace Preservation Forces guarding Hongqiao Airport exchanged fire with Lieutenant Ōyama Isao, an officer of the Naval Landing Force, and killed him. The Japanese military used this incident as a pretext to bring more warships to Shanghai, and the army ministry ordered the mobilization of 300,000 troops to be sent to that city and to Qingdao.
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On the morning of 13 August 1937, skirmishes broke out and escalated, and Japanese warships bombarded the Chinese positions in Shanghai.
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Chinese forces fought back but were defeated after three months of bloody battles.

Immediately after occupying Shanghai and the regions nearby, Japanese forces moved rapidly toward Nanjing, the capital of China at the time. By 10 December they were at the walls of Nanjing.
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China’s Nationalist government leader Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek, 1887-1975) ordered Chinese forces to defend to the death the nation’s capital. However, discipline broke down and the Chinese Central Army’s plan for staged withdrawal from Shanghai crumbled, leaving the defence of Nanjing to warlord troops or new recuits.
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Fighting continued over the next three days until the city fell into Japanese hands on 13 December 1937, whereon Japanese troops began the mass slaughter of Chinese civilians and surrendered Chinese military personnel.
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Exactly how many Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers were killed during the fall of Nanjing has been debated.
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According to the IMTFE:

Estimates made at a later date indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking [Nanjing] and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000.
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That these estimates are not exaggerated is borne out by the fact that burial societies and other organizations counted more than 155,000 bodies buried. They also reported that most of those were bound with their hands tied behind their backs. These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning, or by throwing them into the Yangtze River, or otherwise disposed of by the Japanese.
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The IMTFE judgment describes the ruthlessness of the sexual violence perpetrated by the Japanese soldiers during the Nanjing Massacre, stating that death was frequently a penalty for even the slightest resistance on the part of a rape victim or any members of her family who might have sought to protect her. Throughout the city, young girls and old women were sadistically raped. A large number of women were killed after being raped and their bodies were mutilated. The IMTFE estimates that there were approximately twenty thousand cases of rape within the city during the first month of the occupation.
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The refugees in a camp at Canton Road sent the following plea for help to the International Committee of the Nanjing Safety Zone:

There are about 540 refugees crowded in Nos. 83 and 85 on Canton Road. Since 13th inst. up to the 17th those houses have been searched and robbed many, many times a day by Japanese soldiers in groups of three to five. Today the soldiers are looting the places mentioned above continually and all the jewelry, money, watches, and clothes of any sort are taken away. At present every night women of younger ages are forced to go with the soldiers who send motor trucks to take them and release them the next morning. More than 30 women and girls have been raped. The women and children are crying all night. Conditions inside the compound are worse than we can describe. Please give us help.

Yours truly,                               All the Refugees

Nanking, 18 December 1937
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The actions of the Japanese troops during the Nanjing Massacre outraged the Chinese people and the international community. Considering mass rape to be a potential hindrance to Japan’s military advance in China, the Japanese military leaders began to implement comfort stations throughout the frontlines and occupied areas as soon as full-scale warfare began. Okabe Naozaburō, then chief of staff of the North China Area Army, made this clear in his instructions to the commanders of his units. In a memorandum sent out on 27 June 1938, he noted: “According to different sources, the strong anti-Japanese sentiment [among the local Chinese] has been caused by the widespread raping by Japanese troops in many places” and that “the frequent occurrence of rapes in different areas is not merely a matter of criminal law; it is serious treason that damages the occupational order, that obstructs the military actions of our entire army, and that harms our country.” He concluded: “Therefore, the acts of individual military personnel must be strictly controlled. At the same time, facilities for sexual comfort must be established immediately to prevent inadvertent violation of the rules due to the lack of such facilities.”
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Okabe’s statement shows that the motives behind the establishment of the comfort stations, despite the noble claim of the need to prevent widespread rape, really had nothing to do with protecting local women and everything to do with the implementation of an aggressive war.

Although Japanese military authorities attempted to address the widespread sexual violence, and the military codes stipulated that those who committed rape would be punished,
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attempts at discipline were ineffective even according to the available Japanese reports. According to the numbers that Oyama Fumio, head of the Legal Affairs Bureau in the Japanese army, submitted to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, twenty-eight military personnel were convicted under the military code of conduct (looting, rape, manslaughter), while 495 were convicted under the domestic criminal law (rape, injuring).
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These numbers are in striking contrast to the evidence regarding the magnitude of the Japanese military’s criminal activity. Since rape was a mere subcategory in the code of conduct, the actual number of sexual crimes that ended in court-martial was extremely small. Thus, it is not an overstatement to say that military commanders virtually condoned raping, looting, killing, and other crimes, Indeed, as Yuma Totani points out, soldiers believed that their superiors tacitly permitted such behaviour, regarding it as the spoils of war – as a reward for their having engaged in prolonged and exhausting battles.
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