GIs Used Comfort Women in Japan after WWII
by Richardson ~ April 25th, 2007. Filed under: History, Japan, U.S. Military. 
Cutting right to the chase, the article describes these “comfort women” as Japanese, and there is no mention of Korean or other women being employed in the brothels for American soldiers. Of particular interest is mention of the Asia Women’s Fund in regard to abused Japanese women. The Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) ran the show, with a peak of 70,000 prostitutes:
Japan’s abhorrent practice of enslaving women to provide sex for its troops in World War II has a little-known sequel: After its surrender… Japan set up a similar “comfort women” system for American GIs… American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war.
[. . .]
“Sadly, we police had to set up sexual comfort stations for the occupation troops,” recounts the official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police Department, whose jurisdiction is just northeast of Tokyo. “The strategy was, through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect regular women and girls.”
[. . .]
“As expected, after it opened it was elbow to elbow,” the history says. “The comfort women … had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just yesterday were the enemy, and because of differences in language and race, there were a great deal of apprehensions at first. But they were paid highly, and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully.”
[. . .]
“I rushed there with two or three RAA executives, and was surprised to see 500 or 600 soldiers standing in line on the street,” Seiichi Kaburagi, the chief of public relations for the RAA, wrote in a 1972 memoir. He said American MPs were barely able to keep the troops under control.
[. . .]
Kaburagi wrote that occupation GIs paid upfront and were given tickets and condoms. The first RAA brothel, called Komachien — The Babe Garden — had 38 women, but due to high demand that was quickly increased to 100. Each woman serviced from 15 to 60 clients a day.
American historian John Dower, in his book “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of WWII,” says the charge for a short session with a prostitute was 15 yen, or about a dollar, roughly the cost of half a pack of cigarettes.
[. . .]
By the end of 1945, about 350,000 U.S. troops were occupying Japan. At its peak, Kaburagi wrote, the RAA employed 70,000 prostitutes to serve them. Although there are suspicions, there is not clear evidence non-Japanese comfort women were imported to Japan as part of the program.
Toshiyuki Tanaka, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, cautioned that Kaburagi’s number is hard to document. But he added the RAA was also only part of the picture — the number of private brothels outside the official system was likely even higher.
The U.S. occupation leadership provided the Japanese government with penicillin for comfort women servicing occupation troops, established prophylactic stations near the RAA brothels and, initially, condoned the troops’ use of them, according to documents discovered by Tanaka.
Occupation leaders were not blind to the similarities between the comfort women procured by Japan for its own troops and those it recruited for the GIs.
A December 6, 1945, memorandum from Lt. Col. Hugh McDonald, a senior officer with the Public Health and Welfare Division of the occupation’s General Headquarters, shows U.S. occupation forces were aware the Japanese comfort women were often coerced.
[. . .]
Amid complaints from military chaplains and concerns that disclosure of the brothels would embarrass the occupation forces back in the United States, on March 25, 1946, MacArthur placed all brothels, comfort stations and other places of prostitution off limits. The RAA soon collapsed.
MacArthur’s primary concern was not only a moral one.
By that time, Tanaka says, more than a quarter of all American GIs in the occupation forces had a sexually transmitted disease.
Read the rest here.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Wow, somebody in the western media finally managed to pick up a history book. I wondering if they’ll ever discover that a similar system was set up by the South Korean government for our troops as well.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Japan does to this day have legalized prostitution (well, they don’t call it prostitution, but that’s what it is == the difference is taxes are paid) and for whatever reason there seem to be a large concentration of such areas near the bases in Okinawa (however Okinawa is small enough, and the bases are so frequent and large that pretty much anywhere is near a base). However keep in mind this establishments I’m speaking of are private businesses and run by neither government.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Several GIs I knew who served in Japan AND Germany immediately after the war described to me what local women did in order to feed their families. Many of them had lost their husbands and fathers during the war, so it did not surprise me to hear about women selling their bodies in order to survive. Of course what happened to women in the Soviet zones of occupation was considerably worse, according to most accounts.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
I suppose the alternative is an Army of specially recruited Born-Again whatevers who neither smoke, drink alcoholic beverages, nor engage in sex prior to marriage. I believe that the concept has been tried in the old military orders (Kinghts Templar, Teutonic Knights, Knights of St. John Hospitaller, etc), but didn’t some particularly nasty accusations regarding sodomites and monks who frequented whores come out of that as well?
April 25th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
“more than a quarter of all American GIs in the occupation forces had a sexually transmitted disease”
I wonder how this statistic compares with today’s military. As a woman, I’ve never understood why men don’t just use their hands instead. Masturbation is clean and free.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
LDS (Mormons) and SDA. I’ve not heard of any buggering going on in those groups, but the SDA did end up in a series of medical experiments; see Operation Whitecoat. [more]
April 25th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
No offense, but you still don’t understand!
April 26th, 2007 at 1:56 am
#5 - eventual onset of tennis elbow and damaged rotator cuff…
simple. Where do you think they originally got the term “carpal tunnel syndrom”?
Next, there was a report by a Korean academic written in the mid or early 1990s about prostitution in Korea, and she mentioned Park Chung Hee’s program of gaining hard currency by running sex tours for Japanese businessmen. The US military was also talked about. It wasn’t, however, one of those tunnel vision works that are characteristic of what is a small sub-category of researchers in the West on feminism, sex, and the (US) military.
(P.S. — I had to look up “carpal” to see if I was spelling it right. “Carpel” would have been much funnier….maybe…)
April 26th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Something I think is worth noting is our concept of human rights and how far human rights have come since then. Many many things were overlooked back then and prostitution, being the world’s oldest profession, was hardly considered an atrocity. As long as there is supply and demand, there is a market. Unfortunately women are only beginning to gain rights. Women in America hadn’t even had the right to vote very long at all, as universal suffrage was not granted until 1920 in America, and later in other countries such as Japan and Korea. Needless to say China isn’t even a Democracy. There is such a divide between the old world and the new world, but the new world is still paying for the sins of it’s fathers even though they were probably doing the best they could.
As humanity is coming out of darkness, political opportunism still seeks to exploit past transgressions even though reparations are rightly justified.
The world still has a shameful problem with the sex trade and trafficking of women into sex slavery. Sex tourism in S.E. Asia and China is huge, as well as, E. Europe, etc…. This is nothing new.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:02 am
“No offense, but you still don’t understand!”
And we’ll leave it at that.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:44 am
Yeah, I’m sure things could take a whole new direction from what’s been said already…
April 26th, 2007 at 7:56 am
I come to this blog looking for the latest North Korea news and instead find people discussing hand jobs. Sheesh………….
Bill
April 26th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Didn’t Woody Allen call masturbation “sex with someone I love.”
April 26th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
It might be worth re-emphasizing out a major reason for such programs was to reduce friction with the local population, particularly in cases where even platonic contacts could ignite nationalist opposition. To put this in context, the driving desire of the great majority of Americans in the immediate post-war era was to get millions of troops demobilized, and home as soon as possible. The military, though, needed a certain number of occupation forces, and the most immediate candidates were those units already in theater. (Precisely those most anxious to return home, and eligible for early release.) Military staffs would have been wrestling with the numbers required, and weighing the factors that impacted upon those numbers, such as the number of possible hard-core hold-outs (insurgents in the present Iraqi context), the sheer size of the civilian population, and the attitudes of that population towards their occupiers. This last would have included a list of factors that could prompt the population to resistance, thereby requiring a larger occupation force, and measures that could be taken to preclude such risks. In the course of such planning, Japanese cultural attitudes to both prostitution, and social contacts between Japanese women and U.S. soldiers would have been carefully analyzed. My suspicion is that the brothel system was a direct response to this need.
In the early 1960s, one could still find a fair number of military men, particularly NCOs, who had met and married “war brides”. I viewed these women as living history and at unit functions took pains to draw out their stories. In the case of both Japanese and Korean girls, many of whom had met their husbands while working as maids and kitchen workers, they impressed upon me that just being seen with a foreigner had subjected them to severe social ostracism, even within their immediate families. So once they made the decision to date a foreign occupier, it had to be marriage and emigration or nothing. If the romance failed, it was suicide or work as a bar girl (in the hope of picking up another prospect) or prostitution. To put this into further context, soldiers wishing to marry local nationals had to get the approval of their commander, and not all marriages were approved, sometimes with disastrous personal consequences for girls who were now officially dishonored.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
“It might be worth re-emphasizing out a major reason for such programs was to reduce friction with the local population, particularly in cases where even platonic contacts could ignite nationalist opposition.”
The same rationalization caused Japan to use comfort women in and near the war zones.
April 27th, 2007 at 5:55 am
The Japanese military didn’t seem to especially interested in the impression they left with locals, so I don’t think that “rationalization” holds much water.
It’s also interesting to note that the shame factor prevented those Japanese women forced into the profession from coming forward, when the question has been posed in the past of Korean women, “why did they wait so long to come forward”?
April 27th, 2007 at 6:27 am
Lirelou wrote:
“To put this into further context, soldiers wishing to marry local nationals had to get the approval of their commander, and not all marriages were approved, “
What were some reasons for not approving marriages?
April 28th, 2007 at 12:21 am
In the mid and late 1990s in Wonju in Kangwondo, I had some female students (mid-20s to early 30s) who said they worried about walking in the street with me after class if other Korean male students weren’t arround because of the “impression” it gave particularly older Koreans.
April 29th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Sonagi, I don’t have the data for a statistical answer your question. James H. Michener’s “Sayonara” alludes to American racism of the period, as well as the command desire to stay on good terms with the Japanese, who likewise disapproved of their women marrying gaijin. There were also many burocratic reasons to discourage such marriages. Legal marriage to a foreign national required that the service member be granted an allotment for his dependent, and be allowed access to quarters and base facilities. Here, “command sponsorhip” was important, as even married soldiers deployed overseas as “unaccompanied” did not have any rights to quarters, nor did their dependents have access to the PX and commissary. I believe that they were authorized medical care, but on a stand-by basis, as medical facilities overseas in those days were mostly troop-oriented. Troops who married foreign nationals inevitably needed time to process the recognition of their marriage by the embassy, and to obtain the necessary visa for the spouse to enter the U.S. All this took the troop away from his duties. The easiest way for the commander to avoid such hassles was to discourage the service member from marrying. There was also an element of paternalism. The U.S. was a much whiter nation in those days, and the question in many commander’s minds may have been: How will East Podunk accept the former Ms. Kim or Ms. Ohara? (In 1959 Norman, Arkansas, hardly a bastion of tolerance, there was a single Japanese war bride. Yet all her neighbors loved her to death, and anyone making any comments against her was likely to end up shot.)
Michener’s novel, and the subsequent film, may have made it much easier for Asian war brides. Sergeants married to Koreans and Japanese were fairly common in the early 1960s Army, and by Vietnam, marrying a local national, while still requiring the commander’s permission, was largely a rubber stamp process designed to weed out 18 year old PFC Joneses from marrying 38 year old Ms. Nguyens, who had seven children and had worked as a bar hostess. Visas appear to have become much easier by then. (Mrs. Lirelou received hers in weeks)Still, there was alarm in some quarters. A chaplain I knew in the 1970s had done a study of former Asian bar girls who married to GIs. To his surprise, they had a lower divorce rate than the general population, and he had been quite favorably impressed by their parenting skills.
April 30th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
This is not surprising. Throughout the history, the victors plundered the victims. That included their females. Was there EVER an exception? Japan occupied Korea and China, so they raped their women. US occupied Japan, and did the same to Japanese women. At least they paid 15 yen ($1) a pop, and they lined up to take turns. The Japanese soldiers, on the other hand, just just rushed in, raped them, and in the case of Chinese women, shot them afterwards.
How interesting it is to see that Japan and US still refuse to acknowledge their war time deeds, even though such deeds are historically necessary consequence of any conquest. They must protect their hypocritic conscience I guess.
April 30th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
“Throughout the history, the victors plundered the victims. That included their females. Was there EVER an exception?”
The Zulu practice was to kill all women and children after they had defeated the opposing armies. Often, they were herded into the kraals, which were then set on fire.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
I think there were some significant differences in the ways Japanese occupation troops behaved in China and Korea when compared to the way US occupation troops behaved in Japan.
Having said that, whenever there is a discussion of this kind — about the women of the vanquished, the quote attributed to Hemingway comes to mind:
“I have seen much war in my life and I detest it profoundly. But there are worse things than war, and they all come with defeat.”