In January 1942, Japanese forces occupied Kuala Lumpur. The young Chinese woman, who later introduced herself to the public as Mrs X, was unperturbed. She felt safe in her small village. But one day in December, Japanese troops moved in. The soldiers combed the village. They also broke into her house. “They grabbed me. My parents tried to save me, but they hit my father in the head. There was blood everywhere. I resisted as much as I could, but they hit me in the head too.”
All efforts by family members to protect her were in vain. “They ripped my underpants off. One of the soldiers unzipped his trousers. While the others were pressing me to the ground, he put his thing inside me. I had no idea what he was trying to do. I knew nothing about life. I was only 15 years old. I hadn’t even had my first period yet.”
She was in total agony. “They did it on the kitchen floor, in front of my parents and brother.” One by one, three soldiers lined up. Then they loaded her onto a truck and took her and a few other girls from the village to a large two-storey house in Jalan Ampang.
“Six Japanese officers lived there. They raped me again.” She cried. She could neither eat nor sleep. They moved her somewhere else. The story repeated itself. A month later, she ended up in a hotel.
“I had a big room with a double bed. I got two basic meals a day. We had a cleaner who changed the sheets every day. I had to have sex with 10 to 20 men every day. This made me constantly inflamed. Red-hot. Sex was exhausting. You can’t even imagine how painful it was! You can’t! But I had to be nice and serve every soldier well. If I didn’t prove myself, I was beaten. Some of the men were drunk and they beat me anyway. One man, even though he was drunk, stayed inside me for a whole chartered hour. It was unbearable, but I had to endure it.” This was how Mrs X met the end of the war.
She was a comfort woman, as the Japanese military authorities called women who were forced into military prostitution. Organised prostitution existed in Japan before the war, but when the Japanese annexed Korea in 1910, the system was extended there.
Uniformed pimps
Since prostitution was organised in civil society, it was logical that it was also organised in the army. For the Japanese, the battlefield was the most stressful environment a man could find himself in, so soldiers, who were usually at the height of their sexual powers, were “temporarily unavailable”. They had to be offered relaxation. They came up with military brothels, better known as comfort stations.
A Japanese military letter said: ‘It goes without saying how much the environment affects the psychological state of soldiers and consequently their discipline, and it is therefore necessary to provide suitable living conditions and comfort aids. The most direct and profound psychological effects are those emanating from comfort stations, and it is important to realise how much their proper functioning and control influence the raising of morale, the maintenance of discipline and the prevention of crime and venereal disease.”
There have been cases in history of an entire battalion being incapacitated by venereal disease, so the Japanese took the danger seriously, and they had some experience of rape of civilian women. In 1932, 223 rapes of Japanese soldiers were reported during fighting between the Japanese and the Chinese. When the Japanese army opened its first brothel shortly afterwards and brought in comfort women, the rape rate plummeted.
The system of organised prostitution was not maintained afterwards, but had to be reinstated after the infamous rape of Nanking in 1937. This time, special units, otherwise responsible for guerrilla actions and undercover work, were involved in setting up the comfort stations. They had to find as many prostitutes as they could through their liaisons by the end of 1937. Money was not an issue.
At first, they recruited more or less professionals, but they soon ran out. They had to leave the regular Japanese women alone. They were needed to work in the factories when the men were on the battlefields, and they didn’t want to knock the morale of their soldiers when they realised that their sisters had been forced into prostitution.
So they began to look for comfort women, especially young Korean women. Everyone from the army to the interior ministry and the police were involved in recruiting them. The latter later regularly cooperated with the army when it was necessary to forcibly recruit comfort women.
Initially, women were lured into prostitution by promises to cook and do the soldiers’ laundry. They ended up in brothels, which the army initially officially called relaxation centres. It was then, around 1938, that the foundations were laid for all subsequent military brothels. Each brothel consisted of ten huts and one hut belonging to a superintendent. They were surrounded by barbed wire. Each hut had ten rooms. They were numbered and separated by doors. The opening hours and the duration of each visit were defined. Sex with a condom was forbidden, but this was abolished during the Second World War.
But the army soon realised that it was not a good idea to run brothels, so it formally transferred responsibility to civilian managers. They were able to get better comfort women, and the army was able to wash its hands of the international public by claiming that it had nothing to do with pimping, even though it retained control of the brothels, facilitated comfort women’s transport and provided them with medical care.
Nor should comfort women’s activities be subject to the rules that applied to the military forces. The rules were the Emperor’s will, and it was not appropriate for the Emperor to engage in prostitution. Thus, comfort women were the subject of publications, just as, for example, the euthanasia of seriously wounded soldiers who could not be evacuated because the Emperor could not command that they should kill his own men.
You are making a mistake
Mun Ok Ju, an 18-year-old Korean girl, has been unable to get a job. When she was offered “a good job in a restaurant in a warm place, albeit some distance away”, she accepted. The promised salary was high enough to help her poor family financially, and she trusted the well-groomed Korean who offered her a job. She changed her name to Fumihara Yoshiko, because at that time Koreans had to change their names to Japanese ones, and set sail on a boat with 17 girls from her neighbourhood and about 200 others aged between 15 and 21 to a new life.
The women landed in what was then Rangoon, or today Yangon, Burma. Korean soldiers who had served in the Japanese army told them they were “making a big mistake”. They were confused, but could do nothing.
They were divided into groups of 15 to 20 girls. Mun Ok Ju landed in a comfort station next to the barracks. In reality, it was a large hut with beds separated by curtains that did not even reach the ceiling. She had to provide services to more than 30 men every day. She only had a break once a month.
It is estimated that 80% of the forced prostitutes were Korean women, but no one knows how many women were actually involved in the system. They did not officially exist, and were recorded in the records as war supplies or military ensemble. A rough estimate is that there were around 139,000. Most of them, around 80 per cent, were aged between 14 and 18.
Some girls were seduced with tempting job offers, others were forced to take it up, thinking that they were contributing to the war effort. But there were still not enough girls. They began to be literally kidnapped under the guise of the National Mobilisation Act.
It was also invoked when they were collected in schools. Frightened parents would write their daughters off and hastily report them to anyone, just to protect them. The system of prostitution may have been obscured by a fog, but rumours spread quickly. To stop them, the authorities punished any former comfort women caught warning their parents against mobilisation, saying they were spreading “harmful rumours”. One woman was imprisoned for four months for telling a story about a woman who had married to avoid being drafted.
Women who ended up in organised prostitution were paid for their work. They should get half the money they earn. The price in the brothels depended on how high the client’s rank was, but also on where the woman came from for comfort. In those days, a soldier was paid 15 Japanese yen a month. A visit to a brothel cost him 1,5 yen. An officer with a lower rank paid 2,5 yen for a comfort woman, those with a higher rank 3.
The men paid at reception. They were given a receipt and had to hand it to their wives. She collected the receipts and handed them to the brothel manager at the end of the day. Once a month she got her wages. With this money she had to buy food, because she only got the basics, and clothes, but also tobacco and alcohol when she needed comfort herself.
For example, Ok Ju, a young Korean woman, saved 15,000 yen, but only raised it through tips. She deposited the money in the local military post office. She managed to send some of it home, but lost the rest when Japan was defeated.
In the brothels, the rooms were disinfected once a week and the women were regularly checked for venereal diseases by a military doctor. In some cases, the infected women were referred to hospital, while in others they recovered in the brothel. At that time, a sign hung on their door: ‘No entry this week’.
In the Ok Ju brothel, girls had to work even during their periods. Ok Ju refused a drunken soldier. He attacked her and she stabbed him to death. She was court-martialled. She was acquitted because she killed him in self-defence.
After six months in Mandalay, Ok Ju and her unit moved close to the Indian border. One of the brothels was run by the army. It was reserved for officers only, and therefore mostly professional Japanese women worked there. When she was transferred to Thailand a year or so later, they started training her as a nurse. She was sent to the battlefield with other girls and there she met the end of the war. Out of a group of 17 girls from her village, 12 survived. Others committed suicide, drowned or died of disease.
Ma Fe Yabut Santillan was 18 years old when the Japanese occupied the Philippines in 1941. The soldiers initially wanted free food at a stall she and her mother ran next to the military post, but soon after, Captain Sakuma demanded that she become an army cook. She refused. He grabbed her and slapped her. Her mother ran to her rescue. He kicked her.
Ma Fe stopped resisting. He took her to a small room. There were two girls in it. “One of them told me that in the morning I would be treated like a maid, but at night I would have to be a ‘wife’.” In the morning, she did indeed have to make Captain Sakumi breakfast. He thanked her profusely, complimented her and told her to wash his clothes.
“At night, my horror began. I was tired. I was lying on my bed when he came in. When Dessie and the other girl saw him, they fell silent and passed out. They turned to the wall. Captain Sakuma motioned for them to be silent. I got up and sat on the bed without saying a word. He went straight to her and sat down next to me.
He started touching my hair. He told me to be a good girl. At first I didn’t move, but when he started kissing me, I pushed him away. He fell to the floor. I got up and tried to run away, but he grabbed my arm. He slapped me. He shouted ‘cura, cura’ and kicked me in the chest. It hurt a lot, I almost lost consciousness. He pulled me up and threw me on the bed. He started tearing my clothes off. Now I could no longer resist. I was afraid he was going to do something else to me. He took off his shirt and trousers and lay down beside me.
For me, it was the first time. It really hurt. When Captain Sakuma abused me, I cried all the time. He kissed me on the lips, cheeks, neck and breasts. He acted as if he was ‘using’ a girl for the first time. I felt so dirty. After a few minutes, he broke into me. When he finished, he got up and picked up his clothes. He took my blanket and covered me. I cried. He told me that I was a hardworking girl and I should stay that way.”
The story of morning and night was repeated day after day. For two years. “During that time, whenever he had visitors, he always offered to entertain me.” After two years, she managed to escape with the help of a cousin who had been asked by her mother for help.
Dutch women prisoners
After the war, she remained silent about it, as did almost all the victims. Only one case came before a court martial in 1948, and that was because it involved foreign women, Dutch prisoners from Central Java in Indonesia.
In 1944, as sexually transmitted diseases began to spread among the cadets of the Semarang Military School, Lieutenant-General Nozaki came up with the idea of setting up a comfort station nearby. He obtained all the necessary official permits for it, but left the search for the girls to others, including the police. The plan was to gather the girls in six nearby military camps, but that they would all participate voluntarily.
A list of eligible women aged between 17 and 35 was made, but none of them wanted to take part. In the end, they were made to sign a consent form. They were checked to see if they were healthy and sent to four comfort stations. They started work on 1 March 1944.
They later reported that they had to see five clients each day. They lived in a house with no ventilation and no running water. Two girls tried to escape. One was caught and tortured. When they were finished, she committed suicide. The other tried to do it. One suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to hospital.
When a woman complained after her fourth cadet that she couldn’t take it anymore, she was threatened with being transferred to a brothel next to the barracks, where women have to do favours for 15 men every day. She suffered a fit of hysteria and became unconscious. She was placed in isolation for ten days and then found fit for work again.
The Dutch women were released after it was reported that they had been taken by force. They were taken to the Kota Paris camps. More than 100 were there, including Jan Ruff. She had been in the camp for almost two years when, aged 20, she was forcibly turned into a prostitute. At the time, she was preparing to enter a convent.
She later recalled how they were left alone on the first day, and on the next they were gathered in the living room and their tasks were explained to them in detail. If they did not fulfil them, their families would suffer, they threatened. The fear she felt then never left her, she recalled later.
Her first client was a “big, fat and bald” officer called Mihashi. She resisted, but he took a sabre in his hand and pressed the tip against her skin. She fell to her knees. He ripped her clothes. She had to lie on the bed. “He moved the sabre slowly over my body, up and down, up and down. I could feel the icy steel touching my skin as he moved the sabre across my neck and chest, stomach and legs. He played with me like a cat with a helpless mouse.” Then she experienced the same as the other girls. “For me, this brutal and inhuman rape was worse than death.”
When it was all over, she ran to the bathroom to “wash off all the dirt, shame and pain”. She hid, but was found. The night was still long. “I never imagined that suffering could be as bad as this. But this was only the beginning.” They were supposed to be safe during the day, but the house was full of people, so the girls were often raped even then.
Jan tried to hide, but each time she was found and beaten again. One morning, in desperation, she cut her hair to make herself look as unattractive as possible. To her horror, she turned into a curiosity that everyone wanted to try out. She resisted all men. She did not know that by doing so she would attract those who were attracted to sadomasochism. The professional Japanese prostitutes knew this. She only complied when they threatened to send her to a brothel for soldiers, where the local women work and the working conditions are much worse.
She had no one to turn to. Everyone in the system was involved, from the brothel manager to the doctor who checked them regularly. The latter enjoyed leaving the door of the room open between gynaecological examinations so that the men could wander around. “The humiliation was unbearable,” Jan recalled. She became pregnant. Deeply religious, she refused to have an abortion. She was forced to swallow a bottle of pills. She miscarried.
She spent three months in the brothel before being released and taken to Kota Paris camp. Because of all she had been through, the church did not want her in its ranks. She later married and had three abortions. She became pregnant only after an operation. She felt the effects of the trauma she had endured throughout her life. For her, just getting into bed at night became an effort. Every time she went to bed, she relived the horror of the war days. She was never able to truly relax and enjoy sex with her husband. She deeply resented her rapists.
After the war, women had a different fate to console themselves. A minority returned home and lived normal lives. Some did not survive the war. They died of disease, in the fighting or had to commit honourable suicide with the Japanese soldiers instead of surrendering. Some remained in the occupied territories. A minority of them married locals. Some actually became prostitutes and continued working after the war.
Japanese comfort women were most often professionals before the war. They had a reputation for looking down on ordinary soldiers, but this changed when they were moved close to war zones. At that time, they were able to show great compassion for soldiers who were on the verge of death, and they were highly respected for this. Their patriotism was further strengthened when they came across a unit with men from their local community. In one comfort station, the comfort women bonded with the soldiers in such a way that it was “like a collective wedding”. Under such circumstances, women were forced to accept fewer men.
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A little comfort in hell
Kim Chu Ja was a Korean woman who was forced to join the Women’s Patriot Force. They took her to Seoul and bought her clothes. At first, she was very pleasantly upset. “Look, the soldiers are tired of the long war. They would be very happy if you would give them a nice party and welcome them. That’s your job,” they said to her and the other girls. Kim Chu Ja imagined that she would have to dance and be cute.
She and the girls end up in a hot brothel. The manager took them in and gave each girl a thorough washing herself. She dressed them in Japanese kimonos and took them to a room. There were five officers in the room. They were drinking. The girls stood shyly in the doorway. The manager pushed them into the room, but before that she told them to remember the names of the officers so that they would take good care of them later.
The girls served them sake and listened as the manager assured them that they would fight successfully and return safely as winners. They did not understand what she was saying, but they might have if they had known the old witchcraft that says that a soldier is protected from injury and death in battle if he undresses his girlfriend before going to the battlefield.
It wasn’t long before every man had taken his girlfriend into the room. It was the same as always, except that Kim Chu Ja’s first sexual intercourse lasted for hours. While she cried in pain and shame, the officer forced her into many positions. For the next three days, the story repeated itself, except that the girls were rotated among five men. They were told: “Soldiers are like horses: the first effect of the testing and training is the most important. If they are not properly trained on the first day, they are useless on the battlefield.”
Once the girls had been “hardened”, they were transported to the Chinese battlefield as an orchestra, as they were otherwise not officially allowed to be transported by troops. The girls were given precise instructions. They were not allowed to become aroused during sex, lest they tire too quickly. They were not allowed to get attached to a single soldier. They had to treat all parties equally. They had to adapt to the client and, for example, be more casual with older soldiers and more romantic with younger soldiers.
Kim Chun Ja worked in China for two years. The only nights she spent in peace were those in which she travelled to remote outposts where the guerrilla’s movements were monitored. For the journey, the women were armed and told to save the last bullet for themselves. When they arrived at their destination, the whole garrison would converge on them.
The worst off were those comfort women who worked on the front lines in China, where the comfort stations were also the most numerous. They were housed in simple huts on the edge of the jungle or surrounded by vast lowlands. Their worst customers were the officers. They already regarded their soldiers as an inferior species, and women were worth even less. They often refused to pay them.
Even more than them, women feared the troops going to the battlefield. If they always worked with the same men, they could at least establish a relationship with them, but when random soldiers came by, the number of clients suddenly increased. Sexual relations were also more intense because the soldiers were on their way to the battlefield and this might have been their last chance for sex.
Sometimes the women were so exhausted that they lost the receipt that told them how many clients they had seen in a day and how much they had to earn at the end of the month. They were often robbed by the organisers of prostitution, and sometimes even robbed by soldiers. To be left without shoes or clothes in the jungle was no small problem.
It was also difficult when they had to move with the troops. Sometimes they would walk for ten days before reaching their destination and start working immediately. Some of them did not even have a day off, even though they were officially supposed to rest two days a week. They could only take time off if a doctor prescribed it.
In some places, the comfort stations were closed one day a month, but most often women could only take a break on the half-day of the week when they had a gynaecological check-up. They were allowed to do laundry and play cards, and sometimes they were allowed to get food, but they were always supervised. Sometimes they took part in sporting activities, but only because physical fitness was very important to the Japanese.
In smaller environments, where the same troops have been around for a longer period, it has happened that women have become attached to soldiers when they shouldn’t have. For example, one woman cried loudly for comfort when her favourite soldier did not return from battle. She made a small shrine for him in the corner of her room.
Sometimes women grieved and refused to work for a whole month after hearing about the death of “their” soldier. When one of them was transferred to the front, they tried to send him messages and gifts, even though they needed the help of other soldiers to do so. Sometimes they received tips, souvenirs and gifts.
In some cases, they have agreed among themselves not to accept clients from other women. Some of them accepted sweets or something similar from some of their clients instead of money, indicating that a personal rather than a professional relationship had developed between them.
Ms X has been through a lot, but she has found exceptions among her clients: ‘Many men have become regular clients and I have become friends with some of them. Hamabe-san was a regular, he really liked me. He usually brought me chicken and other good food. When he was transferred, he cried. Some of the soldiers who said a very emotional goodbye to me were on their way on a suicide mission.”
Sim Mi Ja, a Korean woman, has met most of the terrible men and has been friends with two of them at different times, but for quite some time. One was the commander of the camp where she was introduced to the prostitution system. He made sure that for the eight months she spent there, she worked only for him. To make her life a little easier, he took her out for coffee and took her with him when he visited the troops in western Japan. Six years later, he found her and paid for the treatment she needed. At that time, he also asked the local police commander to help her.
A former soldier in Manchuria recalled a Korean woman who wanted to be his mistress because she feared she would not be able to have children and marry in Korea. He became so attached to her that he planned to marry her after the war if Japan still retained control of Manchuria. He did not, and there was nothing to the marriage either.
Another soldier recalled how he had experienced his “first love” under these circumstances. He only visited his chosen woman for comfort. He brought her gifts and bribed her pimp to let her go on trips with him. “I felt like I was establishing a truly human relationship, if only for a moment. When I visited them, I felt as if I could rekindle my human feelings.”
Later, the soldiers reflected on how they could have turned themselves from good men, brothers and children into what they became. “The army was a prison, but above all, every new recruit experienced what they called strict discipline – we were beaten every day. If your suit flap was dusty, your shoes were badly folded, or your answers or behaviour didn’t please your superior, you were beaten.”
During the war, one in six comfort women is estimated to have died, i.e. around 23,000 women. But for the 116,000 women who survived the war, it was not the war’s abuses that were the worst, it was the post-war silence that was much more difficult. They were not allowed to talk about what they had experienced. If it had become known what had happened to them, Japanese and Korean society would have excluded them from its midst. They remained silent for decades, alienated from their relatives and alone. Some began to hate men, others were afraid of sex. Most could not have children.
From the Romans to the Nazis
There has never been a system of organised prostitution as extensive as that set up by the Japanese military, but prostitution during wartime was not a Japanese invention. It was already known in the Roman Empire, where it was organised in a similar way to Japan, and sources report that in the 16th century the army of the Spanish Duke of Alva was accompanied by “400 whores on horseback and 800 on foot”.
As warfare changed and the number of soldiers increased in the 19th century, so did the number of sexually transmitted diseases. It became increasingly difficult to maintain order and prevent desertions. In order to cope with the problems, and to prevent the rape of civilians, many armies resorted to organised prostitution, but only with female volunteers.
Although it was unknown in the 19th century British Army, it was relied upon in British colonies such as India. Before it was introduced, British soldiers had three times more sexually transmitted diseases than their French counterparts, where prostitution was controlled. Thus, by 1888, a register of prostitutes was kept, who were under strict medical supervision and received money from the regiment for soap and a towel a month.
After 1888, the formal system was abandoned, but it continued to operate on a voluntary basis. The women followed the regiments wherever they were moved. “If we didn’t have women, the men would spread out all over the place and we didn’t know what offences they had all committed,” reported one officer.
The system was maintained during the First World War, primarily as a protection against venereal diseases. “If they’re going to have women – and they certainly will – at least give them clean women,” Ettie Rout, a New Zealand feminist who organised a voluntary nursing service in Egypt to care for “sick and wounded colonial soldiers”, advised the army.
During World War II, the Germans also turned to prostitution. They set up military brothels in key locations in the occupied territories. They were run by outsiders and did not fall under military command, but equipment, supervision and supplies were handled by local commanders. As the Germans had recorded 2 million cases of sexually transmitted diseases among soldiers alone during the First World War, brothels were now set up as a medical preventive measure.
Prostitutes in the brothels were examined by a local doctor under the supervision of a German military supervisor. On the wall of each room hung three rules: “Use a condom – risk of venereal disease!” “Remember your partner’s registration number!” “Disinfect yourself after intercourse!”
The brothels were open between 2pm and 11pm. The military police had already started to close them an hour earlier and continued to work for an hour after closing time to avoid any disturbances. Only ten soldiers were allowed to sit in the waiting room at a time. They were not allowed to queue in front of the brothel, and parking was forbidden in front of it.
There is little information on prostitution among the Allied Forces. There are references to British “regimental brothels” and French “Polish military brothels”, but no precise data. Nor is there any more information on organised brothels for US troops, only in China. For example, the Sino-American commander of the air force there was worried when his troops became infected en masse in local brothels, but he brought 12 healthy Indian prostitutes. His superiors soon banned them.
