Papers prove Japan forced women into second world war brothels, says China

[xunzi]

Papers prove Japan forced women into second world war brothels, says China | World news | theguardian.com

• Justin McCurry in Tokyo and Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing
• theguardian.com, Monday 28 April 2014 08.12 EDT
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Japanese women hold portraits of Chinese, Philippine, South Korean and Taiwanese former 'comfort women' who were sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the second world war. Photograph: Toru Yamanaka/AFP
China has released documents it claims offers "ironclad proof" that the Japanese military forced Asian women to work in frontline brothels before and during the second world war.

Almost 90 documents from the archives of the military police corps – part of Japan's Kwantung army, the occupying force that propped up a puppet regime in Manchuria in the early 1930s – include letters from Japanese soldiers, newspaper articles and military files discovered in the 1950s and kept at the Jilin provincial archives in north-east China. Documents from the regime's national bank were also included.

"Going through the bloodiest parts of these archives, many of us experts have succumbed to chronic depression," said the archive's director Yin Huai, according to the official China News Service.

Zhao Sujian, 81, an archive employee since 1948, said that the documents were discovered by a People's Liberation Army unit in November 1953. The soldiers were digging near the remains of the Japanese base to lay pipes and fix electric cables when they stumbled on the buried cache.

"At the time, these documents filled an entire truck," he told the news service. "Because they were buried for so long, most of them were stuck together, even rotted into one mass."

The archive in Changchun, the provincial capital, began systematically analysing the documents in 1982, after it received them from a local law enforcement office. Most remain untranslated. Research has been slow, state media said, owing to the poor quality of the documents and a dearth of Japanese-speaking researchers.

Three former 'comfort women' recount their ordeal at a press conference in 1992. Photograph: Tao Chuan Yeh/AFP/Getty Images
It was not immediately clear why the body had chosen to release the documents this week, but Chinese state media speculated that the publication was in response to repeated claims by conservative politicians that the women were not coerced by government authorities or the military.

Some historians believe that as many as 200,000 women – most of them from the Korean peninsula – were forced to work in frontline brothels between 1932 and 1945.

The 25 previously confidential files relating to sex slaves include reports, telephone records and documents mentioning the sexual enslavement of women, according to Chinese media.

Other documents give details of the Nanking massacre, in which Japanese soldiers killed as many as 300,000 people during their 1937-38 occupation of Nanking [now Nanjing], according to Chinese and western historians.

Japan disputes the number of deaths, while far-right commentators in Japan have accused China of fabricating the slaughter.

A 1944 telephone record taken from the national bank of Manchuria shows that the Japanese imperial army spent 532,000 yen on setting up so-called comfort stations, according to the Global Times.

Other records show how the Japanese army abducted women from the Korean peninsula and forced them to work in occupied China, with brothels eventually appearing in 20 to 30 counties in the country's north-east.

"We can see from this file that the Japanese military made use of the national general mobilisation act to forcibly conscript Korean comfort women," Zhao Yujie, a research fellow at the Jilin provincial archives, told Reuters. "And these Korean women were basically dispensed to high-ranking officials."

One of the released documents records the number of women sent to have sex with Japanese soldiers in certain parts of occupied China over a period of 10 days from 1 February 1938.

In Nanking, for instance, there were 141 women and 2,500 Japanese soldiers. "That is to say, one woman had to be tortured 178 times within 10 days," said Su Zhiliang, director of the China research centre on comfort women.

"The archives of Kwantung army unveiled this time and other times showed clearly that Japanese military and government implemented sex slavery in the army. The mechanism was influential and forcible. It was against the personal wills of these women. Second, it was widely adopted," Su said.

The release of the documents comes soon after Barack Obama called the use of comfort women a "terrible violation of human rights".

Japan sparked anger in China and South Korea this year when it said it would re-examine a 1993 statement in which Japan acknowledged for the first time the military's role in forcing women into sexual slavery, and apologising to those who "suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds".

Public figures seen as close to the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, added to tensions between South Korea and Japan with claims that Japan was being unfairly singled out for criticism of its wartime conduct. Abe has since said he does not intend to alter the statement, which has been upheld by successive Japanese administrations since it was issued by then chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono.

A reminder of the war's enduring role in souring Japan's ties with China and South Korea came on Monday, when a member of Abe's cabinet visited Yasukuni, a shrine in Tokyo that honours 2.5m Japanese war dead, including 14 leaders convicted of class A war crimes by the allies.

The visit by Tomomi Inada, a state minister in charge of administrative reform, came days after almost 150 Japanese MPs made a pilgrimage to the shrine, which is viewed by Beijing and Seoul as a powerful symbol of Japanese militarism.

Speaking in Seoul at the weekend, Obama called on Japan to give a full account of the sexual abuse of women by its military. "This was a terrible, egregious violation of human rights. Those women were violated in ways that, even in the midst of war were shocking," he said.

"They deserve to be heard. They deserve to be respected. And there should be an accurate and clear account of what happened."

Japan has refused to directly compensate the women, saying all claims were settled by a 1965 bilateral treaty that normalised diplomatic ties. In 1995, Japan set up the privately run Asian women's fund, which drew on donations, but many women rejected any redress unless it came directly from the Japanese state. The fund was disbanded in 2007.

During Obama's visit to Tokyo last week, Abe said Japan regretted the pain it had caused in the past, particularly in Asia. On Sunday, Abe told reporters the plight of the comfort women was "heart-wrenching".

 

[Counter-Errorist]

I was under the impression that the Rape of Nanking was pretty well document by now. The Japanese truly did some horrendous things during the war.

Unit 731 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women, and children[1][2]—from which around 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai[3]—died during the human experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone, which does not include victims from other medical experimentation sites.[4] Almost 70% of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese, including both civilian and military.[5] Close to 30% of the victims were Russian.[6] Some others were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of Allied prisoners of war[7] (although many more Allied POWs were victims of Unit 731 at other sites)[citation needed]. The unit received generous support from the Japanese government up to the end of the war in 1945.

Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some, however, were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949; most, however, remained under American Forces occupation. These scientists were not tried for war crimes by the Americans so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be coopted into the U.S. biological warfare program.[8] On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence."[9] The immunity deal concluded in 1948.

 

[shuttler]

Before all these revelations the japanese has been claiming these atrocities were not supported by the imperialists government. The war criminals were done out of their own volition and the women were not forced into prostitutions

You have scumbags like this who turned blind eyes to justice and when he died - a saint to the japanese imperialists

Radhabinod Pal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[third eye]

It's disgusting how Japanese got away scotch free with their inhumane crime, yet today many people admired these people. Some like the Vietnamese and Filipino even willing to suck their dick for some weapons. LOL

---------------------

The word is scot free.

No one admires anyone but himself. Its for political or economic reasons that people & nations create the impression of ' admiring' another.

Those who feel ' admired' ought to take a reality check & not feel flattered.

BTW there is no nation maybe with the exception of Switzerland which is free from guilt of having discriminated, exploited or harmed another.

 

[third eye]

Are you defending the atrocities Japanese commited during their emperial war with your statement of comparing discrimination to women were forced into prositution for the Japanese emperial army?

I have neither the time nor inclination to defend any one other than India.

All I am trying to say is that when seen closely, all clothes have holes.

 

[shuttler]

to all the TROLLs above and below

the japanese war atrocities were not just restricted to China, but in Korea, the Philippines, S E asia ...
Have a bit of shame of yourselves!

Credits: gstatic.com; jakartaexpat.biz, abc.net.au

 

[Grand Historian]

Chinese should look into their own crimes they commited and still are commiting before pointing fingers and acting like a drama queen.

Armenian Genocide ring a bell?

You are absolutely disgusting, show some respect for the dead.

 

[Reashot Xigwin]

I'm with Japan on this one. China shouldn't make up lies. If Chinese women offered themselves up for a quick buck, it is the women's own choice, Chinese government shouldn't use them as propaganda tools. It is just a milk cow they keep milking.

That's BS. China's fury is legitimate. Unlike the German the Japanese never even felt genuinely sorry about the whole "shindig."

How about this guys then. Were they given a few bucks to for helping with the contest?

 

[janon]

It's disgusting how Japanese got away scotch free with their inhumane crime, yet today many people admired these people. Some like the Vietnamese and Filipino even willing to suck their dick for some weapons. LOL

It is fully acknowledged that the Japanese did a lot of horrible crimes during the war, especially to Chinese and Koreans. But does that mean that one should not admire Japan as a country TODAY? I mean, today's Japan and today's Japanese people are not going on wars of aggression. Can't we admire TODAY's Germany, despite their Nazi past?

There is one thing I agree with the Chinese - that Japan should offer an official apology for its past crimes. Many other countries have done so. At least acknowledging their crimes would go a long way in improving feelings.

There is no doubt in anybody's minds, that they did some really cruel atrocities during WW2.

 

[shuttler]

Revisionism Tokyo-style
Op-Ed
Japan's leaders still won't acknowledge their country's wartime atrocities.
January 18, 2013
By Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturma

This month 75 years ago, the people of Nanking, China's ancient capital city, were in the midst of one of the worst atrocities in history, the infamous Rape of Nanking. The truth of what actually happened is at the center of a bitter dispute between China and Japan that continues to play out in present-day relations. Many Chinese see Japan's election last month of ultraconservative nationalist Shinzo Abe as prime minister as just the latest in a string of insults. And it was recently reported that Japan is considering rolling back its 1993 apology regarding "comfort women," the thousands of women the Japanese army sexually enslaved during World War II.

In 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army, captured Nanking on Dec. 13. No one knows the exact toll the Japanese soldiers exacted on its citizens, but a postwar Allied investigation put the numbers at more than 200,000 killed and at least 20,000 women and girls raped in the six weeks after the city fell.

In 2006, we traveled to China and to Japan to interview victims and soldiers who took part in the massacre. One former Japanese soldier explained, without a hint of regret: "We all drew straws, and the man who pulled out the one marked first, he brushed off her face tenderly and treated her pretty, yes, and then proceeded to rape her. As their daughter was being raped, the parents would come outside and gesture to us, 'Please spare her!' They'd bang their heads on the ground and plead with us. We'd take one girl and five of us would hold her down."

In China, a 79-year-old man tearfully described how, at 9 years old, he watched a soldier bayonet his mother to death as she breast fed his brother. Another man saw his 13-year-old sister sliced in half by a Japanese soldier after she resisted being raped. Elderly women told harrowing stories of the rapes they endured as young girls.

It was the mass rapes in Nanking and the brutalization of an entire populace that eventually convinced Japanese military leaders that they needed to contain the chaos. Japanese soldiers began rounding up women and forcing them to serve as sex slaves in so-called comfort stations.

This is what most historians believe. But not in Japan, where a large faction of conservatives, led by Abe, denies that the Japanese military forced women into sexual slavery. They maintain that any suggestion to the contrary is simply anti-Japanese propaganda and probably spread by China. At the furthest end of the spectrum, the minimizing turns to flat-out denial; one professor we interviewed at a top Japanese university adamantly insisted there were no killings or rapes in Nanking.

Not surprisingly, all this minimizing and denial enrages the Chinese and others in Asia. But this is a familiar pattern.

Abe has visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo and has said he plans to visit again as prime minister. This is the place where the souls of more than 2 million Japanese war dead are said to be enshrined. Among them are 14 men convicted at the end of World War II of what are known as Class-A war crimes, including Iwane Matsui, the general who led Japanese forces in Nanking. To the Chinese, every visit by an official is like ripping open an unhealed wound. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi went there six times, and his 2005 visit resulted in anti-Japanese riots in China.

It's also informative to walk just a few yards to the Yushukan, the museum affiliated with the Yasukuni shrine. There, as we surveyed the exhibits on the Great East Asian War (World War II to much of the rest of the world), we were surprised to learn that Franklin D. Roosevelt had forced Japan to go to war in a calculated effort to lift the U.S. out of the Depression. (This exhibit was recently revised to omit the Depression reference; now it just says the U.S. forced Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor.)

Then there's the exhibit that argues that Japan's "entry into" other Asian countries was simply an effort to help them throw off the yoke of Western colonization. The museum claims that the Japanese leaders who were tried as war criminals were heroic. A tiny section on Nanking makes no mention of atrocities.

All this revisionism is interspersed with militaristic displays. And crucially, these are not a handful of dusty exhibits in an out-of-the-way place; the Yasukuni complex occupies 25 acres of prime Tokyo real estate.

Fueled by such an aggrieved interpretation of Japan's wartime past, Abe and his party are leading efforts to amend Article 9 of the nation's postwar constitution, which mandates that Japan not maintain a standing army. This comes at a time of escalating tension with China, much of it focused on the Senkaku islands. And Abe's government is considering revising what is known as the Kono Statement, a 1993 apology Japan made for the comfort women, an issue of great meaning to China and other nations that had women forced into sexual slavery.

It seems unlikely that the region will erupt into armed conflict over three tiny islands or repeal of the apology. And it can be argued that the move to amend the constitution shouldn't be a cause for great alarm because Japan already has a well-armed self-defense force.

What is alarming is that the leaders of Japan — and a large and vocal minority of its citizens — have an understanding of their country's wartime history that is grounded primarily in fiction. The Rape of Nanking is not in dispute. There is abundant eyewitness testimony from foreign observers, victims and Chinese and Japanese soldiers; contemporaneous news accounts; horrifying forensic and photographic evidence; and even film footage, surreptitiously shot by an American missionary.

Link

 

[shuttler]

Japan Is Still Denying the Sexual Slavery of Chinese 'Comfort Women'
By Megan Murphy
April 18, 2014 | 8:55 pm
This article originally appeared on VICE Canada

The term "comfort women" masks the lived reality of the approximately 200,000 Chinese women and girls kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during WWII. It is estimated that 400,000 women and girls from occupied countries such as Korea, China, and the Philippines, were enslaved in total. The term evokes a much more pleasant image than that which survivors tell — harrowing stories of daily rape and torture, often ending in death or permanent injury. Many of these "women" were not women at all, but girls—pushed into the "comfort stations" as soon as they began menstruating.

The notion that men not only need access to women's bodies and sexual release, but that they are entitled, particularly during wartime, was foundational to the existence of and justification for the comfort stations. According to researcher, C. Sarah Soh, author of "The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan," the comfort women system was viewed as a way "to control the troops through regulated access to sex."

"If the historical truth is not told, the same thing could happen again."

For 70 years, the Chinese "comfort women" have been erased from Japan's postwar narrative. It is only recently that the human rights violations committed against these women and girls have broken through into public conversation.

Dr. Peipei Qiu, author of "Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves," began to cry as I spoke with her over the phone. The stories are almost unbearable.

Qiu tells me that one of the survivors interviewed witnessed a woman and younger girl — just a teenager — be buried alive. She watched as a soldier showered the teenager's body with dirt, stopping mid-task to laugh at her as she died.

Another survivor Lei Guiying, was only nine when her hometown was occupied by Japanese soldiers. She witnessed the soldiers take the older girls—14 or 15 years old — away, sexually torture them, and leave them to die. Impoverished and begging on the streets, Guiying began working as a nanny and a maid in a comfort station in Tangshan. When she turned 13 and started menstruating, she was told: "Congratulations, you're a grownup now," and sent off to a room where she was violently raped by a solider. She eventually managed to escape.

The book is the first English language book that tells the stories of the Chinese women who were forced into sexual slavery during WWII. It includes the voices of 12 Chinese survivors who tell stories of being raped numerous times a day until they could no longer sit or walk. The women suffer from deep psychological trauma today, as well as headaches, memory loss, and other associated physical and medical problems. A number of the women have passed away since the book was published, still not having received compensation, acknowledgment, or justice.
Qiu points out that these accounts "expose the multiple social, political, and cultural forces that played a part in their life-long suffering." This is to say that the abuses suffered by the comfort women is connected, not just to war, but to a life of extreme poverty, colonialism and racial discrimination, and a patriarchal culture that Soh says commodifies "women's sex labor."

That the Japanese government continues to deny involvement and erase these women's past from history only contributes to their experiences of lifelong trauma.

At the end of the war, the Japanese military deliberately destroyed war evidence, and conservatives, neo-nationalist activists, and government officials in Japan continue to claim that no war crimes were committed; saying recently that the US fabricated them.
It wasn't until the 1990s that this issue and these women's stories began to receive attention. In 1992, history professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered war documents that proved the military were directly involved in forcing women into "comfort stations." This coincided with the comfort women's redress movement initiated by a number of scholars and feminist groups. Survivors began to come forward to testify about what happened to them during the war.

But opponents were not dissuaded from their efforts to bury the truth. Three hundred Japanese legislators signed a petition this year to have a statue dedicated to the comfort women in Glendale, California removed. They claimed it spread "false propaganda." Proposals for another memorial statue in Australia have also been met with fierce opposition from Japan. Just last month, Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, denied the Japanese government and military had any official involvement in the comfort stations, claiming the women were willing prostitutes, working in privately owned brothels.

Each retelling is painful and retraumatizing for the survivors and they continue to experience shame, embarrassment, and discrimination. After the war ended, many of them, Qiu tells me, were seen as immoral or as "bad women," as they had "served the other side." After escaping a comfort station, Lu Xiuzhen returned home to her village and told the interviewers: "Because I had been raped by the enemy, people in my village gossiped abut me, saying that I slept with Japanese soldiers… People in my village believed that a person defiled by Japanese soldiers would bring bad luck and could not produce anything good."
When we talk about war and the casualties of war, women are rarely discussed. Wartime stories are heroic battle tales, fought among men; or they commemorate the suffering and deaths of soldiers. Never do we hold nation-wide days of remembrance for the women and girls who were brutalized and killed during wartime. Yet the tragedy and injustice of war makes women and girls its victim daily. The comfort women are symbolic of this erasure and it is our responsibility to acknowledge and address the way in which women and girls are sacrificed by our nation's wars.

Qiu points out that that there is a racial element at play too: "The comfort women's stories were kept silent for so many years because the victims were Asian. When war crimes were prosecuted, with regard to political prisoners, for example, the focus was on white men."

Denial of these atrocities does damage not only to the victims of the comfort women system but, Qiu says, "If the historical truth is not told, the same thing could happen again." Regardless of opponents' claims, Qiu says that survivor testimonies provide a powerful counter narrative to the Japanese government's denial. One that, despite the overwhelming pain experienced by the women with every retelling, can no longer be hidden from history.

Link

 

[Pakistanisage]

Japan has a serious criminal past that it must confront and make amends for.

 

[sincity]

The more Japan want to whitewash their ugly past, the more about the grand scale of atrocity commit by Japanese coming into light.

 

[SarthakGanguly]

Can't wait for the day when Japan gets nuked again.

Only mistake those worthless Yankees made was not nuking every Jap city and making sure the population in evey city is zero.

If only China had a fascist leader. He would do the appropriate job on the Jap race.

Chinese leaders are too soft including Mao. We need a truly ruthless leader. Unleash the PLA on Japan. Just bomb every school, every university, every building, every population centre.

Kill them like the dogs they are



The less Turks there are in this world, the better.
So anyone killing a Turk is fine by me.
They are doing the world a favour.

Are you aware of the Pacific winds that will make sure the air you breathe becomes poison? Not to mention the sea you fish you eat and the inevitable tsunamis in the immediate aftermath.

 

[StarCraft_ZT]

The less Turks there are in this world, the better.
So anyone killing a Turk is fine by me.
They are doing the world a favour.

True.