Free Japan's Comfort Women by Yuki Tanaka

this point.
    Why comfort women?
    There were several reasons why the Japanese military decided that comfort stations were necessary.
    As mentioned previously, Japanese military leaders were very concerned about the rape of civilians by members of the Japanese armed forces – but not out of concern for those civilians. For good strategic reasons, they believed that the antagonism of civilians in occupied territories towards their conquerors was exacerbated by such behaviour. They also believed that a ready supply of women for the armed forces would help to reduce the incidence of rape of civilians.
    Was the exploitation of women in military-controlled comfort stations effective in preventing widespread random sexual violence by Japanese soldiers? The initiator of the Japanese army comfort women system, General Okamura, reflect-ing on the Japanese invasion of Wuhan in 1938, stated that random sexual violence occurred in spite of the fact that the Japanese forces had groups of comfort women attached to them. He admitted, therefore, that his scheme was a failure.53
    Until it was revised in February 1942, the Japanese Imperial Army Criminal Law (Article 86, Clause 2) stated that army personnel who committed rape at the same time as looting would be punished by between seven years and life imprisonment. Here rape was regarded as a secondary crime, incidental to looting. It was also a general trend in the Japanese Imperial forces that looting and rape, in particular during combat operations, were not only tolerated but even encouraged by many troop commanders as a means of arousing the fighting spirit in their men. Therefore, it is not surprising that only a small number of soldiers were convicted of rape under this code of conduct each year. In 1939, The origins of the comfort women system 29
    15 men were found guilty of looting, rape and manslaugter. Only four soldiers in 1940 and a mere two men in 1941 were convicted of the same crimes.54 This Japanese official military data looks absurd when it is compared with actual evidence, such as various testimonies presented at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal regarding the Rape of Nanjing.
    On February 20, 1942, the law was revised to acknowledge rape as a single major criminal offense. The amended article reads that “those who commit rape in the battlefield or in the territory of the Empire will be imprisoned for between one year and life,” for the reason that “rape in the occupied territory is fundamentally different from rape in the national territory and will defame the Empire.”55 In other words, rape of women in occupied territories was regarded as a crime under the revised Army Criminal Law mainly because it brought disgrace on the name of the Japanese Empire, not because rape itself constituted a serious crime against humanity. Thus, in actual cases, it remained extremely rare that a soldier or officer rapist was court-martialed. The fundamental problem was that, regardless of what the law stipulated, rape of civilians in occupied territories was not considered a serious criminal act by Japanese military men.
    In fact, in his report about particular battlefield problems in China in 1939, Dr. Hayao Takeo, a medical officer and professor in psychiatry, stated that many officers deemed it necessary for their soldiers to rape women in order to stimulate aggression.56
    The following testimony by General Okamura shows how reluctant even senior officers were to prosecute offenders. In August 1938, the Chief of Staff of the 11th Army reported to Okamura (then commander of this army) that some of their own soldiers had gang-raped the wife and daughter of the chief of one Chinese village in their occupied area. When Okamura was told that local civilians were refusing to co-operate in construction work of a Japanese military airfield because of this sexual violence, he ordered the kempeitai to arrest the offenders. However, the kempeitai chief told Okamura that the criminal act could not