Free Japan's Comfort Women by Yuki Tanaka Page B

brothels could easily be infiltrated by spies and that prostitutes working in them could easily be recruited as spies. Kempeitai members were frequent visitors to comfort stations and kept close tabs on the women to ensure there were no spies among them. In order to limit the women’s contact with people outside comfort stations as much as possible, they were not allowed to go outside the premises by themselves. So severely were they restricted that permission was required for them even to go for a walk to get fresh air.

    The origins of the comfort women system 31
    The comfort women were treated as “military supplies,” but relevant documents were either hidden or destroyed at the end of the war. It is impossible to know, therefore, how many women were exploited. The best estimates range from 80,000 to 100,000. According to the Japanese military plan devised in July 1941, 20,000 comfort women were required for every 800,000 Japanese soldiers, or one woman for every 40 soldiers.62 There were 3.5 million Japanese soldiers sent to China and Southeast Asia during the war, and therefore, by this calculation, an estimated 90,000 women were mobilized. Of these women, 80 percent are believed to have been Koreans, but many also came from Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
    Why were comfort women almost invariably from Taiwan, China, or various places in Southeast Asia, and above all Korea? This might seem odd at first, given that the Japanese were notorious for their racism towards the people of other Asian countries. However, racial prejudice provides part of the answer to the question – that very racism helped make these women suitable for the role of comfort women.
    Japanese prostitutes did serve the military abroad during the war, but most were in a different position from the comfort women. The Japanese prostitutes mainly worked in comfort stations that served high-ranking officers, and they Plate 1.5 While comfort women were sexually exploited, Japanese women were expected to be chaste and encouraged to have as many healthy children as possible. This scene shows one of the healthy baby contests often held in Japan during the Asia-Pacific War. The photo was taken in April 1941.
    Source : Mainichi Shimbun 32
    The origins of the comfort women system experienced better conditions than the Asian comfort women. Apart from the difficulty in recruiting Japanese women into comfort stations, Japanese military leaders did not believe Japanese women should be in that role. Their mission was to bear and bring up good Japanese children, who would grow up to be loyal subjects of the Emperor rather than being the means for men to satisfy their sexual urges. The Japanese wartime government took its lead from Nazi eugenic ideology and policy in these matters. In 1940 the National Eugenic Law was proclaimed. The purposes of the law were to prevent miscegenation and the reproduction of the “unfit,” such as those with mental illness that was believed to be inherited.63
    According to widely held Japanese views at the time, a supreme virtue for a woman was to serve her husband from the time of her marriage until the end of her life. During the war, the Ministry of Health actually recommended that war widows remain loyal to their deceased husbands by not remarrying, unless they were less than 36 years old. In 1943, when Professor Kaneko Takanosuke from the Tokyo College of Commerce argued in a popular woman’s magazine, Fujin KDron , that all war widows should be encouraged to remarry, the military authorities demanded that the publisher issue a public apology. In addition, the government-regulated distribution of paper to this publisher was considerably reduced for the rest of the war period.64 So hypocritical was the Japanese military leaders’ attitude that on the one hand they strongly demanded that Japanese women be chaste, while on the other they did not hesitate to preside over the extreme sexual exploitation of