2008-05-10
■ Hicks, pp.55-56 
Slave raids and frontline military efforts
If other methods failed, there was always the slave raid. One such raider was Yoshida Seiji, who in 1983 published hid wartime experiences, My War Crimes: The Forced Draft of Koreans.*1 On graduating from Tokyo University in 1936, Yoshida was appointed to a post in the administration of the client state of Manchukuo. A few years later he as was transferred to Army Headquarters in Nanking, as a War Ministry administrative officer in charge of military transport in the Shanghai area. He noticed that each regiment had at least one comfort station, usually with a few Japanese women of more mature years, and twenty to thirty younger Koreans. The more senior officers had special clubs with luxurious geisha-type entertainment.
In Shanghai at the time there was an underground Korean resistance movement calling itself the Korean Provisional Government affiliated to the Chinese Nationalists, and led by Kim Koo. On one occasion, after clearance by his superiors, Yoshida arranged an air passage to Hankow for a group of Korean 'medical staff', who later turned out to be members of this movement, apparently including Kim Koo himself. Yoshida was made the scapegoat and court-martialled for 'assistance to the enemy in wartime, an offence which could carry the death penalty. Instead, he was sentenced to two years in the Nanking military prison.
On his return to Japan in late 1942, he was appointed to the newly-formed National Labour Service Assocation, and given the task of co-coordinating conscript labour throughout the country. His post was mobilisation department head in Shimonoseki, a city at the western extremity of Honshu, and the regular port for sea links to the Korean port of Pusan. Yoshida's main duty was to control the flow of conscript labour to essential industries by order of Army and Navy headquarters in western Japan, particularly to the mines in the region. Much of the draft was handled through the regular network of police and the Korean Government-General's organization. In cases of urgent demand, however, Yoshida describes how he himself led 'slave-raid' expeditions which recruited thousands of male labourers and about 1000 women for comfort duties.
In frontline areas, where the logistics of recruitment were less organized, officers and soldiers led raid on the civilian population and prisoner-of-war camps. Madam X, the young Chinese girl living in Malaya recounted in the interview quoted in the Introduction how she was seized by soldiers invading her village, raped in front of her parents and then taken with several other village girls to a comfort station in Kuala Lumpur, where she worked as a comfort women until the war ended in 1945
George Hicks, Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, pp.55-56
