Stiffmuscle@ianhu

■ Hicks, pp.194-196

8. The politics of sex

In 1945, some two-and-a-half million Japanese troops surrendered to the Allies. Almost all, and indeed some their women, would have known about the comfort system. There were comfort women right on the edge of battlefields. Licensed prostitution was also conducted fairly openly in Japan. Yet by 1962 when Senda Kako started his research on comfort women, collective amnesia appeared to have set in. It took him quite a while to uncover enough information for his book, Military Comfort Women*1, published in 1973.

According to one Japanese academic, it became a 'hidden' bestseller. Copies disappeared from shelves, but few would admit to owing a copy, or even having read one. Senda's book had appeared just a year after the Japanese Women's Association had begun to openly oppose sex tourism, the year that, with Korean women's groups, they had demonstrated against sex tours at Korean and Japanese airports.

The collective amnesia was not peculiar to the Japanese. Korean comfort women were also keen to expunge their abasement from memory. The last thing many wanted was Kim Il Myon's seminal publication on their sufferings. Although a Korean, Kim's book The Emperor's Forces and Korean Comfort Women*2 appeared in Japanese, to become part of the literature of the 'Japanese of Conscience'. In Korea, the book initially made little impact. Nevertheless it went through numerous reprints, a sign that knowledge about comfort women was spreading.

Not long after, in 1979, came Yamatani's film on Pae Pong Gi*3. Pae's experience made the link between the sexual activities of the Japanese Armed Forces and that of the American Occupation Force as two sides of the same coin—the exploitation of women. This impressed the growing feminist movements in both Korea and Japan.

The growth of consciousness in Japan took another leap forward in 1982. A woman freelance journalist, Usuki Keiko, later to become the leading figure in the Association for Clarifying Japan's Postwar Responsibility, spent most of that year in South Korea, learning the language, building up contacts, and studying the comfort women issue. The political situation in South Korea in the early 1980s did not encourage activism of any kind. The contacts Usuki made, however, were to prove useful by the end of the decade. Yun Chung Mo's My Mother was a Military Comfort Woman*4 was also published in 1982. Then in 1983 came Yoshida Seiji's landmark book, My War Crimes: The Forced Draft of Koreans*5, a singularly stark account of his activities during the war.

Given the official Japanese reluctance to accept responsibility for the comfort system and its forced draft of women, the memoirs of Yoshida are very important. They remain the only independent and semi-official account of the recruitment process, aside from the evidence of the comfort women themselves. During the war Yoshida had been with the National Labour Service Association whose task was to co-ordinate draft labour throughout the country and work with the police force. He was the Mobilisation Department Head in Shimonoseki, less than a day away from the Korean port of Pusan. His main duty was to control the flow of conscript labour to essential industries, on the order of the Army and Navy headquarters in western Japan. The mines in the region were particularly important. At the time and for a long time afterwards, he said he regarded his raids as an inevitable part of war. Later, after his retirement in the late 1970s, he came to reflect on them with increasing horror. As he puts it, this was not due to any sudden change of heart, but to an accumulation of circumstances.

He had been approached by journalists to write articles on his war experiences. On some being published, he was persuaded by a publishing company to write a book-length memoir. Lacking documentary support, except for some diary material, he contacted over forty former colleagues in the hope of exchanging and checking recollections. Most refused, and some even stopped sending him New Year cards. He was, however, able to obtain come help in the Shimonoseki area, and his book was published. Its contents drew widespread attention, leading to television interviews and public lectures. It made an impact in South Korea, too, and, in 1985, he was invited to lecture at Seoul University. He was prevented from doing so by the South Korean government, with its customary fear of agitation. The occasion for the proposed lecture had been the visit to Korea by Yuyuta, the Korean comfort woman. Yuyuta had been visited in Thailand, interviewed and written about by journalist Matsui Yayori of Asahi Shinbun in 1983, the same year that Yoshida's book was published.

Yoshida also developed links with Korean residents in Japan. Through them, he learned more about the prevalent discrimination against them: how, for example, schoolchildren had to use Japanese names to avoid being bullied. He also learned of the fingerprinting requirement for all foreign nationals, a measure aimed mainly at the Koreans. He came to feel partly responsible for their situation. By exposing the historical reasons for their presence in Japan, he hoped their lot might be improved.

Despite Yoshida's continued strenuous activities to expose the forced draft, he has been studiously ignored by the Japanese authorities—even after the official fact finding inquiry following the institution of the 1991 lawsuit, and the exposure of damning surviving documentation in various official archives. Yoshida complains more about public apathy than any attempt at suppression. However, Right-wing extremists who have always denied that there were any Japanese wartime atrocities, also took exception to his book, and threatened him.

His main critics is an historian, Professor Hata Ikuhiko, of a university originally founded to provide training for the colonial service. He claims that investigations in southern Korea have failed to substantiate Yoshida's accounts.

(emphasis added)

George Hicks, "Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War", W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, pp.194-196.