In WWII: While nothing will ever fully compensate the Comfort Women for all they suffered.

Comfort women of WW II slavery in Asia.

Some of the greatest atrocities committed by the Japanese military during World War II were against the women of the nations they conquered.

 A graphic interview given by IJA soldier Shirō Azuma, shows how sexual assault escalated among Imperial Japanese soldiers:

At first, we used some kinky words like Bikankan. Bi means “[Pussy],” Kankan means “look.” Bikankan means, “Let’s see a woman open up her legs.

Chinese women didn’t wear underpants. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. There was no belt. As we pulled the string, the buttocks were exposed. 

We “Bikankan.” We looked. After a while we would say something like, “It’s my day to take a bath,” and we took turns raping them. It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them.

 Because dead bodies don’t talk.

After the rape, and often murder, of the women and girls in the areas they conquered, Imperial Japanese military leaders set up rape brothels where they imported women from other areas or countries or “recruited” local women. They euphemistically called their victims “Comfort Women [ianfu].

More than 200,000 women were forced into service as Comfort Women by Japan during WWII, many of them being “harvested” and imported from Korea.

The average age of these sex slaves was 15, with some of them as young as 10. It was not uncommon for young girls to die due to internal hemorrhaging. 

In some of their rape brothels, the Comfort Women were given a daily quota: “twenty enlisted men in the morning, two NCO’s in the afternoon, and the senior officers at night.

The Imperial Japanese military set up these Comfort Women stations to cut down on the wide-spread and random raping wherever Japanese troops were garrisoned.

 After conquering Hong Kong and the surrounding regions, the 23rd Army under Major General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and General Takashi Sakai had meetings about how to control the “rape-epidemic.

To avert future rapes, the 23rd Army established brothels and looked for “non-family women to staff them.

 Posters appeared on the streets advertising for ‘comfort women,’ some hundreds of whom were recruited…[from] Guangdong province” according to historian Philip Snow.

 Kuribayashi helped establish these prostitution houses, not because of his concern for the “Chinese victims of rape by [his] soldiers but because of [his] fear of creating antagonism among the Chinese civilians” according to historian Yuki Tanaka. 

Also, by “employing” local women, IJA medical personnel believed they could reduce venereal diseases, which they feared would “undermine the strength of their men (and hence their fighting ability)” writes Tanaka. 

Since there were never enough local women to “service” all the men, Kuribayashi and his staff imported an additional 1,700 Japanese prostitutes from Canton, treating women like military supplies. It is interesting that Kuribayashi brought in Japanese prostitutes. 

These women “were in a different position from the comfort women” in that they mainly serviced high-ranking officers and were given better food and accommodations.

 Kuribayashi was not only taking care of his flag- and field-grade officers, but he was probably also taking care of his own needs. 

His command helped organize and take part in what would become “the largest and most elaborate system of trafficking in women in the history of mankind and one of the most brutal” notes Tanaka.

Jeanne Ruff-O’Hearne, a Dutch Comfort Woman, echoed what happened to thousands of these victims: “During that time the Japanese had abused me and humiliated me. 

They had ruined my young life. They had stripped me of everything, my self-esteem, my dignity, my freedom, my possessions, my family.

How did this happen? In Christopher Browning’s landmark book, Ordinary Men, Browning ends his book discussing German perpetrators of Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust with the haunting phrase if “the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?

 In other words, Browning documented in extreme detail that the “normal,” run-of-the-mill men from German society who made up Police Battalion 101 succumbed to peer-pressure and group behavior to slaughter innocent Jewish men, women and children, then there is no reason to think that given the right circumstances, people in any society might do the same thing. We see this truism dramatically when it comes to the Imperial Japanese military.

 Japanese culture stresses group harmony and social obligation over individual needs or beliefs.

 This mentality can create a productive society as seen with making incredible cars (Toyota) or electronics (Sony), but it can also create compliance with a philosophy of bloodthirsty militarism (Bushido) giving rise to a landscape of atrocities.

 During World War II, this led ordinary Japanese to become rapists and murderers throughout Asia and the Pacific. 

A military of approximately 3 million men deployed throughout Asia, primarily China, killed 22 million people, and raped millions of women and girls (and thousands of boys), displaying what happens when aggression meets cultural compliance.

Modern day Japan continues to cast doubt or refuses to fully apologize for the horror inflicted by Imperial Japanese Forces.

 Here is proof in their own words. In January 1938, Imperial Headquarters in the name of Field Marshal Prince Kan’in Kotohito (Emperor Hirohito’s uncle) wrote General Iwane Matsui, “If we look at actual conditions in the army, we must admit that much is less than blemish-free.

 Invidious incidents, especially as to troop discipline and morality, have occurred with increasing frequency of late.

By August 1938, Lieutenant General Yasuji Okamura, who replaced Matsui, declared, “It is true that tens of thousands of acts of violence, such as looting and rape, took place against civilians during the assault on Nanking.

 Second, front-line troops indulged in the evil practice of executing POWs on the pretext of [lacking] rations.

Head of the War Ministry, Lieutenant General Seishirō Itagaki, had a top secret memorandum circulated throughout the IJA in 1939 stating, “If the army men who participated in the war [throughout all of China] were investigated individually, they would probably all be guilty of murder, robbery or rape.

” Kotohito, Okamura and Itagaki’s statements display that the vast majority, if not all troops, stationed in China committed atrocities. 

Why did the Imperial Japanese rape so much? Psychologists offer one explanation for Japanese behavior during WWII.

 For generations, Japan viewed women as inferior (a view not unique to their culture). Societal norms during Hirohito’s reign dictated women’s purpose was to raise children and they often did so using corporal discipline.

 Boys growing up in Japan were taught to view women as weak, stupid and emotional and they, subconsciously, resented the fact the inferior half of society punished them.

 They grew up steeped in the idea that “physical aggression is acceptable and necessary” according to historian Richard Frank. 

When Japanese soldiers were released on foreign nations, their pent-up resentment against women expressed itself in violence; they raped woman because they were viewed “as adversaries to be attacked and subdued” according to psychologists Robert Prentky and Ann Burgess.  

Japan spawned a nation of men who took their psychotic drive to conquer to a whole different level of diabolical.

 They were what psychologists Prentky and Burgess called enraged and sadistic rapists who “hate their victims” and want to “humiliate and dominate women.” Such rapists often make “unusual and painful sexual demands and many seem to be acting out a bizarre fantasy.

 Frequently they “fatally injure their victims”; the Japanese did this by the millions.

It is sad to note that recent Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is a card-carrying member of Nippon Kaigi, which denies that Comfort Women ever existed.

 No Japanese leader, including Abe, has ever publicly apologized to the surviving elderly Comfort Women nor the Asian nations Japan quite literally raped.

 Despite their dwindling numbers (as of 2019 there were 23 still living), the Comfort Women of Korea had been protesting outside of the Japanese embassy in Seoul for 25 years. 

Today, there daughters and granddaughters have picked up their mantle.

 Japan devastated a whole generation of women and physically hurt the individuals who most deserve our protection and respect—mothers, wives and daughters of a nation (the ultimate people makers).

 Japan’s behavior towards these crimes against women during WWII and its inability to admit to these crimes makes it is one of the biggest violators of women’s rights, as well as human rights, in the history of the modern world.

 While nothing will ever fully compensate the Comfort Women for all they suffered, isn’t it time for a proper apology before we lose the last of these brave survivors?

For more on the Comfort Women and the rape of Asia, see my new book, “Flamethrower”