In every large-scale armed conflict, women are victims of sexual violence. In most cases this is kept quiet – by victims, perpetrators and government leaders. The taboo is persistent. Jan Banning and I discovered as much during our quest to find “comfort women,” women forced to perform sexual acts for the Japanese armed forces during World War II. Young girls then, they are old women now. Shame, stigma and feelings of guilt have made them maintain silence for decades about their wartime experiences. The women in this book had the courage to share their suppressed past. Many others remain silent. The conspiracy of silence benefits the guilty. They typically face no repercussions for their acts, even today. In 2008, the United Nations passed resolution 1820, which intends once and for all to prevent such abusers from going scot-free. The resolution condemns the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war during armed conflict. Now the world no longer can close its eyes.

Recent examples of sexual violence in areas of conflict can be found in Congo, the Darfur region in southern Sudan, Liberia, Colombia and Burma. During the 1990s, some 500,000 women and girls were raped and mistreated in Rwanda, while in Bosnia-Herzegovina some 50,000 women were raped systematically. Several armed forces during World War II were guilty of wholesale sexual violence against women. Russian soldiers raped probably tens of thousands of women after they took Berlin in April 1945. In late 1937, the Japanese military celebrated the conquest of what was then the Chinese capital in identically brutal fashion. During “The Rape of Nanking,” at least 80,000 women of all ages were raped and then usually murdered. This mass rape in Nanking was the impetus for the Japanese government to expand dramatically a brothel policy it had introduced previously on a regional level. Regulated sex in military brothels was advocated as an effective means “to boost the spirit of the troops, keep law and order and prevent rape and venereal disease,” a 1938 directive of the Japanese Department of War shows.

Already having occupied Korea, parts of China and present-day Taiwan, Japan at the end of 1941 also entered World War II through its attack on Pearl Harbor. Within six months, large parts of Asia were conquered, including the then-British colonies of Malacca, Singapore and Burma, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia. In the occupied territories, the Japanese armed forces instigated the establishment of thousands of military brothels, in which an estimated 50,000 – 200,000 comfort women were forced to serve the three million Japanese troops. Some of the brothels the military ran itself. Most of the “comfort centers” were managed by private individuals, while for all practical purposes the military maintained supervision and control. Regular medical checkups and mandatory use of condoms were to prevent the imperial troops from succumbing in wholesale fashion to venereal disease, as had happened during previous wars in the 1920s and 1930s in Siberia and Manchuria.

At their arrival in the military brothels, the women went through a medical check up and registration, had their picture taken and were given a Japanese name. Every woman was assigned her own room, where at set times she had to receive military customers. The men could buy a ticket at the front office and pick a girl from a picture display. Condoms were mandatory, though not everyone took that all that seriously. The women were checked every week for venereal diseases. Whoever was sick received treatment and wasn’t returned to work until she was better.

For the Japanese occupying forces, the comfort women system was a purely pragmatic policy, but for the woman it was a nightmare. They were kidnapped, threatened, snatched from the streets by force or with false promises, dragged from their homes or summoned through village chiefs and then systematically raped in military brothels but also in barracks, factory warehouses, railroad wagons and tent camps. Many of them were underage, some only 11, 12 or 13 years old. Their stories indicate that the military brothels were hardly effective in maintaining military order and discipline. On the contrary. Since nowhere near all troops had access to regular military brothels, military brass and soldiers felt justified in arranging for their own “comfort women.” Some commanders set up an informal brothel in barracks or a warehouse. Others claimed local women as their concubines and allowed their troops, too, to have live-ins, by themselves or with roommates. In addition, all barracks and tent camps typically had women who as forced laborers had to work in the kitchen or dig trenches and with whom the troops could have their way without repercussions. Sometimes soldiers would hit up rural hamlets, or kampongs, in a truck to pick up girls for one or more days.

One of the best-known and best-documented cases is the Indonesian “Semarang Affair,” in which imprisoned Dutch women from several camps were gathered and forced into prostitution in brothels for the officers at the local Japanese military academy. It’s also one of the rare instances in which the military hierarchy intervened after a few months. After the war, at the Netherlands Temporary Court-Martial in what was then Batavia, the Japanese soldiers involved were convicted after all of committing war crimes by forcing prostitution. But that was it. The bulk of perpetrators in the Dutch East Indies and other occupied territories got off. The fate of tens of thousands of Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Philippine, Malaysian and Indonesian women was met with silence. In none of the negotiations about reparations in the 1950s and 1960s were the comfort women discussed.

In the early 1990s, Korea’s Kim Hak-sun ended the silence. Incensed that a Japanese government representative had the gall to deny the existence of the comfort women system, she told her story by the end of 1991. That became the starting signal for an international movement. Touched by the Korean testimony, Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi dug into the archives and found official, documented evidence of the Japanese policy of military brothels. During the 1992 “Tokyo Tribunal,” former comfort women other than Kim Hak-sun also spoke up, and advocacy groups began registering victims. Japan felt obliged to start an investigation. In August 1993, this resulted in the so-called Kono statement, in which the Japanese government acknowledged that “the then military was, directly and indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women.” Recruitment, on the other hand, had largely been done by private agents, albeit at the military’s request. “In many cases, women were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel took part in the recruitments.”

For victims and advocacy groups, the Kono statement didn’t go far enough, while conservative groups in Japan thought the government had gone overboard in its admission of guilt. In 1995, the democratic-socialist Japanese prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, tried to break the political stalemate by establishing the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF). This non-governmental fund received money from the government and citizens to pay one-time damages to formerly enslaved prostitutes, with accompanying apologies from the prime minister indicating moral responsibility for inflicted suffering.

The AWF initiative did not end the controversy. This became clear, for instance, when right-wing groups in Japan early in the new millennium negated the Kono statement by managing to have the issue of comfort women scrapped again from history textbooks. But in 2007, victims and advocacy groups were able once more to draw international attention with their initiatives. The testimony of several victims resulted in the United States Congress adopting a resolution that called on Japan “to acknowledge” forced prostitution during World War II, “to apologize and to accept historical responsibility.”

In this project, Jan Banning and I have focused on the Indonesian comfort women. Historical research in Indonesia hardly pays attention to the victims of the Japanese occupation. When Banning in 2002, for his book Traces of War, documented the experiences of former forced laborers on the Burma and Sumatra railways, we already discovered that the fate of millions of Indonesian laborers, the romushas, has been kept quiet. The same was true for the Indonesian comfort women. The Indonesian press in 2007 did mention the Korean and Chinese victims who registered as such in the 1990s but not the 20,000 Indonesian victims. Not only Japan but also Indonesia has suppressed the issue, it turned out. Instead of supporting the victims’ demands for rehabilitation, the women are admonished not to flaunt their “sin.” Indonesia is not interested in disturbing its good relationship with Japan and risk the loss of trade and the steady stream of development funds and investments. All this provided the impetus for Banning and me to set up the “comfort women project” to record these women’s personal experiences through portraits, in pictures and text. Before it’s too late.

Finding the women wasn’t easy. Many already had died, and the elderly survivors hardly felt the need to stir up painful memories again. We traveled across Java, to the Moluccas, East Kalimantan, North Sumatra and West Timor, where in total we interviewed and photographed some fifty women. We had to approach them discretely, because feelings of shame remain severe. Often, they couldn’t bring themselves to say the word “rape,” were reduced to nervous giggling and called it “forced adultery” or “doing it.” At times it helped that we were foreigners; because of that, they didn’t have to fear that their neighbors would see or read the whole story in the local media the next day.

Even after more than six decades, many women still try to keep their wartime history a secret for their family and immediate surroundings. That doesn’t always work. In certain places, everyone knows who the “Japanese hand-me-downs” are. Even in their eighties, some women still face abusive sneers. As much as they would like to erase the traces of their wartime history, they drag it along all their lives: The humiliation and pain, their childless existence, the failed marriages. The women in this book nevertheless were willing to break the silence to have their history recorded. They don’t want new generations of women to become the victim of sexual violence. And they want to be acknowledged, not only by apologies but also through the financial compensation that advocacy groups have promised them now for years. From such motives, they draw the strength to conquer their shame and look the world in the eyes.

Hilde Janssen
August 2010