Hilde Janssen
(note 1)

“Comfort Women” they are called. These veiled words can not take away the painful memories of forced sexual labour, nor the shame and the stigma. The taboo is persistent, even sixty five years onward.

The 80 year old woman in front of me smiles apologetically. We are sitting on a terrace of a quiet hotel at the foot of a volcano in Central Java. Her eyes nervously flash back and forth. She would prefer to disappear and hides her head in my arms.  She was still a girl during the Second World War, just thirteen years old, when she was regularly raped by Japanese soldiers as a forced labourer in the barracks near her village. She can hardly bring herself to utter the word “rape”.

What am I doing to these women, stirring up the wartime past that they already for decades try to forget? Why? These questions regularly cross my mind since I and photographer Jan Banning in 2007 decided to record the personal experiences of former comfort women in Indonesia through portraits, in pictures and text. (note 2) Shame, stigma and feelings of guilt have silenced these women. While they struggle with the physical and emotional impacts, the Japanese perpetrators have gone scot-free. The circle of silence needs to be broken, the voices of the women no longer suppressed, their stories told in history books.

For the Japanese military the comfort women system was a pragmatic policy. 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. With Japanese troops raping tens of thousands women to mark the conquest of the then Chinese capital of Nanking at the end of 1937, the government started to dramatically expand the brothel policy. Not only in China, but also in later occupied territories. An estimated 200.000 women living in Asian countries occupied by Japan were forced into prostitution, among them some 20.000 women in Indonesia. (note 3) Thousands more were forced to provide sexual services as concubines or daily labourers. And the rapes continued. The military brothel policy was hardly effective in maintaining military order and discipline. On the contrary. Since nowhere near all the troops had access to the regulated brothels, military brass and soldiers felt justified in arranging for their own “comfort women”.

For the women 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. 

Ronasih (1931) was thirteen and on her way to school when a Japanese soldier grabbed her and locked her up in his room in the nearby barracks in a village on the outskirts of Sukabumi, West Java. Her father desperately tried to get her out, but for three months Ronasih was raped almost daily. It took her many years to recover physically and mentally. “I married late, because I wanted to think, my wounds hadn’t healed yet, I was afraid.” She married several times, never being able to bear children. Now she lives in a small shed, depending on charity from family and neighbours.

Sanikem (1926) still had bridal decorations marks on her forehead when she was lifted into an army truck and taken to a camp in Yogya city. Daytime she was forced to work as a kitchen help, cleaning vegetables. After work, she was raped in the adjoining fields or in a tent, where other forced labourers, both men and women, also slept. “I trembled with fear, rolled up in my sleeping mat, crying.” She immediately told her parents and her husband, once she got back home after the war. “Praise the Lord, he took me back defiled, even though I had been taken away intact.”
 
Iteng (1927) never returned to her village after a military escort took her at the age of fifteen to the city of Sukabumi, to an informal brothel were truckloads of soldiers dropped in for their sexual rest and recuperation.  “Three beds in a large room with no curtains in between. All in the open, for everybody to be seen. Without condoms or any medical care.” After more then a year, when Iteng was physically broken and seriously ill, a Japanese officer took her to his guarded house. Once recovered she had to serve as his concubine till the end of the war. “I was not the only one, the same happened to my older and younger two sisters.”  Taken under a pretext of work Iteng’s sisters were also forced into prostitution in several informal brothels in factory sheds and offices, ending as concubines of Japanese officers. “Everybody in the village knew, we were too ashamed to go back.”

Emah (1926) was fifteen years old when Japanese soldiers took her away from home in West Java. She spent three years working in a military brothel in the army barracks of Cimahi. Upon arrival she had to undergo a medical checkup, to see if she was free of venereal diseases. Afterwards her photograph was taken and showcased as ‘Miyoko’ at the ticket office for the military clients to choose. Beautiful Emah alias Miyoko became one of the favorites. “I so much wanted to be ugly, because the Japanese did not want ugly girls. They ugly ones were quickly sent home. I had to stay…Everybody wanted me.  They kept on coming, one guest after the other.”  She had to follow a strict schedule, started after midday. “First came the soldiers, from two o’clock onwards, and in the evening the officers and captains. Six days a week. Sunday was our only day off and when we had our period.”  Emah grabs a cigarette and inhales deeply. For her smoking is a medicine to calm the nerves and blow away distressing memories; a habit she picked up in the military brothel, like many of her friends.

Suharti (1929) is one of the few who never smoked. “I used to give my ration of cigarettes to the cooking lady and office boy. I got better food and nicer visitors in return.”  Suharti named ‘Kiki’, learned how to survive the hard way in military brothels in East Kalimantan. She was fourteen in 1943 when she was spotted by some local government officials in her grandmothers courtyard in Blitar, East Java, and summoned to join a so-called “study program”. “Every villagehead had to hand over several hundred people to the Japanese, first of all romusha, second young men to serve as auxiliary soldiers or heiho, and third women as jugun ianfu. In those days they didn’t use the word “jugun ianfu”, they called it ‘the struggle for the uneducated children." (note 4)
Suharti and fourteen other girls were shipped to Balikpapan, to one of the first Japanese military brothels in Indonesia that was built by Yasuhiro Nakasone who later served as a prime minister. (note 5) After the mandatory checkup, she spent a week in a guesthouse with a Japanese officer who had taken a holiday from his post in Sanga-Sanga in anticipation of the arrival of a new load of ‘virgins’.  When he left, Suharti entered the brothel, and was forced to serve ten, twelve visitors per day, first in Balikpapan and later, after fleeing heavy bombardments, again in Banjarmasin.

It was in Banjarmasin that Suharti met Mardiyem, who later epitomized the Indonesian women’s quest for formal apologies and reparation from Japan. They became best friends, as after the Japanese occupation both married Javanese KNIL soldiers based in Kalimantan, who later enlisted in the Indonesian national army. (note 6) The homesick Suharti actually just wanted to go home, not aware of the stigmatisation she would encounter as a “Japanese-hand-me-down”. A local restaurant manager, doubling as a marriage matchmaker for her KNIL guests, opened her eyes. “She advised me to marry, telling me: once you have a husband and a child you can go home with your head up and nobody will ask awkward questions.”  But in the army barracks people didn’t need to ask, they knew. For years Suharti and her former colleagues were a source of envy and gossip with their well-groomed appearance and smoking habits. So they tried to erase the traces of their past, never talking about their painful memories, not even among themselves. And fifty years later, when Mardiyem was the first Indonesian to respond to the international appeal to break the silence convincing Suharti and others to follow her example, the stigmatisation started again. “We experienced a sharp drop in orders for our catering service, we were forced to close down,” recalls Suharti. “And after my photograph appeared in a national paper, the future family-in-law of one of my grandchildren initially decided to blew of the wedding.”

Suharti and other survivors, like most Indonesians never knew that right after the war tens of Japanese military were convicted and jailed for forced prostitution in Indonesia. The returning Dutch colonial government had introduced a new legislation declaring forced prostitution a war crime, thus enabling prosecution at the Netherlands Temporary Courts-Martia. (note 7) Due to these trial hearings and verdicts the so-called “Semarang case” became one of the best-documented cases providing strong evidence about of the Japanese comfort women system. However, the number of these trials was limited and almost exclusively restricted to forced prostitution involving European and Eurasian women.  That was it. The bulk of perpetrators in Indonesia 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.
 
It took half a century before the comfort women issue received international attention at the end of 1991. Korea’s Kim Hak-sun broadcasted testimony became the starting point of a global movement. When Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi dug into the archives and found official documents providing evidence of the policy of military brothels, 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, lacking the acknowledgement of state responsibility, 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 in Asia and The Netherlands, with accompanying apologies from the prime minister indicating moral responsibility for inflicted suffering. Japan also set up a digital museum, to document the Japanese comfort women system and research regarding past and present implications and made it a mandatory topic in history textbooks. (note 8)  

These developments also had its impact in Indonesia. Early 1993, human rights activist of the legal aid institute LBH following a visit of some Japanese lawyers, asked war victims to come forward to record their testimony. In total LBH registered more than thousand women in Central Java alone. Later the Indonesian Ex Heiho Forum joined forces with their nationwide network, hoping to strengthen their own lobby for outstanding payment of part of their wartime salary. Having worked for the Japanese and belonging to the same generation as the comfort women, they often could easily point out the victims. Within a year the ex Heiho Forum registered around 20.000 women. Impressive numbers. However few details are available about most women. Hardly anybody has dared to ask the survivors what exactly they had to endure, confronted with the women’s pain and shame.

Emah one day ran into an ex-heiho who recognised her and confronted her with her past that she tried to forget. “I was shocked. I denied my past, I felt too ashamed. Only when some old friends from the brothel showed up, I decided to register.”
The reasons to come forward varied. Some were longing for an understanding stranger to  share their long kept secret. For others rehabilitation and justice was the major drive: they wanted to be acknowledged as victims of systematic sexual abuse by the perpetrators and general public, have their stories recorded, their names cleared. Many, once confronted or pushed by family members, felt obliged to join the call for justice and more so the claim for compensation. Once the AWF fund was set up, word got around fast about the financial compensation. (note 9) In Central Java, Paini (1930) showed me a copy of a newspaper article from 1996, stating that all former comfort women would receive a compensation of $ 28.500. (note 10) An enormous amount, certainly in those days. For Paini reason enough to overcome her shame and acknowledge the sexual abuse she had suffered. “That’s why I went to LBH in Yogya and to Jakarta seven times. That’s why I am honest and open with you, admitting my forced adultery, although others will call me indecent.” 

Indecent, that is exactly what the Indonesian government called them. Instead of supporting the victims’ demands for rehabilitation, the women were admonished not to flaunt their “sin”.  
The government was not interested in disturbing its good relation with Japan and risk loss of trade and the steady stream of development funds and investments. It never had been. Historic research in Indonesia –as in The Netherlands- has hardly paid any attention to the hundreds of thousand Indonesian victims of the Japanese occupation. Indonesia’s first president Sukarno described the loss of live, suffering and economic damage as a “small sacrifice” the nation had to pay for gaining independence, even boosting about his personal intervention in 1942 to gain support for a Japanese comfort women station in Padang. (note 11) His successor Suharto, a Japanese trained PETA soldier, didn’t tolerate any criticism against Japan that so generously supported his New Order economic development. (note 12) It was under Suharto’s rule that the government rudely suppressed the demands for reparations. The then minister of Social Affairs rejected Japans AWF offer of individual consolation payments, under the pretext of protecting women’s dignity as public revelations of “sins” went against the cultural tradition. Adding insult to injury the government claimed the AWF money for their own coffers. (note 13)

“It was our money, and the government took it. That hurts.” More then ten years onward, the interviewed survivors still express their anger and deep disappointment. Not only Japan, but also Indonesia has suppressed the issue of comfort women, it turned out. However frustrated, the lobby groups didn’t give up easily. They kept on mobilising the women, joining international efforts to prove the direct involvement and responsibility of the Japanese state, i.e. government and its army, in the establishment and execution of the comfort women system. Emah and Suharti, together with Mardiyem went to Japan and to The Netherlands to testify in an internationally organised War Tribunal in 2000 and 2001. But in 2007, no Indonesian was among the four former comfort women to bear testimony in the United States Congress. These testimonies resulted in a Congress resolution calling on Japan “to acknowledge” the forced prostitution and “to accept historical responsibility”, and received worldwide media attention, including in Indonesia. However, national papers only referred to Chinese, Korean and Dutch comfort women, ignoring the Indonesian victims.

The silence, neglect and ignorance provided the impetus for Jan Banning and me to set up the “comfort women project” to record these women’s personal stories through portraits, in pictures and text. Before it would be too late.
Finding the women wasn’t easy. Many already had died and the dwindling group of elderly survivors hardly felt the need to stir up painful memories again. The frustrating, failed attempts to break the silence in surge for rehabilitation made them even more cautious, as they became a victim for the second time, increasing their feelings of humiliation and shame.  Advocacy groups, local contact persons and family members share these feelings, resulting in a weakening of the network. Advocacy groups lost contact, documents have been destroyed by termites or thrown away. Local contacts don’t dare or care to raise the issue again, due to lack of success and “wasted” time and money. Survivors and family members keep their distance, afraid to be cheated again and become the laughing stock of their community.

“Are you coming to deliver the money for the new tar road?” Trying to find my way to a contact in West Java, villagers immediately guessed the connection. The contact had bragged about the large amount of compensation money, promising he would pay to upgrade the village road. The villagers haven’t forgotten. That’s why some women in Central Java don’t want us to visit their houses. “The neighbours keep on pestering us: Where’s the money? You expose your shameful past, and what do we get in return? Nothing!” 
“What do we get in return?” After an hour of small talk and tea the head of a village on the border of East Java and Central Java wants to know what is in for him and his community. He sees no need to pester the survivors in his region just to have their history recorded. He wants money. ‘I spent a big part of my salary, even sold rice harvests and land to pay for transport and food for all these the trips to Yogya and Jakarta.” He is not the only one. Many locals and family members “invested” in advocacy-support, attracted by reports of big compensation rewards. Several found themselves cheated by “agents” who offered help with the final paperwork and disappeared as soon as they cashed their fee. “One man claiming to work for LBH said the compensation money had arrived, but we needed to pay one million rupiah collection fee that same day,” recalls Paini. The family didn’t have that much cash, so they borrowed money from several sources. “The only thing we got in return was debt.”

Various local people involved in the advocacy process acknowledged spending tens of millions of rupiahs: on registration and membership fees for a group of women, on transport and food, on special events. Their generous support was based on the unwritten agreement that they would receive a – often substantial- share of the compensation money. After 2000 many gave up and took their losses. Others kept investing, some even till today. Several ex-heiho contacts in West Timor admitted spending between 50-60 million rupiah in recent years, requested by their central board to allow them to “speed up” and “finalise” the payment procedure. They didn’t dare to refuse, afraid to be omitted from the list of recipients. Even after they discovered most of the money went into the private pocket of the chairperson some again decided to raise money to start a new procedure. “We invested so much, we can’t stop now.”

Despite all good intentions the lobby for reparation became corrupted, the women exploited as milch cows in the process. Government and advocacy groups need to learn from past mistakes. (note 14) They owe the former comfort women at least that much. Even in their eighties, many women try to keep their wartime history a secret for their families and immediate surroundings. As much as they would like to erase the traces of their past, they drag it along all their lives: The humiliation and pain, their childless existence, the failed marriages. The women we interviewed and portrayed want to be acknowledged and rehabilitated, not only by apologies, but also through financial compensation allowing them to live their final years in dignity. They are willing to break the vicious circle of silence and impunity, to have their history recorded, because they don’t want their grandchildren to become victims of sexual violence. From such motives they draw the strength to conquer their same and look the world in the eyes.   

Hilde Janssen
May 2011