Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to US troops until
the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down.
The documents show the brothels were rushed into operation as American forces
poured into Japan beginning in August 1945.
"Sadly, we police had to set up sexual comfort stations for the occupation
troops," recounts the official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police
Department, whose jurisdiction is just northeast of Tokyo. "The strategy was,
through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to
protect regular women and girls."
The orders from the Ministry of the Interior came on Aug. 18, 1945, one day
before a Japanese delegation flew to the Philippines to negotiate the terms of
their country's surrender and occupation.
The Ibaraki police immediately set to work. The only suitable facility was a
dormitory for single police officers, which they quickly converted into a
brothel. Bedding from the navy was brought in, along with 20 comfort women. The
brothel opened for business Sept. 20.
"As expected, after it opened it was elbow to elbow," the history says. "The
comfort women ... had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just
yesterday were the enemy, and because of differences in language and race,
there were a great deal of apprehensions at first. But they were paid highly,
and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully."
Police officials and Tokyo businessmen established a network of brothels under
the auspices of the Recreation and Amusement Association, which operated with
government funds. On Aug. 28, 1945, an advance wave of occupation troops
arrived in Atsugi, just south of Tokyo. By nightfall, the troops found the
RAA's first brothel.
"I rushed there with two or three RAA executives, and was surprised to see 500
or 600 soldiers standing in line on the street," Seiichi Kaburagi, the chief of
public relations for the RAA, wrote in a 1972 memoir. He said American military
police were barely able to keep the troops under control.
Though arranged and supervised by the police and civilian government, the
system mirrored the comfort stations established by the Japanese military
abroad during the war.
Kaburagi wrote that occupation GIs paid upfront and were given tickets and
condoms. The first RAA brothel, called Komachien - The Babe Garden - had 38
women, but due to high demand that was quickly increased to 100. Each woman
serviced from 15 to 60 clients a day.
Cost: about a dollar
American historian John Dower, in his book "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake
of WWII," says the charge for a short session with a prostitute was 15 yen, or
about a dollar, roughly the cost of half a pack of cigarettes.
Kaburagi said the sudden demand forced brothel operators to advertise for women
who were not licensed prostitutes.
Natsue Takita, a 19-year-old Komachien worker whose relatives had been killed
in the war, responded to an ad seeking an office worker. She was told the only
positions available were for comfort women and was persuaded to accept the
offer.
According to Kaburagi's memoirs, Takita jumped in front of a train a few days
after the brothel started operations.
"The worst victims ... were the women who, with no previous experience,
answered the ads calling for `Women of the New Japan,'" he wrote.
By the end of 1945, about 350,000 US troops were occupying Japan. At its peak,
Kaburagi wrote, the RAA employed 70,000 prostitutes to serve them. Although
there are suspicions, there is not clear evidence non-Japanese comfort women
were imported to Japan as part of the program.
Toshiyuki Tanaka, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute,
cautioned that Kaburagi's number is hard to document. But he added the RAA was
also only part of the picture - the number of private brothels outside the
official system was probably even higher.
The US occupation leadership provided the Japanese government with penicillin
for comfort women servicing occupation troops, established prophylactic
stations near the RAA brothels and, initially, condoned the troops' use of
them, according to documents discovered by Tanaka.
`Enslaving girls'
Occupation leaders were not blind to the similarities between the comfort women
procured by Japan for its own troops and those it recruited for the GIs.
A December 6, 1945, memorandum from Lt. Col. Hugh McDonald, a senior officer
with the Public Health and Welfare Division of the occupation's General
Headquarters, shows US occupation forces were aware the Japanese comfort women
were often coerced.
"The girl is impressed into contracting by the desperate financial straits of
her parents and their urging, occasionally supplemented by her willingness to
make such a sacrifice to help her family," he wrote. "It is the belief of our
informants, however, that in urban districts the practice of enslaving girls,
while much less prevalent than in the past, still exists."
Amid complaints from military chaplains and concerns that disclosure of the
brothels would embarrass the occupation forces back in the United States, on
March 25, 1946, MacArthur placed all brothels, comfort stations and other
places of prostitution off limits. The RAA soon collapsed.
MacArthur's primary concern was not only a moral one.
By that time, Tanaka says, more than a quarter of all American GIs in the
occupation forces had a sexually transmitted disease.
"The nationwide off-limits policy suddenly put more than 150,000 Japanese women
out of a job," Tanaka wrote in a 2002 book on sexual slavery. Most continued to
serve the troops illegally. Many had VD and were destitute, he wrote.
Under intense pressure, Japan's government apologized in 1993 for its role in
running brothels around Asia and coercing women into serving its troops. The
issue remains controversial today.
In January, California Rep. Mike Honda of Campbell offered a resolution in the
House condemning Japan's use of sex slaves, in part to renew pressure on Japan
ahead of the closure of the Asian Women's Fund, a private foundation created
two years after the apology to compensate comfort women.
The fund compensated only 285 women in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan,
out of an estimated 50,000-200,000 comfort women enslaved by Japan's military
in those countries during the war. Each received 2 million yen, about $17,800.
A handful of Dutch and Indonesian women were also given assistance.
The fund closed, as scheduled, on March 31.
Haruki Wada, the fund's executive director, said its creation marked an
important change in attitude among Japan's leadership and represented the will
of Japan's "silent majority" to see that justice is done.
Even so, he admitted it fell short of expectations.
"The vast majority of the women did not come forward," he said.
