Jottings from the Granite Studio

Following up on yesterday’s post about the Japanese Supreme Court hearing two cases involving forced labor and forced prostitution. In a ruling early yesterday, the court overturned a lower court ruling awarding five laborers compensation for forced labor on Japanese construction sites. Late Friday afternoon, the court denied two Chinese women compensation despite their claims of being kidnapped and coerced to work as prostitutes by the Japanese army.*

The court acknowledged that both the women and the workers had been forced by Japanese military and industry but that neither could sue for monetary damages, claiming that Chinese citizens forfeited their rights to compensation in a 1972 joint statement between China and Japan in which “Beijing renounced war reparations from Japan, a decision supporting the government’s position that postwar agreements cleared Japan of responsibility for future individual claims.”

The landmark ruling effectively puts the kibosh on a host of similar lawsuits brought against Japan’s government and some of its leading companies by Koreans, Chinese and others forced into prostitution or slave labor. The Chinese foreign ministry–quite rightly–denounced the verdict, describing the rulings as “’illegal and invalid’ and calling the court’s interpretation of the 1972 statement as ‘arbitrary.’”

Estimates of the number of women forced to work as prostitutes by the Japanese army range from 50,000 to as high as 200,000. The stories told by the women in the NYT article are simply horrifying. Perhaps only slightly less so are the stories of the men forced to work as slaves for Japanese companies during the war, often suffering long-term effects from the physical and emotional stress.

Following on the heels of the news out of Japan comes a shocking story that US servicemen might have also patronized brothels established by the same official administrative bureau that had originally brought the comfort women to Japan.

Via HNN and AP:

Japan’s practice of enslaving women to provide sex for its troops during World War II has a little-known sequel: After its surrender — with tacit approval from the U.S. occupation authorities — Japan set up a similar system for U.S. troops.

An Associated Press review of historical documents shows that U.S. authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate, despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution.

Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to U.S. troops until spring 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down. The documents show that 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.”

According to AP, on the opening night of the first brothel in Ibaraki, over 500 occupation soldiers queued in the streets for the chance to pay the equivalent of 50 cents for sex with one of the women inside. While there is no evidence that the women in this particular establishment were among those kidnapped from China, Korea or the other countries under Japanese control, none of this puts occupation authorities in a particularly good light especially if the plan received the go-ahead from US officers with knowledge that sexual slavery was used in the Japanese official brothel system.

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*Maybe I don’t know enough about the subject, but I kind of feel that all prostitution is–on some level–coerced. Not many little girls grow up with the dream of some day becoming a hooker.