Ergebnisse & Perspektiven des MarxismusThe following article was published in Women and Revolution, No. 41, Summer/Autumn 1992, then the journal of the Women’s Commission of the Spartacist League/U.S.
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“The powers of the state used the police to trap and kidnap helpless women from Japan’s colonial territories and ship them off to the battlefield where they were held as prisoners and gang-raped for one to two years, then abandoned by the retreating Japanese Army. Of the Koreans I was responsible for enslaving, I think half of the men died and all [950] of the women.”
— Seiji Yoshida, mobilization chief of the Shimonoseki branch of the Yamaguchi Prefectural Patriotic Labor Association, quoted in Asahi Evening News, 31 January 1992
TOKYO – In December 1991, three Korean women, Kim Hak Soon, Sim Mi Ja and Hwang Kum Ju, courageously came forward to tell the story of their living nightmare of enslavement as ianfu (“comfort women”) for the Japanese Imperial Army. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 victims were forced, under threat of death, into sexual slavery during the Pacific War as the Japanese imperialists vied with their American counterparts for mastery of Asia and the Pacific. While women were rounded up across Asia, over 80 percent of the ianfu were Koreans, long subjected to vicious bigotry and chauvinism by Japan. The true extent of the Imperial Army’s enslavement of the ianfu may never be known, as the military – which meticulously recorded the number of horses, dogs and even pigeons transported – covered up the “comfort women” by listing them as “military commodities” or ammunition.
The revelations sparked an international outcry. Diverse voices from areas occupied by Japanese imperialism during the Pacific War – from officials of the repressive Taiwanese government to Filipino leftists – have demanded that Tokyo pay compensation, while the Western news media has used the story to get in some cheap Japan-bashing. The Japanese bourgeoisie tried unsuccessfully to hush up the story with various damage control measures, but the crimes of the brutal, racist and male-chauvinist Imperial Army were too widespread to cover up.
The women-hating bigots in the government seat at Nagatacho, who once again want to enslave the workers of Asia in a new “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” had hoped they could ignore this “unfortunate incident.” At first they tried to alibi these atrocities by claiming the ianjo (the filthy shanties used as “comfort houses” and called “public lavatories” by the soldiers) were operated by private entrepreneurs, thus relieving the government of responsibility. This bald-faced lie was exposed in January when Yoshiaki Yoshimi, professor of history at Chuo University, uncovered documents buried in the archives of the “Self-Defense Force” library which directly link the government and military to the establishment and maintenance of the “comfort women” system. Yoshimi is also an expert on the infamous Unit 731, the secretive section of the Imperial Army which conducted Nazi-like chemical and biological warfare experiments on Korean, Chinese and Russian prisoners.
Within weeks other documents were made public, including a telegram to then War Minister General Hideki Tojo from a Japanese commander in Taiwan requesting permission to establish “brothels” in Borneo. These materials detail army regulations on the kidnapping of women and on ianjo personnel, locations, prices, hygiene and scheduling priorities for various units and ranks. Recent accounts report that the Japanese government began to draft Korean women as “comfort women” in 1937 after the start of the Sino-Japanese War. But in his 1973 book, The Ianfu Belong to the Army (recently republished), Kako Senda writes that the ianfu originated following the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, when the military commissioned doctors to devise a program to protect soldiers from venereal diseases. And the Korea Times claims the abductions started as early as the 1920s. The story of the “suicide cliff” in Hakodate, Hokkaido, named for the Korean women who killed themselves there after being forcibly taken to military supply plants, dates from this time.
As the Japanese Imperial Army pushed across Asia, ianjo came into existence from Okinawa and Fukuoka to Nagano and the front lines stretching from the Philippines to New Guinea, Indonesia and China. Many women were “recruited” nominally to provide “comfort” to soldiers at the front by visiting the wounded and rolling bandages. Others were told they would be employed in Japanese factories; still others thought they would be working on the Thai-Burma Railroad – all for high wages which they could send to their impoverished families. The majority were brutally captured on “virgin hunts” by organizations such as the Patriotic Labor Association and handed over to army personnel. Roh Chung Ja, enslaved as a “comfort woman” for six years, told her story:
“I was 17, and there was big virgin hunting at the time. My grandmother told me to hide in a deep mountain. I was in a cave when the Japanese military policemen arrested me…. They took us by train all the way through China. We were somewhere near the front. At first I did not obey what I was told. I was hit, and blood came from my mouth. After that, I was forced and did what I was told.”
— San Francisco Examiner, 16 January 1992
Unmarried Korean women aged 17 to 20 were first conscripted through trickery and intimidation, but by the war’s end, women and girls were taken regardless of marital status or age. Some were as young as 11 or 12.
The ianjo slavemaster received 50 to 60 percent of the woman’s gross earnings and the remaining portion was used to buy moth-eaten rotten rice or clothes, or was put into “savings.” Soldiers and army civilian employees were rotated through in intervals of 20 to 30 minutes or 30 to 40 minutes, according to their unit and rank. Officers were allotted more time, the freedom to go every night, and, in certain locations like Taiwan, the “privilege” of being serviced by Japanese, not Korean, women. Fees were based on nationality: one yen for a Chinese woman, one and a half for a Korean woman and two yen for a Japanese woman. On an average weekday, a woman would be raped “until she loses her mind,” 20 to 30 times, while on weekends the number was doubled. Venereal disease examinations were required once a week; those diagnosed as “diseased” were either killed outright or expelled without food – a virtual death sentence. Hwang said, “I had many miscarriages in my life because I received injections many times for treatment of syphilis. Many ‘comfort women’ who were diseased were killed by Japanese soldiers who thought that such women could no longer satisfy soldiers’ desires.” Taiwanese women had the kanji character for “comfort” tattooed on their arm. In Thailand, the only days off were during a woman’s menstrual period, when a hinomaru (rising sun flag) would be placed on the outside of her door. Those that were caught trying to escape were beaten. In addition to the atrocious punishments imposed officially, nobody knows how many women were tortured and murdered by sadistic individual soldiers.
As the military began losing battles and retreating, the Japanese vice home minister sent a secret order urging local administrative units to burn all documents related to joshi teishintai ("Women’s Submit Body Units"). Much of the living human “evidence” was probably dispatched along with the documents. Surviving ianfu were either turned over to the advancing U.S. military forces to a fate which has not yet been made public, or were left penniless. Stigmatized, those who did make it back to their native country almost never returned to their families. They have lived out their lives in isolation and poverty.
The story of the ianfu underlines the Japanese bourgeoisie’s intense hatred of women and of national and racial minorities. That 80 percent of the ianfu were Korean flows from the 1910–1945 Japanese occupation, modeled on the Russian tsarist colonization of Poland. The Korean peninsula served as a “forward logistical base” that was to supply natural resources and manpower for Japan’s imperialist expansion into mainland Asia. To this purpose, Koreans had to be “assimilated”; the teaching of Korean history, culture and language was replaced with Japanese history, culture and language. Initially all political organizations and meetings were banned; Korean-owned newspapers were forcibly bought out; all arms were confiscated. All instruction was geared toward kokutai meicho (national polity) and loyalty to the Japanese emperor. After the Pacific War started, a general draft was implemented and by July 1944 an estimated 242,000 Koreans were forcibly dispersed throughout the Japanese front to be used as bullet shields, laborers and prison guards. Some were later tried as “war criminals” under the Allied-imposed “victor’s justice” and jailed or hanged.
Until 1910, the Korean community in Japan consisted mainly of students and consular officials, as labor laws (like those in existence today) forbade entry of unskilled laborers. With the annexation, immigration laws ceased to apply to Koreans and many emigrated to work in “3-K” (dirty, difficult and dangerous) jobs like textiles and mining. Mining jobs had previously been reserved for prisoners and burakumin (descendants of feudal-era outcasts). As one official report stated, “Their first feelings on arrival in Japan are probably best expressed by the phrase ‘it sounded like paradise but when I saw it, it was hell’.” By 1923 more than 90,000 Koreans were in Japan, subjected to systematic, brutal discrimination and living in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions resembling those of the early feudal Nara period (910–944). In the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, right-wing hysteria resulted in the massacre of as many as 6,000 Koreans by the police, military and racist jikeidan (vigilante groups).
The number of Koreans in Japan grew between 1939 and 1945 when they were conscripted as slave laborers to toil from Sakhalin (then a Japanese territory) to Kyushu. Even the most conservative sources place the number conscripted at almost one million, while other sources say two million. By 1944, an estimated 32 percent of all miners in Japan were Koreans, enslaved in concentration camps with little food and token pay. There are no records of how many Koreans were killed or maimed in work-related accidents, starved to death, shot while trying to escape, or incinerated during the atom bombing of Hiroshima by the vengeful U.S. imperialists.
The South Korean “comfort women” survivors have demanded from the Japanese government a “sincere apology,” public information on all aspects of the issue of “comfort women,” compensation (currently ¥20 million per person, about $160,000) for the victims and their families, coverage of the “comfort women” in school textbooks and the erection of a memorial to the victims. In his January address to the National Assembly in Seoul, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa mouthed a few hypocritical words of sympathy for the victims of Japan’s imperialist aggression in Korea. In July, the government finally bowed to pressure and admitted it had set up and run the ianfu system, but it is standing by its claims that the matter of compensation was settled with the 1965 Treaty of San Francisco, whereby Seoul agreed to accept compensation for individual personal losses in the form of development aid.
The atrocities suffered by the ianfu were not simply imperialist “excesses” and no compensation can atone for these crimes. Nothing will, as Hwang asked, “Give me back my youth.” Racist contempt for the rights of “our little brothers” (and sisters) in the less developed countries of Asia was an essential feature of Japan’s war policies. A memorial to the victimized ianfu will hardly see the light of day as long as the ruling class that raped Nanking, seized Korea and inflicted the horrors of imperialist war upon its own people remains in power. For years a memorial to the Korean victims of the atom bombing of Hiroshima has been refused placement in the “official” peace park and is periodically desecrated by fascistic right-wingers. We say, the living perpetrators of the crimes against the ianfu should face a tribunal comprised of their victims!
As more information about the ianfu, forced laborers and victims of Unit 731 comes to light, right-wing nationalists have launched their own propaganda campaign to alibi their imperialist masters and to refurbish the face of renascent Japanese militarism. An attempt by the Kanagawa Prefecture municipal government in April of this year to hire a researcher to collect information on ianfu and Korean forced laborers met stiff opposition from racist assemblymen. These chauvinists had the audacity to claim, “Under the Emperor’s everlasting rule, Koreans were equally treated with Japanese so that such allegations were baseless.” In the 29 February 1992 Weekly Post, right-wing critic Fuyuko Kamisaka claimed, “People from the Korean peninsula were also Japanese in those days, so we can’t say that the ianfu issue is one of racial discrimination by nationality.”
What lies! Even today, Koreans whose ancestry in Japan goes back as far as 1910 are denied the basic rights of citizenship – the right to vote, to run for public office, to become citizens without changing their name or renouncing their heritage. Miyazawa’s government claims it is liberalizing its treatment of Koreans; in January 1993 a bill will go into effect which suspends the mandatory fingerprinting of non-Japanese permanent residents. This cruel hoax mandates that the gaijin card, Japanese version of the hated South African passbook, must still be carried at all times, while a prison term of at least one year or a stiff fine of up to ¥200,000 will be imposed for refusing to sign the card. A similar fine will be meted out to those who don’t report an address change within two weeks of moving.
The links between the oppression of women and of minorities are readily seen in the treatment of immigrant workers here. Today an increasing number of young women – Japayuki-san (“Ms. Go to Japan”), mainly from the Philippines and Thailand – are coming to Japan to work the lucrative mizu-shobai bars and hostess clubs in the cities. These women, who can potentially earn in a sleazy Japanese hostess club ten times what they can at home, are easy marks for the yakuza sex trade vultures. Recruited to work as “entertainers,” most wind up in the yakuza prostitution trade where their passports are confiscated and their wages withheld. They are kept in ianfu servitude in a xenophobic country that denies any semblance of civil rights to foreigners, especially non-Caucasian immigrants from Asia and Africa. Male laborers from Africa, Asia and, more lately, South America – including even Nikkeijin, ethnic Japanese whose families emigrated to Latin America – are segregated into the worst, lowest-paying “3-K” jobs and subjected to systematic discrimination in housing, medical care and social services.
The intense exploitation and oppression of workers in Japan demands militant, multiracial class struggle! But the labor lieutenants of Japan, Inc. are wedded to the system of capitalist exploitation, which is sustained by racist and chauvinist ideology and practices. None of the three labor federations have fought to break the racist “Japanese only” employment system in major industry or to organize the non-Japanese workers into common unions with Japanese. Nor have the fake-leftist union leaders lifted a finger to fight the vicious part-time labor system that effectively bars women workers from full employment status and union protection.
The Japanese left, from the reformist Diet opposition parties to the New Leftovers, rarely concerns itself with questions of special oppression. In the main narrow, nationalist and chauvinist, leftist parties are content, when it suits their purpose, to tail protests by minorities or women, but they never attempt to link the struggles of the oppressed to a perspective of socialist revolution in Japan. Thus, while all the left, even the pro-imperialist Tanabe wing of the Japanese Social Democratic Party, supports the ianfu demands for compensation, this voiced support was a pressure point on the Liberal Democratic Party government in a feeble attempt to block the recently enacted PKO (“Peace Keeping Operations”) bill that “authorizes” the use of Japanese troops abroad.
Indeed that the governments of South Korea and Taiwan which have known about the existence of the ianfu for decades, are supporting the ianfu demands has nothing to do with the suffering these women endured and everything to do with fear of a resurgent and re-armed Japanese imperialism. Kim Il Sung’s government likewise maintained silence until the recent revelations. These Stalinists have always insisted that North Koreans living in Japan should not get involved in internal Japanese politics but should meekly accept their oppression in accordance with subordination to the principle of Juche (“self-reliance,” that is, “peaceful coexistence").
Revolutionary Marxists maintain that anti-imperialism abroad means class struggle at home. The question of women’s oppression and the struggle to end racial, caste and national oppression is a central component of a socialist revolution here. The political and social condition of Koreans in Japan is a barometer of this fight. It is this link the reformists and New Leftovers consistently ignore. In the early postwar years most Koreans either actively sought to return to the homeland they were barbarously ripped away from, or fought to retain their national identity under the hammer blows of Japanese forced assimilation schemes. But this is changing. The newest postwar generation, the third, no longer dreams of returning to the vicious police state south of the 38th parallel or the bizarre Kim Il Sung cult society in the North. They are beginning to wage a fight for their civil, social and political rights in their real homeland – Japan! Indicative of this new, potentially militant trend among third-generation Koreans is the formation of the Osaka-based Foreign Residents Party, Zainichi-to, which is running Korean Lee Young Hwa for a Diet seat in the July Upper House elections. Lee succinctly summarized the attitudes of militant young Koreans in Japan today: “I have no desire to return to North Korea. Japanese is my native tongue. Japan is my home country. I can’t understand why I can’t vote here.” And in assessing the response among Japanese to Korean aspirations for citizenship rights Lee revealingly said, “Ordinary people seem to support me, but the main political parties, unions, even the leftwing, are doing nothing” (Japan Times, 9 June 1992).
Lenin’s Bolsheviks, fighting within the Russian “prison house of nations,” understood that they had to be a tribune of the people, not just a narrow Russian labor party, to topple the tsar and the Russian capitalist class. The same Bolshevik conception of “tribune of the people” is essential to any successful socialist revolution in Japan. The countless vestiges of Japan’s feudal past, grafted onto modern-day society through the maintenance of the tenno (emperor) as a symbol of Confucian submission to hierarchical rank and discipline, must be a central target of any proletarian revolution, which is the basis of our fight for a workers republic. Korean activist Lee’s assertion that the “left” is doing nothing for Korean rights is for the most part true. The Spartacist Group Japan, as part of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), stands in sharp contrast to the narrow and chauvinist Japanese left. We seek to build a multinational and multiracial Leninist party in Japan that will aggressively recruit women, minority workers, students and activists who want to topple this arrogant and racist ruling class, avenge the unspeakable crimes committed against the ianfu and countless other victims of Japanese imperialism, and end the capitalist system that spawns imperialist war. For a revolutionary workers republic in Japan as part of a socialist world!