ABSTRACT
Japan’s ultra-conservative political leaders allege that the “comfort women” mobilized by the Imperial military for sexual servitude during World War II were in fact prostitutes licensed by the state who have no claim on victimhood or our sympathy. This position reflects a profound indifference to human rights and an ignorance of modern history and humanitarian law that is deeply rooted in Japanese society. In fact, the vast majority of comfort women, rounded up against their will, had nothing to do with prostitution. The state-managed system of public sex for adult males and the wartime comfort women system were two different regimes. Yet it is also a fact that many Japanese comfort women were recruited from licensed individuals, including (shōgi), geisha (geigi), and workers (shakufu) exploited sexually by eating and drinking establishments.
This chapter 1) analyzes the state licensing system for women in the prewar sex industry, 2) gives examples of prostitutes, geisha, and waitresses and barmaids lured or pressured into becoming military comfort women, 3) examines the domestic and international movement for the abolition of state prostitution—widely reviled at the time as a form of sexual slavery—and the Japanese government’s efforts to preserve, rather than outlaw, this system, and 4) challenges the notion that there was nothing wrong with transporting women from Japan’s licensed quarters to military comfort facilities in foreign warzones. Officialdom’s support of public prostitution in peacetime fostered social acceptance of the wholesale trafficking of young women during the Asia-Pacific War. The dense networks created by brothel keepers and their auxiliaries created an infrastructure that spanned the Empire and facilitated the rapid and massive mustering of women for military comfort stations following Japan’s invasion of China in 1937.
