ABSTRACT
Following Japan’s full-blown invasion of China in 1937, Imperial forces rapidly expanded the network of comfort stations they had started in Shanghai in 1932. In that endeavor they enjoyed the full cooperation of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Foreign Ministry, which facilitated the mobilization of women in Japan (and later, its Taiwanese and Korean colonies) and their transportation to China. In mid-1935 and early 1937, however, Japan’s highest legal instance, the Great Court of Cassation, handed down two rulings declaring the abduction of underage and adult woman for transportation outside the Empire and their prostitution in comfort stations to be illegal.
The Shizuoka Incident (1935) involved the attempted trafficking of a Japanese minor to Manchuria, and the Nagasaki Incident (1937) the attempted trafficking of women to Shanghai, in both cases for sexual servitude. In both instances, Japan’s highest court determined that whether a victim, adult or minor, is taken away by physical force or induced into submitting through the artifice of threat, deceit, or flattery, “forcible recruitment” (kyōsei renkō) is involved. In the rush after 1937 to build comfort stations in China (and later across Asia and the Pacific), the forcible mobilization of women, many of them minors, by the Japanese military not only violated Japanese and international law of that time, but it was a crime against humanity and should be adjudged as such.
