Japanese government’s claim that their military were not hand in glove with the running of brothels throughout Asia during World War II has been rebuffed by a historian.
Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a history professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, cross checked the official documents from the 1930s in the Defense Agency’s library. And he discovered some ‘hidden information’ which insinuates the military involvement in running the brothels.
For the past fifteen years, the government had established that there were no official documents to prove the military’s role in managing the brothels.
However, Yoshimi pointed out,
...if you can’t use anything except official documents, history itself is impossible to elucidate.
The stress on official documents, according to Yoshimi and other historians, has always been part of the government’s strategy to control wartime history. In the two weeks between Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, and the arrival of American occupation forces, wartime leaders anticipating postwar trials had destroyed nearly all the potentially incriminating documents.
Even today, Japan refuses to release documents that, historians believe, have survived and would shed light on Japan’s wartime history.
Although Yoshimi has discovered official documents showing the military’s role in managing brothels but he is not optimistic about unearthing documents about the military’s abduction of women.
He says,
There are things that are never written in official documents. That they were forcibly recruited - that’s the kind of thing that would have never been written in the first place.
In late 1991, former sex slaves in South Korea became the first to break their silence. When the Japanese government responded with denials, Yoshimi went back to the Defense Agency’s library on a premonition that there were more incriminating official documents.
Of the half-dozen he then discovered, the most damning was a notice written on March 4, 1938, by the adjutant to the chiefs of staff of Japan’s North China Area Army and Central China Expeditionary Force. Entitled ‘Concerning the Recruitment of Women for Military Comfort Stations,’ the notice revealed that armies in the field will control the recruiting of women and that this task will be performed in close cooperation with the military police or local police force of the area.
While, other such paper noted that molestation of the native women by the Japanese soldiers had aggravated anti-Japanese sentiments and that conception of facilities for sexual comfort as quickly as possible is of great importance. Yet another asserted that the 21st Army had directly managed 850 women.
Now, the question arises, how these documents survived?
Well, it was because they were shifted to 40 kilometers west of central Tokyo before the end of war. The postwar American occupation forces had confiscated the documents at that time, eventually returning them to Japan in the 1950s.
Government tried it utmost to hide the past yet Yoshimi succeeded in coloring a detailed picture of Japan’s wartime sex slavery.
Yoshimi asserted that it was all because of the persistent campaign by nationalist politicians who have succeeded in casting doubt, in Japan, on what is accepted as historical fact elsewhere.
The fund which was aimed to help the victimized women is set to expire today. As provided by the statistics, it, provided 285 women in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan with monetary compensation and gave medical aid to some 80 Dutch sex slaves.
Yet there were many who did not accept the aid because it had neither come directly from the government nor been accompanied by an official apology.
