American GIs used comfort women in Japanese occupation

JAPAN'S abhorrent practice of enslaving women for sex for its troops in World War II has a little-known sequel: a similar system for occupying US GIs.




After its surrender, with tacit approval by US occupation authorities, Japan set up a similar "comfort women" system for the Americans.
Newly translated documents show US authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution.

The Americans by then had full knowledge of Japan's atrocious treatment of women across Asia.

Tens of thousands were employed to provide sex to US troops until March 1946, when Gen Douglas MacArthur ended it.

The documents show that the brothels were rushed into operation as US forces poured into Japan from August 1945.

"The strategy was, through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect regular women and girls," recounts the history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police Department, northeast of Tokyo.

"The comfort women . . . had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just yesterday were the enemy, and . . . there were a great deal of apprehensions at first.

"But they were paid highly, and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully."

Police and Tokyo businessmen established a network of brothels.

On August 28, an advance wave of occupation troops arrived south of Tokyo. By nightfall, they'd found the first brothel.

"I was surprised to see 500 or 600 soldiers standing in line on the street," Seiichi Kaburagi, the chief of the association in charge of the brothels, wrote in a 1972 memoir.

The US occupation leadership provided the Japanese government with penicillin for comfort women servicing occupation troops and, initially, condoned it, according to documents discovered by Toshiyuki Tanaka, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.

He said they showed US forces were aware the comfort women were often coerced by financial difficulties or, in some rural areas, perhaps enslaved.

Mr Kaburagi said the sudden demand forced brothel operators to advertise for women who were not licensed prostitutes.

Natsue Takita, then 19, whose relatives had been killed in the war, responded to an ad seeking an office worker.

She was told that the only positions available were for comfort women and was persuaded to accept the offer.

According to Mr Kaburagi, she jumped in front of a train a few days after the brothel opened.

- AP