Raping women was necessary for military discipline

lazygal

According to a mayor in Japan.

http://www.thejournal.ie/japanese-mayor-wartime-sex-slaves-were-necessary-907746-May2013/


I find the whole story of the 'comfort women' so sad and depressing. It really shows the low value placed on women, viewing them as fit for only one purpose and entirely for the use of men to do with what they wanted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women

enda1

Well the same country sent men to be Kamikazee pilots and had a no surrender attitude.

To be fair, women fared very well in comparison.

LittleBook

enda1 wrote: »

Well the same country sent men to be Kamikazee pilots and had a no surrender attitude.

To be fair, women fared very well in comparison.

No denying there are many, many elements of the fúcked up in Japan's culture and history ... but pilots volunteering to die quickly for their own country and being glorified to this day is a little different from foreign women being kidnapped and raped/gang-raped over and over again and then having their experiences denied by members of the Japanese political class to this day.

And let's not assume all of the "comfort women" survived.

Interesting article on the Japanese history taught in their schools. The writer is a Japanese woman who was educated partly outside of Japan.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21226068

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.

...

One of the most contentious topics there is the comfort women.

Fujioka [an author who denies "comfort women" even existed] believes they were paid prostitutes. But Japan's neighbours, such as South Korea and Taiwan, say they were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese army.

Without knowing these debates, it is extremely difficult to grasp why recent territorial disputes with China or South Korea cause such an emotional reaction among our neighbours. The sheer hostility shown towards Japan by ordinary people in street demonstrations seems bewildering and even barbaric to many Japanese television viewers.

...

I asked the children of some friends and colleagues how much history they had picked up during their school years. Twenty-year-old university student Nami Yoshida and her older sister Mai - both undergraduates studying science - say they haven't heard about comfort women.

"I've heard of the Nanjing massacre but I don't know what it's about," they both say. "At school, we learn more about what happened a long time ago, like the samurai era," Nami adds.

Da Shins Kelly

The amount of white-washing of history that seems to go on in Japan is astonishing.

catallus

Da Shins Kelly wrote: »

The amount of white-washing of history that seems to go on in the world is astonishing.

The Japanese are going through a very long and drawn out process of coming to terms with the actions of their past fascist society.

The issue of "comfort women" is a mess of emotionally charged issues; many of the women did indeed ( as has been already pointed out in an earlier post) fare a lot better than the other victims of the hideous hell that was under Japanese control during that time.

An interesting point is that rape as an act of war is usually forbidden by all commanders; the reason being that if the systematic rape of women is condoned it makes it so much harder to get an enemy to surrender; the enemy fights to the death if rape is used as a weapon of war, for obvious reasons.

Femme_Fatale

Nobody's denying women overall fared better than men in terms of being placed in violent situations, but it doesn't lessen the horror of the "comfort women" system, which the opening post is about.

Seems a bit strange to say in relation to this staggering system "That may be so, but men had it worse"...
It's not a competition.

newsunglasses

In n.korea a lot of ****ed up things to women happened,and a lot of ****ed up things are still happening

lazygal

Femme_Fatale wrote: »

Nobody's denying women overall fared better than men in terms of being placed in violent situations, but it doesn't lessen the horror of the "comfort women" system, which the opening post is about.

Seems a bit strange to say in relation to this staggering system "That may be so, but men had it worse"...
It's not a competition.

Ah sure according to TD Peter Mathews we're all going to die anyway.

catallus

The OP references a "system" which enrolled women to provide sex to soldiers; I've only read about it in passing when reading about the war in the far-east, so I'm no expert, but in my shallow understanding of it, it seems that it was a formalisation of what goes on when soldiers occupy any territory; they have relations with the subjected women.

It isn't about whether men or women suffered more.

Rape is probably one of the most emotional subjects that can be discussed; there is shame and blame and accusations flying left-right-and-centre. The Japanese war-guilt has been ongoing for decades, this story was big in the 1990's too. And now that the Chinese are gaining confidence they won't be too afraid to start using it as a political tool.

Femme_Fatale

"Had relations" meaning rape.

I remember reading nonsense re the tsunami that people felt no sorrow for the Japanese people because of the war crimes of the Japanese state/military during WWII (and soldiers themselves were victims: a person needs to be put through horrific ordeals in order to become that dehumanised).
This thing of blaming a people today for the acts of some of them (many of whom are now dead) 70 years ago is illogical and extremely unfair, and I'm not sure I even agree with a state apology from people who weren't even born at the time, but there should certainly be acknowledgement/admission, and from what I know about Japan today, the latter are not particularly forthcoming, whereas there have been excuses made, and even glorification.
I don't see any justification in the above.

Paddy Cow

Femme_Fatale wrote: »

"Had relations" meaning rape.

I remember reading nonsense re the tsunami that people felt no sorrow for the Japanese people because of the war crimes of the Japanese state/military during WWII (and soldiers themselves were victims: a person needs to be put through horrific ordeals in order to become that dehumanised).
This thing of blaming a people today for the acts of some of them (many of whom are now dead) 70 years ago is illogical and extremely unfair, and I'm not sure I even agree with a state apology from people who weren't even born at the time, but there should certainly be acknowledgement/admission, and from what I know about Japan today, the latter are not particularly forthcoming, whereas there have been excuses made, and even glorification.
I don't see any justification in the above.

I don't think the people of today are blamed for the transgressions of their predecessors and like you said, most victims want acknowledgement of the wrongs they suffered. Look at the difference in how Germany and Japan have conducted themselves post WWII. In Germany the children learn all the gory details of the war so that the same mistakes are not made again. They do not deny the Holocaust and have managed to move on. Japan are selective in what they teach in schools and have either tried to justify or deny completely the exsistence of "comfort women".

The name itself is so ironic it makes me want to throw up. How comforting can it be to be beat and rape a woman who is crying and begging to be shown some mercy. I read the articles and it is estimated the women "comforted" as many as 25-35 soliders per day :eek: and roughly 75% of them died. The high death rate can probably be attributed to overuse, beatings, suicide and contracting multiple STD's

To the posters who talked about the Kamikaze pilots, I would rather go down once in a blaze of glory than suffer months of being raped daily, only to die an undignified death riddled with disease. I have no proof but I imagine even surviving wouldn't have had a happy ending. Times are more enlightened now but back then I can't see comfort women getting the emotional and psychological support they needed and I would guess that many of the survivors hid their secret so that they weren't rejected. Rape has been used as a means of psychological warfare for centuries, not only because it strikes fear into people during the war but afterwards many of the victims are considered damaged goods.

Da Shins Kelly

Paddy Cow wrote: »

I don't think the people of today are blamed for the transgressions of their predecessors and like you said, most victims want acknowledgement of the wrongs they suffered. Look at the difference in how Germany and Japan have conducted themselves post WWII. In Germany the children learn all the gory details of the war so that the same mistakes are not made again. They do not deny the Holocaust and have managed to move on. Japan are selective in what they teach in schools and have either tried to justify or deny completely the exsistence of "comfort women".

The difference is mad. Last year a Japanese lad was in my brother's college on an exchange program for the year and over the Christmas he had nowhere to go, so he came to stay with us for the festivities. Over the few days we got talking about the various aspects of Japanese culture and history and he told us that he only properly learned about the war crimes Japan had committed in China after he left Japan and went elsewhere because he never learned about it in school. That is crazy to me. I got the impression he was quite ashamed of the whole thing, which is understandable - coming to another continent and finding out some gruesome truths about your home country from complete outsiders must be embarrassing. Not that young Japanese people should be made to feel ashamed of the actions of past generations, but the Japanese government are really doing a great disservice to new generations of Japanese people to deny to them the truth about their past, regardless of how difficult it may be to reconcile with it.

When you compare the above to how subsequent German governments have dealt with their difficult past, it's pretty shocking. I accept that honour is a big thing in Japanese culture, but there comes a point where you just have to take responsibility and start taking measures to make sure stuff like this can't happen again.

discus

There were actually whole units of these women. At first they were japanese women who volunteered to do it. When they had no more volunteers they coerced and tricked their own women into the job, much akin to how women from eastern europe are lured westward these days - jobs as nannies, teachers etc.

Eventually the japanese commanders felt that using their own race was demeaning to their nation, so they used captured women, one notable group being dutch women captured from dutch colonies in the pacific.

Pretty sick, although to be honest war is pretty sick.

The Corinthian

catallus wrote: »

It isn't about whether men or women suffered more.

No, it's not; it's more about which suffering is acknowledged more.

For example, Japan may have practised sexual slavery for women civilians, but if you were a man, your use would have been more likely to have been as bayonet practice (warning, image may offend) - so if the former "shows the low value placed on women", the latter shows that an even lower value was placed on men.

Yet, we tend not to get a huge number of articles on the fate of those men, just as in conflict areas in Africa we get article after article about the rape of women in villages raided by one group or another, but little or nothing is ever said about the fact that in such raids the men get killed.

Just as whenever there is a tragedy and people die, we get to hear in the news how "X were killed, including Y women and children", as if their loss is somehow more tragic.

So it's not really a men versus women thing as both suffer, as how the suffering of men tends to be ignored by modern media, which can lead some to falsely believe that Japanese brutality was specific to their attitudes twoards women. In reality, the episode of the 'comfort women' was not an example of Japanese attitudes twoards women, but their attitude towards the people of nations they subjugated, regardless of their gender.

Wibbs

From the charter: [The Ladies Lounge is] not the place for men to respond to a thread on a women's point of view with "what about men?", this is considered "whataboutery" and off topic posting. If you want to discuss such subjects there are other forums on Boards where you can.

Femme_Fatale put it well, it's not a competition so no more what about men posts please. The thread title is clear on the subject we're discussing so back on topic. any more whataboutery posts will be deleted. Thank you.