The mayor of Osaka, Japan, a prominent politician named Hashimoto, recently made a statement (from which he has backed down somewhat) that the institution of “comfort women” (institutionalized brothels for the military, the women of which were recruited from the conquered civilian populations, mostly Chinese and Korean) was necessary to maintain discipline in the Japanese army.
He now acknowledges that the institution was a violation of the women’s rights, but he says that it is unfair to single out Japan, that all armies always abuse the civilian female population of conquered countries. This is the proposition I would like to discuss - to what extent is this true. I would like to limit the discussion to World War II.
The major armies in WWII were:
USA
Great Britain
France
Soviet Union
Japan
Italy
Germany
China (sort of a special case, probably did not fight outside China in WWII)
I can conceive of three general attitudes towards this issue:
Occasional rapes by individuals or small groups happen; when discovered these are (usually) prosecuted within the army as a crime. I would put USA, Great Britain and France in this group.
Wholesale rape by a large number of soldiers, which is ignored or possibly encouraged by the command structure. It’s possible the Soviet Union fell in this category (or at least the Germans feared that quite a bit). I don’t know how much evidence there is to support this. I suspect that in some areas, at least, the German and Italian armies might also have behaved this way.
Institutionalized brothels composed of conquered females. As far as I know, only Japan had this.
Japan, of course, does not want to be singled out for bad behavior, they would rather play the victim for having had A-bombs dropped on them. In some of his remarks in front of the press, Hashimoto seemed to compare the institution of comfort women with the occasional rape of civilian women in Okinawa that happens today, as if he can’t tell the difference between the two. I don’t know if he is genuinely that dense or if he is playing some political game.
So, does Mayor Hashimoto have a leg to stand on? What I suspect he is saying, but won’t say outright, is that if the Japanese army didn’t have #3, they would have done #2 wholesale (which I suspect they did anyway, at least in some places). What is the worst that other armies did that might compare?
Roddy
Just read After the Reich, by Giles McDonogh to see how Soviet troops dealt with German civilians. Also apparently, you could include French Colonial troops in Italy in this list.
But yeah, I read about this too. I would really like to know the incidences of rape in iwo Jima, Okinawa and such. The mayor of Osaka is looking for equivocation with a healthy dose of expected number fudging from the us government. This needs to be addressed right quick, for Korean and Chinese women as well as American servicemen. Seriously how many civilians were alive on those islands after conquest mush less women?
The Russians gang-raped their way across East Prussia and towards Berlin, even through Poland. When Jewish women protested that they were on their side the Russians shrugged and replied “Frau is frau.” Women did everything they could to appear more haggard, rubbing dirt in their faces and marking spots on themselves to feign typhoid fever.
Among the western Allies, French colonial troops, the Goumiers, raped thousands across Italy and Germany. At one point Eisenhower considered public executions of enlisted men who were found to be rapists.
No, the Germans were much more into murder with the open air shooting over a million human beings in the USSR by Einsatzgruppen and watching 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war being deliberately starved to death. What happened to German civilians was horrible, but to be blunt Germany had sown the wind from 1941-44 and they were reaping the whirlwind in 1945.
The mayor of Osaka is full of shit. At least he’s in good company with the former governer of Toyko Shintaro Ishihara:
Yes, but they didn’t rape and that is the topic. Whether the woman had the rape coming is another matter. It used to be common practice that all woman of conquered nations were raped, married off to the conquerors, taken as concubines, or something similar. Swedish troops used to be especial notorious for it. But more recently Saudi clerics have issued statements saying it is fine for the “rebels” to rape Syrians girls as long as the girls are Alawites or Christians. Supposedly he thinks they also have themselves to blame for being non-Muslims (Islamic cleric decrees it OK for Syrian rebels to rape women). I expect a fair deal of raping going on in Syria just now – not that the girls are much better off in Jordan and Turkish refugee camps where they’re preyed on by Saudi sex-tourists (Syrian refugees ‘sold for marriage’ in Jordan, Syrian refugees turn to prostitution). Rape was also used by all sides and for political purposes in the ex-Yugoslavia wars. And some forms of really gruesome terror-rapes have been and are systematically used in various African wars. But Western forces – including German – haven’t in general, or at all, been involved in mass rape for more than a century. Although one of the British pretexts for WW-I was a false allegation that some German troops had raped a convent of Belgian nuns. I seem to remember that Iraqi troops were also said to be raping everything that moved in Kuwait. Another lie apparently.
The Brits establish, um…, approved?, official?, brothels in North Africa under Montgomery. The included having regular checks of the women by British doctors to check for VD. Doesn’t really sound like what the OP is looking for, but it’s hard to draw a line in some cases between volunteerism and coercion.
Yes they did. It was considered race-mixing. Read above article “Frau ist Frau.” I’m sure it happened, but it was frowned upon, and it wasn’t systematic in any way. There were brothels in the concentration camps, and this was rape because when the alternative for the girls is death then sex even when entered into freely is rape. But this also was always a smaller issue (number wise), not on par with the general mass-rape otherwise seen.
You mustn’t have read the post I replied to then. If a statement can be written as a euphemism, then it can be better written bluntly. But if you want it digested, then you can be certain that I do not consider that the German girls had the mass rape coming, and that the mass rape of German girls (and murder, and ethnic cleansing, etc. of Germans in general) was a crime comparable to some of the biggest in WW-II, and which cannot be written off merely as having reaped the wind.
Call me dense, but I don’t get your explanation. You think using a euphemism to say it is possible women deserve rape would’ve made it seem palatable? And that saying *you don’t *think German girls deserved it makes it ok?
You’re presumably referring to Dissonance saying this:
Which is definitely less offensive than saying it is possible that women deserve rape. His point is: the Germans started a war, and then their civilians got hurt. It sucks, but that happens when you start a war. That’s not the same as “women deserving rape is another matter”, and in the grand hierarchy of saying bad things, implying women can deserve rape is worse.
You have clearly misread what I wrote. I used no euphemism, and if you notice I said:
Note the use of the word bluntly, how could I possibly have written it more bluntly than by saying bluntly. You’ll also notice I called what happened to German civilians horrible, hardly an indication that I thought they “had it coming.” Nowhere did I write it off as merely having reaped the whirlwind. They spent four years sowing the wind committing genocide in the USSR; it’s hardly surprising that they conducted reprisals once the war reached German soil. Again, as I said, horrible, but not exactly unexpected given the millions they had genocidally murdered in the USSR in the past four years.
Finally, your calling the
is frankly obscene. That “some of the biggest” was genocide on an industrial scale by the Nazis, murdering over 6 million Jews, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners as Slavic untermench, mass ethnic cleansing in Poland and their replacement with German colonists, etc. etc. A look at the ultimate goal of Generplan Ost is both sobering and revolting:
I should also note that a good part of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Germans post-war was the removal of hundreds of thousands of German colonists who had moved to areas of Poland ethnically cleansed of Poles to make room for them in the first place.
I’ve not said anything about “deserving,” although personally I find the distinction between “had it coming”/”reaping the whirlwind”/”it sucks but shit happen” and deserving to be at most marginal. But look again and I think you’ll find that what I wrote was “Whether the woman had the rape coming is another matter,” so there is no need to put words in my mouth. In fact you can make a search on the thread and find out that you are the only poster that have used the word deserve (no less than five times). And the reason I wrote it was not because this is something I subscribe to, but to the contrary that I think it is exact same thing as saying “to be blunt Germany had sown the wind from 1941-44 and they were reaping the whirlwind in 1945,” and putting it in a less euphemistic way would make clear that it was in fact a very wrong thing to say.
In fact German girls and German people in general are double wronged: first by having been made the victim of horrible crimes, and secondly by not having the same crimes being generally acknowledged or waved away with things like saying they were “reaping the whirlwind”, or “that sucks but that happens when you start a war.”
You are of course correct that there is a lesson to be had from the WW-II. Don’t start wars that you cannot win. And if you absolutely must, try to lose wars to Western nations. It’s just such a trivial lesson: mankind is a beastly creature and war brings the worst out in man. We know it all beforehand and it contains no moral guidelines at all.
**have it coming **
Web definitions
deserve (either good or bad); “It’s too bad he got fired, but he sure had it coming”.
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Verb 1. **have it coming - deserve (either good or bad); “It’s too bad he got fired, but he sure had it coming”
deserve, merit - be worthy or deserving; “You deserve a promotion after all the hard work you have done”
**
Definition of have it coming (to one)
informal be due for retribution on account of something bad that one has done:
his uppity sister-in-law had it coming to her
Oh and this is absurd. How could it be considered race-mixing when they planned to exterminate the entire Jewish race? There were to be no Jewish children left alive to be of mixed race, even if the Jewish women survived long enough to get pregnant and give birth.