Were Comfort Women Really Abducted by the Japanese Government's Policy at That Time?
Nobody witnessed the abduction of Asian women by the Japanese Army. However, Portuguese and Japanese Army medical doctors heard some Japanese troops threaten some village mayors in Indonesia and China. According to them, some village mayors sent women to Japanese troops who stayed in their villages. Some Japanese troops forced the village women into prostitution.
This is an example that some Japanese troops which violated the policy. The Japanese government's policy was based on "Cases on recruiting comfort women for military comfort station," which was the basic policy of Japanese government. When military authorities recognized the crime that Japanese troops took away women and forced them into prostitution, what did the Japanese military authorities do? Japanese troop and brothel dealers took away sixty-five Dutch women from a prison camp to a comfort station, and they were forced into prostitution in February 1944, in Semarang city, Indonesia.
As soon as the Japanese military authorities in Indonesia knew of that crime two months later, the authorities ordered them to close this brothel. Japanese military authorities obeyed the policy. The police and military police officers must cooperate with the Armies in order to control and watch the actions of brothel dealers. They prevented social problems. The Japanese military authorities withdrew this brothel's license because these Dutch women worked against on their own will and this violated a prerequisite of the Japanese military authorities' license.
The prerequisite was that comfort women must work on their own wills when brothel dealers employed them. (The term of women does not mean only European women.) (These measures were the self-cleansing action on the prerequisite of Japanese military authorities, not by the violation of international law.) This abduction in Indonesia was against the Japanese government's policy.
Second, the small number of former comfort women's testimonies cannot prove most comfort women were abducted and deceived by bad pimps. For example, there are 164 comfort women in Korea, 162 comfort women in Phillipines, 32 comfort women in Taiwan, 11 comfort women in China, 260 comfort women in North Korea, 8 comfort women in Malaysia, and 100 comfort women in Indonesia who were abducted and deceived. There were a lot of comfort women before and during WorldWar II.
Professor Kunihiko Hata insisted that a total of 60,000 to 90,000 comfort women were abducted, deceived, and forced into prostitution. Only 0.8% to 1.2% of comfort women have identified themselves. Even though a lot of former comfort women have died and can not identify themselves, the ratio is quite small. Even if the Army and government supervised and regulated the bad conduct of brothels, some bad pimps broke the regulations. About 22,000 women who were abducted and deceived might have existed in Indonesia. However, these former comfort women's testimonies were not very reliable.
Mr. Takagi, who is a Japanese lawyer in charge of Korean former comfort women's lawsuit, advertised for former comfort women in 1995, on the local Indonesian newspaper. It announced that the Japanese government could compensate and could pay forty years income to average Indonesian women. No comfort women existed before Mr. Takagi's statement. The Indonesian government asked them not to be abused by personal and organizational interests. Mr. Takagi confessed that the number of comfort women who were abducted and deceived included former Japanese soldiers' lovers and victims of rape. Mr. Takagi corrected his previous statement, and the number of women who were abducted and deceived in Indonesia was defined as about 100.
No document of the Japanese Army or government proved that the Army abducted
comfort women. The number of former comfort women who have testified is quite small. Their testimonies cannot even prove most comfort women were abducted and deceived by some bad pimps. On the other hand, a lot of the Japanese Army and former soldiers' documents proved that the Army had investigated and regulated bad pimps who abducted or deceived women.
Even though the Japanese government protected comfort women effectively, some comfort women were abducted and deceived by bad pimps. The government is not politically and legally responsible for these situations. However, the government may be morally responsible to the abducted or deceived women. It is the same as the United States of America being morally responsible for the cases of many sexual outrages and rapes committed by American soldiers in Okinawa while it was occupied by the United States.
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