Already in the 19th century, military leaders decided to replace the indiscriminate violence, morally corrupting the army, with specially created brothels, where priestesses of love served their warriors. The Kwantung Army of Japan has greatly expanded this practice.
On September 18, 1931, the Japanese armed forces launched an offensive against the city of Mukden. By February 1932, the Japanese occupied all of Manchuria, which was the northeastern part of China. In these territories, the Japanese created, albeit a puppet, but formally independent state of Manchukuo, headed by Emperor Pu I. Although, in fact, all power in the country belonged to Japanese generals. Black days began for the population of the occupied territories. Men were killed for a sidelong glance, and the soldiers they liked could be raped right around the corner.
Caring general
In 1932, Yasuji Okamura, the deputy chief of staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, received materials of the war crimes of the Japanese military. Among them were reports of 232 cases of rape by soldiers of Chinese and Manchu women. In fact, this figure could be safely multiplied by ten.
The fate of the population of the occupied territories did not worry the Japanese general too much. However, he knew very well that sexual violence, murder and looting morally corrupted the army, making it less efficient. In addition, venereal diseases made a significant contribution to the number of "non-combat losses."
With an analytical mind, Okamura realized that the identified problem could turn into a powerful stimulus for anti-Japanese resistance. Okamura set out his arguments in a report addressed to the commander. And he proposed to create a network of brothels for soldiers and officers. Moreover, the general himself called them not this rude word, but in the style of ancient Japanese poetry hokku - "stations of consolation." It was planned to recruit women to work at the "stations" in Japan itself, so that the military in the brothel could completely relax, imagining themselves samurai visiting geishas.
The command approved Okamura's project, and in the same 1932, the first batch of women were recruited in Nagasaki Prefecture to work at the "consolation station" in Shanghai.
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Needless to say, the servicemen themselves were very enthusiastic about the arrangement of such institutions. Here are just the number of prostitutes was incommensurably less than the number of those wishing to "relax". Therefore, the clients of the first "comfort stations" were mainly officers. The soldiers were forced to be content with rare visits, or even found themselves "out of the game". Therefore, cases of sexual violence against local women continued.
Under strict control
The catalyst for the rapid growth of brothels for the needs of the Kwantung Army was the mass rape carried out by soldiers following the capture of Shanghai and Nanjing in 1937. The command realized that the available number does not relieve the stress of their subordinates. Since 1938, the number of "comfort stations" has increased rapidly.
But officially, the Japanese government and War Department have tried to distance themselves from this vicious practice. Therefore, the authority to create brothels was transferred to private hands. Although something remained under the direct control of the military department. In general, the “comfort stations” were divided into three categories.
The first consisted of brothels under the direct control of the Japanese military command. These were elite institutions, where pretty young Japanese women worked. Only senior officers were clients here.
The second, most numerous, category is brothels "de jure" owned by private individuals. They were owned by persons close to senior officers. The supply of "live goods" to them was carried out by both themselves and the military.
Finally, the third category of "comfort stations" - purely private establishments, in which, with the money and desire, they could serve both military and civilian clients.
The weekly medical examinations of the prostitutes were supervised by army doctors, because these stations were exclusively for the military. In case of detection of syphilis (the most dangerous sexually transmitted disease at that time), the girls were treated with an arsenic drug, salvarsan, called "drug 606".
With the same medicine, but in higher doses, doctors saved the girls from unwanted pregnancies. The fetus simply could not stand the harsh chemical and died in the womb. After that, it was not possible to get pregnant again. If the woman's uterus did not reject the fetus, the woman could even die of sepsis.
Still, the need for "comfort stations" was so great that their number continued to increase. Women from Japan, even from rural areas, were not very eager to travel to China or Indonesia to work as prostitutes. In addition, they could demand from the employer some basic working conditions and defend their interests. Therefore, pretty soon the main contingent of "comfort stations" became girls from the occupied territories - Chinese, Manchu, Taiwanese, Indonesian …
Women were often brought from internment camps. Job advertisements for young women were also published in the occupied territories. Recruiters used the method of buying daughters from poor parents to work as a "special type of nurse at the front." What kind of work they really had to do, no one announced. Already on the spot, the girl was confronted with a fact, giving a couple of days to "train" the profession. After that, she had to fulfill the plan - to serve 30 soldiers and officers per day. The few Japanese women were meant for officers, and the rest for soldiers.
False calls
In August 1944, the Japanese authorities in Korea sent unmarried women to work, allegedly in Japanese weaving factories and civilian positions in the military. The number of conscripts aged 12 to 40 was about 200 thousand women. A third of them were sent to "comfort stations".
According to various estimates, between 50,000 and 300,000 young women have passed through the “comfort stations”. Although estimates of the number of sex slaves vary from 20 thousand (Japan) to 410 thousand (PRC).
And the number of brothels in 10 years in the regions of presence of "Kwantung" has grown to 400. At a meeting of the heads of the Ministry of the Army on September 3, 1942, one of the Japanese generals quoted the following figures: “In Northern China, we have 100“comfort stations”in Central China - 140, in the South - 40, in Southeast Asia - 100, in the South Seas - 10, on Sakhalin - 10 ".
Yet the number of rapes of local women did not decrease. The reason was that you had to pay for a trip to the most seedy "station". Why spend a meager salary when a soldier could get everything for free at gunpoint?
15-year-old native of the city of Mojogedang from the island of Java, Waynem Moahi was taken from her home to work in a weaving factory. But besides this work, she was obliged not to resist the "desires" of the soldiers who came directly to the workshops. Sometimes Vainem and her friends were raped right in the workplace, but in most cases the soldiers took them to their barracks.
Another native of Java, Mardia Khetai, was already married at the time of the arrival of the Japanese. But this did not save her from a shameful fate. A Japanese corporal took a woman from the village under the pretext of washing clothes. He gave Mardia a small shack, where she did her work. In addition, the corporal or his friends forced her to have sex with them. The Javanese soon became pregnant. In order not to give birth to a Japanese child, the girl began to carry a basket with stones: “When I saw the bleeding, I felt relief. Fate spared me and saved me from shame, because I no longer needed to give birth to a Japanese child,”the woman recalled years later. At the end of the war, Mardiya managed to escape while being transported. She never saw her husband again.
When the Japanese began to retreat in 1943-1945, they preferred to shoot sex slaves so as not to leave evidence of their crimes. Therefore, after the war in Japan, there was a show trial of only 11 officers, who were accused of violating the circular to keep only civilian women in brothels. Already in the 1990s, the Japanese authorities officially recognized the existence of sexual slavery during the war years and apologized for this.
Prokhor EZHOV