Children of the Camps by Mark Felton

Author:Mark Felton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2011-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

8

Comfort Girls

We were given flower names and they were pinned to our doors. They started to drag us away one by one. And I could hear all the screaming coming from the bedrooms, you know, and you just wait for your turn.

Jan O’Herne, Dutch teenaged internee

Ambarawa 8 Camp, Java

One aspect of the internment of Allied civilians has not often been addressed, and that was the enforced sexual slavery of teenaged girls. Not only were the girls in the camps subjected to starvation and disease and witnesses to bestial acts, they increasingly had to fear sexual abuse as well. On many occasions the Japanese came looking for sex slaves from among their female internees and teenaged girls were especially prized. The fact of white women being forced to become ‘Comfort Women’ as the Japanese called them, was not really spoken about until many decades after the war. A high degree of shame was attached to the experience, but now in old age many of the women who suffered this final indignity under Japanese rule have started to come forward to tell their stories. It makes for sober and disturbing reading.

Japanese soldiers treated the native women of the Occupied Territories with a contempt that is difficult to comprehend over sixty years later. In the Japanese military mind women appeared to serve one purpose – to provide entertainment for their soldiers, and whether they provided that entertainment freely or through duress did not matter, both were equally acceptable. Japanese soldiers were able to obtain sex whilst on campaign in two ways. Firstly, through rape. Wherever Japanese soldiers went, women could expect to be raped. They famously raped British Army nurses at the fall of Hong Kong and female Dutch colonists in the Netherlands East Indies. The taking of sex by force was often not an individual pursuit, but a group exercise encouraged by senior officers. The second way was to visit prostitutes, or ‘Comfort Women’. Entire battalions of young native girls and women were attached to Japanese divisions in the field and the supply was regularly replenished. Most of these women were not prostitutes, for the term implies some form of financial reward in return for sexual favours; they are better described as sex slaves – young women forced to give their bodies, often on pain of death.

The Japanese set about the procurement of women for their brothels with a remarkable degree of organization. The abuse of women was institutionalized and condoned at the highest levels of command. The women came from a variety of different nationalities and found themselves involved in this sex trade through a variety of different paths. One of the responsibilities of the Kempeitai military police was to procure the ‘prostitutes’ for Japanese units, to establish and run brothels in the occupied territories, and to control the unfortunate women who were imprisoned within them. Between 1941 and 1945 anywhere between 60,000 and 200,000 young women of many creeds, colours and nationalities were forced into military brothels by the Kempeitai, including at least 300 white women and teenage girls.

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