Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone by Ikuhiko Hata

Author:Ikuhiko Hata [Morgan, Ikuhiko Hata;Jason Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Hamilton Books (R&L)
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

The Confabulations of Yoshida Seiji

1. To Jeju Island

Whenever the mass media takes up the issue of war crimes purportedly carried out by the Japanese military during World War II, it is virtually axiomatic that former Japanese soldiers who are theatrical confessors and fabulists will come out of the woodwork.

After the first confession is printed in the local edition of a newspaper or in a weekly magazine, citizens’ groups vie to have the confessor give lectures across the country. The confessor puts out a book, and if it does well he puts out a second, and then he travels to the victimized country to proffer his apologies. It has become a cliché.

This kind of character appeared time and again in relation to the Nanking Massacre. I once lodged with such a person [in November of 1999] while I was in New York to attend a symposium put on by a Chinese American organization. At the symposium, this person broke down in tears as he confessed his experiences involving rape and mass murder. He even got down on his hands and knees and kowtowed in supplication. However, when we got back to the hotel, he ordered me to go buy him a can of beer. Stripped to the waist and drinking his beer, he reminisced fondly about the Chinese girls he had raped.

I have come in contact with this kind of fabulist on many different occasions. This has perhaps deepened my suspicions.

Around the time of the first comfort women lawsuit, Yoshida Seiji, the self-styled head of the Labor Mobilization Section in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture—part of the semi-governmental National Patriotic Labor Association—was suddenly lionized by the mass media as a living witness to the “hunt for comfort women.” It may have been due to my bitter experiences in the past that I harbored doubts about Yoshida’s claims.

My sense of misgiving deepened when I reread Yoshida’s Watashi no senso hanzai (My war crimes), which he published in 1983.1 I felt compelled to ask Yoshida some questions.

I was particularly interested in confirming the veracity of the “mobilization order” Yoshida said he received from the Western District Army headquarters in May 1943, whereupon he set out with nine subordinates for Jeju Island for “comfort woman hunting.” The order’s main points were:

Two hundred women from Korean Women’s Volunteer Corps for comfort of the imperial military

Aged eighteen to younger than thirty

Healthy and strong (in particular, must undergo medical examinations for venereal disease)

Period: one year

Pay: thirty yen per month, advance payment of twenty yen for preparation expenses

Location of service: central China area

Mobilization region: Jeju Island, Cheollanamdo, Korean Peninsula

Dispatch date and time: Noon, May 30, 1943

Assembly place: Western District Army, Seventy-Fourth Unit [author’s note: this terminology was common parlance for the Shimonoseki Heavy Artillery Regiment].2

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