Comfort Women [Paperback] Yoshiaki Yoshimi (Author), Suzanne O'Brien (Translator)

Comfort Women [Paperback]
Yoshiaki Yoshimi (Author), Suzanne O'Brien (Translator)

Publication Date: July 15, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0231120338 | ISBN-13: 978-0231120333
Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women.

This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers.

From Library Journal
During the Asia Pacific War (1931-45), the Japanese government forced up to 200,000 Korean, Taiwanese, Indonesian, and other young Asian women to work as so-called comfort women, providing sexual services for the armed forces of Imperial Japan. Yoshiaki's invaluable study explodes the claims of right-wing Japanese nationalists that comfort women were merely wartime prostitutes. Citing official military records and correspondence, the author proves beyond a doubt that the victims of this monstrous system were actually sex slaves who were subjected to repetitive rape and violence. Often kidnapped or tricked by false promises of legitimate employment, the comfort women were trebly exploited as colonial subjects, members of the rural and urban poor, and women. Yoshiaki, a politically engaged scholar, analyzes the comfort-women issue against the background of Japan's prewar system of licensed prostitution and contemporary Asian sex tourism, where Japanese men continue to exploit the women of neighboring Asian countries. The translator's introduction illuminates the Japanese debate over comfort women, to which this book is an indispensable contribution. Steven I. Levine, Univ. of Montana, Missoula
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
For 10 years, Japan has been torn by the question of its moral and legal responsibility for the women from various Asian countries (primarily Korea) that its World War II military used as "comfort women." Yoshiaki, a professor of modern Japanese history at Tokyo's Chuo University, found and published the first documentary evidence that the military (not independent procurers) established and ran "comfort stations"; the angry debate stirred by the Japanese publication of his book continues because the government has not yet adequately addressed the issue. After a new introduction for U.S. readers, the volume traces the history of the military comfort station system at various stages of the war in Asia and describes how women were "rounded up" and how they lived, placing both issues in the context of international law. In addition to testimonies of surviving women, Yoshiaki combed government archives (though many relevant documents were destroyed, and others remain classified) and analyzed memoirs and biographies of men who served in the military during the war. His study considers the gender, ethnic, and class aspects of this disturbing history. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Product Details
Paperback: 262 pages
Publisher: Columbia University Press (July 15, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0231120338
ISBN-13: 978-0231120333
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 0.6 x 8.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #645,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing and Intelligent December 12, 2000
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
It is a delight to find a scholarly work that is so accessible to non-academics. This fascinating examination of "comfort women" should be read by every WWII scholar, feminist, historian, college student, and thinking person! Particularly of interest is the critical introduction; Ms. O'Brien (who translated the book from the Japanese) has provided an excellent overview that not only examines this work but demonstrates a wide comprehension of similar works by contemporary authors. Superb.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Upfront history education helps stop the ignorance & denial May 12, 2003
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
It is books like these which are so important to educating those who are ignorant or in stubborn denial (like Unko Tamezou) of their past history. The history of the ianfu are just one of the many war crimes from the Pacific War that Japan continues to deny and/or treat lightly. Other countries, of course, are guilty of similar injustices to their own history, but Japan's is well-known and blatant. It is my hope that books and research like these as well as the gradual rise of Japanese witnesses to these war crimes continue to make the truth be heard so that defiantly nationalist people like Unko Tamezou may learn from the wrongs of her nation's past history and truly begin to understand why Japan sets itself up as a pacifist nation.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Witnesses to the crime August 10, 2007
By Kevin W.
Format:Paperback
My father was an intelligence officer in the Navy during WWII and was involved with debriefing a number of fairly senior Japanese officers during the war because he spoke Japanese reasonably well. One of the things that came out time and again is how the military systematically destroyed records because they feared that members of the military would be turned over to Chinese and Korean forces for trial.

The true depth of the abuses of the Japanese military vanished with those documents forcing us to use mostly oral sources to discover the truth. However the oral stories from around the Pacific Rim are largely the same: with a few notable exceptions young women were kidnapped and forced in to sex slavery.

Unlike the German government the Japanese government has never accepted their crimes. I suppose it's natural to be ashamed of so much cowardice and cruelty but it means that this wound will always blacken the whole nation of Japan, long after the criminals are all dead.

Why say all this? Because so much of this book relies on oral histories (even the best Japanese documents are often letters home that describe the brothels rather than official documents). The apologist cling to their desperate plea of "almost no official documents" as if somehow a government letterhead spelling out the crimes is better proof than a thousand tearful stories from a dozen nations that match so well that an organized system of sex slavery is clearly what existed.

Reading this is not easy and you may come away with a bias against the Japanese. Remember that many nations have committed dark acts and yet went on to do great and good things. It is not the purpose of this book to condemn a nation, merely to condemn the criminal cowardice of the Japanese Army of that time.

One day Japan will embrace that truth, and on that day they will have their honor back.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Witnesses to the crime, August 10, 2007
By Kevin W. (Monterey, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Comfort Women (Paperback)
My father was an intelligence officer in the Navy during WWII and was involved with debriefing a number of fairly senior Japanese officers during the war because he spoke Japanese reasonably well. One of the things that came out time and again is how the military systematically destroyed records because they feared that members of the military would be turned over to Chinese and Korean forces for trial.

The true depth of the abuses of the Japanese military vanished with those documents forcing us to use mostly oral sources to discover the truth. However the oral stories from around the Pacific Rim are largely the same: with a few notable exceptions young women were kidnapped and forced in to sex slavery.

Unlike the German government the Japanese government has never accepted their crimes. I suppose it's natural to be ashamed of so much cowardice and cruelty but it means that this wound will always blacken the whole nation of Japan, long after the criminals are all dead.

Why say all this? Because so much of this book relies on oral histories (even the best Japanese documents are often letters home that describe the brothels rather than official documents). The apologist cling to their desperate plea of "almost no official documents" as if somehow a government letterhead spelling out the crimes is better proof than a thousand tearful stories from a dozen nations that match so well that an organized system of sex slavery is clearly what existed.

Reading this is not easy and you may come away with a bias against the Japanese. Remember that many nations have committed dark acts and yet went on to do great and good things. It is not the purpose of this book to condemn a nation, merely to condemn the criminal cowardice of the Japanese Army of that time.

One day Japan will embrace that truth, and on that day they will have their honor back.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for this issue., May 13, 2007
By Marco P. Swart (Enschede, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Comfort Women (Paperback)
Yoshimi did much of the ground-breaking research, and this book shows the results. He writes like a true scholar: presenting the facts he discoverd and giving a clear reasoning for the conclusions he draws from then. He is explicit about his own convictions, but keeps them separated from the facts, carefully avoiding overstatements. Japan can take pride in this historian.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Japan's shameful SEX-SLAVES and denial, March 9, 2007
By Walter W. Ko "Walter Ko" (St Louis, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Comfort Women (Paperback)
This book documents through research the direct involvement and approval of Japanese Government in setting up such brutal and abusive system on Asian women. The Japanese invaders lured occupied countries women by force, lies, deceptions and kidnapping into military sex slaves with fancy names as "comfort women". These poor young women suffered repeated gang rapes and violence with physical and psychological damage and carried the shames and scars till now. Japanese soldiers murdered most when Japan lost the war. I had met a few survivors and listened to their nightmare and testimonials. Their lives were in ruin.

Now, sixty years after Japan's unconditional surrender, there were survivors in Philippine, Korea and China. They broke their silence to testify in US Congress lately with the help of Congressman Mike Honda. How shameful of the Prime Minister of Japan Abe to deny this large scale of international violation of human right. The Japanese government raped these poor women once more! How can we trust Japan for world peace?

Reading this book on Japanese crime against humanity and their shameful denial now would make you join the global campaign to condemn the Japanese now and then!
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23 of 42 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Avoid this argument, April 4, 2005
By Reader Jack (SanDiego, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Comfort Women (Paperback)
I have done some research on this subject and, frankly, I find it difficult to take sides. This book, unfortunately, has not helped.

There is quite a lot of debate about this subject in Japan. It is a fascinating bit of history, but the data is scant and people on both sides of the argument are shrill and sloppy. Nobody seems to have taken the trouble to sort the facts from the rumors or the testimony from the hearsay. Both sides seem to believe that their own outrage is enough evidence for everyone.

Both sides agree to this much: People being sold off for sexual service were commonplace in East Asia in the early half of this century. Poor families frequently sold off thier daughters to brothels. The Japanese army employed manys such brothels to service their soldiers and provided coupons for use in such establishments. Brothels under contract with the army were called "comfort houses" and the women were called "comfort women". Such "comfort houses" existed in Japan proper, Korea, Taiwan, China and all across Japanese occupied Asia.

These "comfort houses" served three main purposes. 1) To prevent Japanese soldiers from raping local women, 2) to control the spread of veneral disease among the Japanese troops, and 3) to prevent espionage using local women.

The big argument is, were any of the women systemically kidnapped by the Japanese army to serve in these brothels?

On this question, nobody seems to agree with anybody. I used to believe that there must have been systemic kidnapping by the Japanese army as a matter of course. It seemed, everybody said so. When I started looking at some Japanese sources, I found some arguments to the contrary, but I did not change my mind. It was true that many of the evidence against Japan were either misrepresented or unreliable, but the Korean argument that the hard evidence must have been purposely destroyed by the Japanese army sounded more convincing to me. It was also true that some of the most famous ex-comfort women frequently changed their testimony or were outright wrong about wartime events, but I let it slide since these women were old and not the best educated. There were also some notable forgeries and liars who, as it turned out, were being paid big money to testify against the Japanese (often by the Japanese media themselves), but that was to be expected when you had such a sensational media frenzy.

Then I learned about the Korean woman who sued the Japanese postal office for her wartime savings. She saved up the money from her pay as a comfort woman in Burma. To their credit, the Japanese postal office searched through their files and found that she had indeed made 12 deposits between June 1943 and September 1945 totalling 26145 yen in gold-backed money. 26145 gold standard yen equals roughly 1 million US dollars today. Also, there is an American military report that puts the average monthly income of the comfort women at 1000-2000 yen, at a time when the Japanese conscript was making 150 yen in a *year*. This was the turning point for me. Lots of people today would willingly sell themselves into sexual service for half a million dollars a year. If that was the actual average income, there would be no need to kidnap anybody, especially when there were plenty of brothels where women could earn a lot less.

Yoshimi's book is one of the best researched on this subject. But the fact is, he did say that he was mistaken about the forced kidnapping. He admitted later that he could find no hard evidence that stood up to scrutiny.

Anyway, I advise potencial readers to approach this topic with caution. No matter which side you take, there will be people who will hysterically hate you for it. Trying to take the middle ground will make you the enemy of people on both sides, because each side believes that EVERYTHING they believe is the TRUTH, even when it is patently not. Trying to sift the facts from the overblown accusations is a frustrating enterprise. In the end, it gets very political and very race oriented. And it will ruin your day many times over.
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12 of 16 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Why some of Japanese are afraid of their past?, November 7, 2004
By Terry B. (CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Comfort Women (Paperback)
It is not a easy book to read; it sure will make many of people in today's materialized society to realize how lucky they are.

This book should be included in our text book to teach our new generation that freedom and liberity is not FREE and there is always a price to pay.

If the Japanese government is not so sensitive and being over-protective about the issue, they should use this book as one of their text book in learning the mistake in their past, and hopefully they won't make the same mistake again in their new generation.
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9 of 56 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars A scholarly work? No, it is not., November 23, 2003
By Hiromi (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Comfort Women (Hardcover)
How can you call this book a scholarly work, when it fatally missed some of most important documents out to show the readers?
Well, although the document no.1 was "shown" on p.42 of this book, Yoshimi failed to translate it for the readers, so I shall do the job for him.
As stated at the footnote on p.43, the document is titled "Matters Regarding the Recruitment of Women Workers for Military Comfort Stations" which was a notification to the Chiefs of Staff of both North and Central China Area Army.
My rough translation is following:
"For setting up `comfort stations' in the war zone in China, we have started to recruit people in Japan for the jobs at the stations including the [comfort] women. Now, to our nuisance, there have been some reports like that some traders are quite inappropriate and wicked that some of them were questioned by the police because their way of recruiting women are deceptive and,in some cases, sort of kidnapping while they are abusing the permission for the recruitment from the Imperial Army. As this matter deeply concerns us, you are advised to take this matter into your serious consideration and the selleting of the traders who recruit women for us in China should be under your tightest control, while working together with the local authorities of the Police and the Military Police so that regrettable things that disgrace the honor of the Imperial Army should never happen."
Although the left-wing Asahi newspaper reported that this document shows the very involvement of the Army to the recruitment of the comfort women,(i.e. the kidnapping, they meant) the contents shows nothing but good intentions of the Army.
Document no.2 was of voices of Korean "comfort girls" those who were captured by the U.S. soldiers in Myitkyina, Burma, whose picture is shown on the dust jacket and p.76 of this book.
This abridged translation is made from the Japanese version of the U.S. document which I quoted from "Jugun-ianfu Shiryoshu"( the Comfort Women Documents) edited by Yoshimi Yoshiaki(p.439):
"The contracts they made with the trader vary from six months to a year depended on the money their parents were given.
They lived in individual rooms in a large 2 story house. Their lives were comparatively "luxurious" thanks to the prenty of money they were given. They could go shopping in larger cities and the Japanese soldiers always gave them presents. They enjoyed picnics, sports day, diner parties and fun evening with the soldiers.
They could refuse to serve soldiers who are drunk.
Many girls have been asked to marry by the soldiers and, in fact, some women actually married to Japanese soldiers. "
The Comfort women were paid three times more than average Japanese soldiers. Some women worked only a year and a half then went home and built a big house.
The U.S.Army reported that the Japanese "comfort station" was similar to their own system. They found nothing wrong in this issue to take into the Tokyo Trial.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki's work failed to show those facts to the readers. It is up to you to decide if this book is really academic or mere propaganda of an anti-Japanese Japanese.

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33 of 88 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Why we can say the author is a pro-communist..., May 31, 2003
By Kazuo Shimizu "kazuo_shimizu" (Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Comfort Women (Hardcover)
The Words of Mr. Unko Tamezo is basically true. Most of Mr. Yoshimi's books are published from Otsuki Shoten Pub. and Iwanami Shoten Pub., both well known as pro-communistic publications. Esp. No anti-communists want to publish their books from Otsuki Shoten. Please remember Korean people is totally in the dark by the Korean government. All both compensations were completed by the Japan-(South) Korea Basic Treaty (1965). So, their acts are a sort of duplicate billing.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Upfront history education helps stop the ignorance & denial, May 12, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Comfort Women (Hardcover)
It is books like these which are so important to educating those who are ignorant or in stubborn denial (like Unko Tamezou) of their past history. The history of the ianfu are just one of the many war crimes from the Pacific War that Japan continues to deny and/or treat lightly. Other countries, of course, are guilty of similar injustices to their own history, but Japan's is well-known and blatant. It is my hope that books and research like these as well as the gradual rise of Japanese witnesses to these war crimes continue to make the truth be heard so that defiantly nationalist people like Unko Tamezou may learn from the wrongs of her nation's past history and truly begin to understand why Japan sets itself up as a pacifist nation.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing and Intelligent, December 12, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Comfort Women (Hardcover)
It is a delight to find a scholarly work that is so accessible to non-academics. This fascinating examination of "comfort women" should be read by every WWII scholar, feminist, historian, college student, and thinking person! Particularly of interest is the critical introduction; Ms. O'Brien (who translated the book from the Japanese) has provided an excellent overview that not only examines this work but demonstrates a wide comprehension of similar works by contemporary authors. Superb.