5.4.3] HUMAN TRAFFICKING DURING IMPERIAL AND WARTIME JAPAN

Ben Chapman-Schmidt 

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University, November, 2017 

HUMAN TRAFFICKING DURING IMPERIAL AND WARTIME JAPAN

Japan’s transition to a colonial power began in the first decade of the Meiji period, when they followed Perry’s example by dispatching gunboats to “open” Korea to foreign trade. Victories in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1905) allowed Japan to colonise Taiwan (in 1895) and Korea (in 1910), and in 1931 the Kwantung Army (Japan’s expeditionary force in Manchuria) used a staged attack on Japanese rail lines in northeastern China as a pretext to seize control of Manchuria. Collectively, these seizures transformed Japan into a colonial empire.^[1] Then in 1937, a Japanese soldier briefly went missing near the Marco Polo Bridge outside of Beijing. Disagreements over whether the Japanese forces could search the area led to skirmishes between Chinese and Japanese forces. Both sides saw the Marco Polo Bridge Incident as a violation of an earlier truce by the other, and the inability of either side to back down once hostilities had begun meant that the initial skirmishes quickly escalated into what became the Second Sino-Japanese

War. This marked the first stage of the Pacific War, which would also include the Pacific Theatre of World War II after Japan—finding itself increasingly cut off by international sanctions from the strategic resources it would need in the event of hostilities with the

Soviet Union—attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbour and English, French and Dutch overseas colonies in Asia in 1941.^[2]

Colonialism as a general practice is predicated on the exploitation of the colonised people, and in this respect Japanese colonialism was no different. Taiwanese and Korean subjects were treated as racial inferiors who at best could aspire to become Japanese, even while their labour was being exploited to support Japanese consumption and continued militarisation.^[3] Korea in particular struggled under an initial period of despotic military control, as well as land reforms that impoverished the peasantry and a lack of industrial investment. This resulted in a sizeable number of Koreans moving to Japan for work, where they became both a new exploitable underclass and a target of violent racism from Japan’s own struggling lower classes.^[4]

Following the outbreak of hostilities in 1937, Japan adopted a National Mobilization Law, which allowed the government to directly control the deployment of both capital and labour.^[5] Military conscription and the movement of Japanese settlers to Manchuria led to labour shortages on the Japanese home islands, however, and so Japan began to recruit labour from its colonies—mostly from Korea, but also from Taiwan—to help meet these shortages.^[6] Initially, recruitment for both industrial labour and the military was handled through voluntary recruitment. However, foreign workers found themselves vulnerable to exploitation because many of them had limited Japanese language abilities; they were also paid less while given the worst and most degrading work. Together, these factors led to a low rate of volunteers and high number of runaways. Faced with continuing labour shortages, the Japanese government introduced a labour quota system, which was met by local brokers who often used deception or coercion to meet quotas. Later, they supplemented this with a direct draft of colonial labour. To prevent escape, the government placed these labourers in remote, and often dangerous, work conditions. Being forced to work with increasingly limited rations resulted in a high level of unrest, leading to fortified work sites with their own guards. This, in turn, amplified opportunities for the abuse of the work force.^[7] And in the final years of the war, the military extended the draft to Koreans and Taiwanese to help make up for a lack of manpower, turning them into forced military labour.^[8] 

Outside of Japan and the colonies, labour conditions could be even worse. In their conquered territories, Japan would sometimes displace local populations to bring in Japanese labour.⁶⁷⁹ During the war, however, they increasingly turned to drafting the local population for labour projects. In China, for example, not only were Chinese forced to work for locally based industries, but they were also gathered up in “rabbit hunts” to be shipped back to Japan for slave labour there.^[9] In Southeast Asia, labourers were forced to work long hours under conditions of high temperature and humidity, low access to rations, and high prevalence of tropical disease, conditions which led to mortality rates of 30% (and perhaps as high as 40%) in some areas.^[10] The Japanese army also drafted captured POWs for slave labour. These POWs, like other forced labourers, suffered from high levels of abuse from the soldiers supervising them, particularly in the later days of the war. This is likely the result of a process of brutalisation, developed both on the battlefield and through the treatment of Japanese soldiers by their own superiors. Nor did the Japanese have a monopoly on cruelty, with many of the surviving POWs remembering the worst abuses as coming from the (even more brutalised) Korean soldiers.^[11]

However, the most infamous case of forced labour by Japan during the war was that of the ianfu (“comfort women”^[12]), the 20,000-410,000 women—often coerced or deceived—who worked in Japan’s military brothels.^[13] Early in the war—before the mass sexual violence that accompanied the Nanjing Massacre—the government was distressed by reports of their troops raping local civilians; in particular, they were concerned that these actions would cause local unrest. They were also concerned about the high incidences of STIs among their soldiers, which the army believed were being acquired from local sex workers. In looking for solutions to these problems, the government worked with the same discourses on sex work and male sexuality that informed their regulation of the sex work in Japan: that men were possessed by a powerful and uncontrollable sexual desire, and that sex workers had to be monitored and contained to prevent the spread of STIs.^[14]

This logic led to the military deciding to establish its own licensed brothels overseas. Since locals were perceived as having higher rates of STIs, and since recruitment from local populations could also become a cause for unrest, the military further decided to bring in women from the existing licensed brothels in Japan as well as Korea, where the Japanese licensed sex work system had previously spread and taken root.^[15] Thus the early military brothels were set up with the assistance of brothel managers from Japan and Korea, with the sex workers for the military brothels being drawn largely from the ranks of existing sex workers in those two countries.⁶⁸⁷ According to Fujime, even the euphemisms for the military brothels (ianjo, “comfort stations”) and the prostitutes (ianfu) had emerged as the result of the prohibitionists’ earlier efforts to end the licensed districts in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture.⁶⁸⁸

As the war expanded and the military’s perceived need for sex workers increased, these sources proved insufficient to keep up with demand. The military, though, was reluctant to engage in recruitment in Japan. In part this was out of concern that soldiers hearing that their female relatives were working in the military brothels would negatively affect morale. However, the government also believed that adhering to the 1921 Trafficking Convention required them to limit recruitment of Japanese women to those who were above 21 and who were working or had previously worked in a brothel.⁶⁸⁹ It might seem surprising that Japanese authorities were concerned with adhering to this treaty after violating so many others (e.g., the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Nine-Power Treaty, the Covenant of the League), and even leaving the League of Nations (which it did in 1933). Maruyama, though, argues that Japanese leaders—unlike German leaders—had convinced themselves that Japan was still an upstanding member of the international community and that violating those treaties had simply been the regrettable outcome of unavoidable circumstances.⁶⁹⁰ In order for the Japanese government to live up to their image of Japan as a first-class nation, then, they could not deliberately violate the 1921 Trafficking Convention by recruiting Japanese women for the purpose of sending them overseas to the military brothels.

                                                          

Women’s Sexual Labour in Japan and Korea,” in Gender and Labour in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class, ed. Ruth Barraclough and Elyssa Faison (London: Routledge, 2009), 44–59.

⁶⁸⁷  Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the

US Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002), 8–32; Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 42–96; Sato, “The

Japanese Army and Comfort Women in World War II.”

⁶⁸⁸  Fujime, “The Licensed Prostitution System and the Prostitution Abolition Movement in Modern Japan,” 153.

⁶⁸⁹  Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 157–63.

⁶⁹⁰  Masao Maruyama, “Thought and Behaviour Patterns of Japan’s Wartime Leaders,” in Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. and trans. Ivan Morris, 2nd ed. (1949; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 95–96.

However, as noted in the previous section, Japan had carved out an exception in signing that convention for their colonies. They now took advantage of this by moving to recruit women from Korea and Taiwan—particularly the former, on account of Koreans being perceived as ethnically closer to Japanese. The military contracted out this recruitment to local brothels, who then subcontracted the recruitment to private procurers with no real oversight. These agents, in turn, frequently engaged in deception and debt bondage, a process facilitated by a high rate of rural poverty caused by Japanese agricultural reforms. Sometimes procurers would use outright coercion or kidnapping. In these cases, the police would sometimes intervene and arrest the brokers; other times, however, the police themselves participated. Once at the military brothel, the women were coerced into serving out the terms of their contracts: being so far from home and unable to speak the local language made escape impossible, and women who chose not to comply could be raped or physically abused until they changed their mind.^[16]

In China and the Philippines, soldiers positioned at the front lines who had grown used to the availability of sex on demand would sometimes establish their own unofficial ianjo. Since they did not have access to foreign women, they would instead kidnap or coerce local women into sexual slavery, holding them in captivity without remuneration. In these cases, “rape camps” is a more appropriate label than “military brothels.”^[17] This in turn suggests that the military brothels were not achieving their stated goal of preventing rape, something that even their architects seem to have acknowledged. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the record is less clear, and Japanese forces may have simply converted brothels previously established for Dutch and British soldiers into their own military brothels. However, there are a number of recorded cases of these troops coercing local European women into military prostitution.⁶⁹³         

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[1] Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 424–45, 576–624.

[2] Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931-1945 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 617–55.

[3] E. Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).

[4] Mark R. Peattie, “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945,” in The Cambridge History of Japan Volume 6: The Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Duus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217– 70; Mark Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

[5] Yoshirō Miwa, Japan’s Economic Planning and Mobilization in Wartime, 1930s-1940s: The

Competence of the State (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 175–76; Takafusa Nakamura, “The Japanese War Economy as a ‘Planned Economy,’” in Japan’s War Economy, ed. Erich Pauer (London: Routledge, 1999), 9–22.

[6] Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai, “Total War, Labor Drafts, and Colonial Administration: Wartime Mobilization in Taiwan, 1936-45,” in Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories, ed. Paul H. Kratoska (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), 90–100; Hisako Naitou, “Korean Forced Labor in Japan’s

Wartime Empire,” in ibid., 90–100; Shiaw-Chian Fong, “Hegemony and Identity in the Colonial

Experience of Taiwan, 1895–1945,” in Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory, ed. Ping-Hui Liao and David Der-Wei Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 160–83.

[7] Petra Schmidt, “Japan’s Wartime Compensation: Forced Labour,” Asia-Pacific Journal on Human

Rights and the Law 1, no. 2 (February 1, 2000): 1–54, https://doi.org/10.1163/15718150020954796;

Timothy Webster, “Sisyphus in a Coal Mine: Responses to Slave Labor in Japan and the United States,” Cornell Law Review 91 (2006): 733–60; Edward T. Chang and Min Young Kim, “Transportation of Korean Slave Laborers During World War II: Kanfu Ferries,” East Asia 24, no. 1 (April 1, 2007): 69– 85, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-007-9002-3.

[8] Aiko Utsumi, “Japan’s Korean Soldiers in the Pacific War,” in Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories, ed. Paul H. Kratoska (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), 81–89; Brandon Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013); Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 239–98. ⁶⁷⁹ Robert Thomas Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 43–47.

[9] Yukiko Koga, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 172–76.

[10] Paul H. Kratoska, “Labor in the Malay Peninsula and Singapore under Japanese Occupation,” in Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire, 237–64; Mỹ-Vân Trần, “Working for the Japanese:

Working for Vietnamese Independence, 1941-45,” in ibid., 287–99; Ricardo T. Jose, “Labor Usage and Mobilization during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, 1942-45,” in ibid., 267–84; Shigeru Sato, “Forced Labour Mobilization in Java during the Second World War,” Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (August 2003): 97–110, doi:10.1080/01440390308559158.

[11] Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York, NY: William Morrow & Company, 2007), 104; Charles G. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941 - 1945 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 275; Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, eds., Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia (London: Routledge, 2008).

[12] Though this translation is commonly used in English, to avoid a somewhat problematic euphemism I will use the Japanese term untranslated.

[13] Shigeru Sato, “The Japanese Army and Comfort Women in World War II,” in Sex, Power, and Slavery, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), 389– 403. As Sato notes, neither of these extremes are likely; he cites Yoshimi’s figures (45,000-200,000) as a more probably range. Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, trans. Suzanne O’Brien (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000), 93.

[14] Fujime, “The Licensed Prostitution System and the Prostitution Abolition Movement in Modern Japan.”

[15] Song Youn-ok, “Japanese Colonial Rule and State-Managed Prostitution: Korea’s Licensed Prostitutes,” Positions 5, no. 1 (1997): 171–219; Chunghee Sarah Soh, “Military Prostitution and

[16] Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women; Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 98–129.

[17] Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 44–60; Peipei Qiu, Su Zhiliang, and Chen Lifei, Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013). ⁶⁹³ Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 61–83; Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 98–129.