Our forgotten shame of wartime sex slavery
June 23, 2007
The existence of "comfort women" in Rabaul has been neglected, writes Tony Stephens.
AUSTRALIANS have chosen not to remember the brothels that housed up to 3000 Japanese and Korean "comfort women" in the Australian territory of Rabaul during World War II, the historian Hank Nelson has claimed.
In a paper delivered at the Australian National University, the professor emeritus of Pacific history said that, either by accident or design, Australians had not used evidence from Rabaul in debates about the "comfort women".
The evidence collected by Dr Nelson includes memoirs by Japanese doctors, reminiscences by Japanese who served in Rabaul, testimony by a Korean woman that she worked in a brothel, and statements by Japanese captured on the Kokoda Trail, New Guineans and Australian prisoners.
Australian reports did not mention that "consolation units" had operated for two years in Rabaul. To establish relevance, Dr Nelson said, Australians had turned to Jan Ruff-O'Herne, who grew up in the Dutch East Indies, came to Australia in 1960 and, in 1992, became the first European to break her silence, telling about suffering brutal serial rape in the House of the Seven Seas in Java.
Dr Nelson's paper comes with renewed debate over the comfort women prompted by a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post last weekend about the 200,000 women driven into brothels during the war.
The advertisement, signed by 44 members of Japan's parliament, says: "No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organisations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army."
Ms Ruff-O'Herne, who lives in Adelaide and travelled to Washington in February to address a House of Representatives hearing on protecting the human rights of comfort women, said the advertisement had left her trembling with anger. "It's absolutely appalling. I am so angry that after all these years and so much proof they could do that … Japan is not owning up to their historical responsibilities.
"I was put on a truck and driven away, torn away from my family and put in a brothel to be raped day and night."
A lobby group, Friends of Comfort Women in Australia, said: "Numerous testimonies by survivors clearly identify the comfort women system as that of military sexual slavery."
The Washington Post advertisement, also signed by professors, journalists, and political commentators, said: "The ianfu (comfort women) who were embedded with the Japanese army were not 'sex slaves'. They were working under a system of licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time."
Rabaul was the administrative centre for New Guinea, mandated to Australia. The Japanese captured the town in a day in January 1942, took about 1000 prisoners and massacred 160 at the Toll plantation.
Before and after the recapture in 1945, Australians wanted to know what had happened to Australian prisoners; they were less interested in the brothels. Yet Japanese prisoners estimated there were up to 20 brothels in Rabaul. Documents set out times, fees and codes of behaviour.
Gordon Thomas, the editor of the Rabaul Times who was interned by the Japanese, wrote that, within three weeks of the invasion, 3000 "little ladies" had come ashore and were working at "top pressure".
At least some of the Koreans had expected to work in factories or plantations, only discovering their real job in Rabaul.
Kentaro Igusa, a doctor, said the women were sent to the "front by order of Vice-Admiral Yorio Sawamoto, vice-secretary of the Navy Ministry". Some were accustomed to their work but others were "from poor families … and looked as pure as virgins". Some, badly infected with venereal disease, "cried and begged for help"; some trembled, "probably with shame".
A Korean, known as Lee Jin Hee, gave public testimony that she had been conscripted from the family farm under the "virgin delivery order" and forced to work as a comfort woman in a church.
"The enormity of the crime in Rabaul is difficult to calculate," Dr Nelson says. "It cannot be known how many freely and knowingly chose to go to Rabaul, but it would have been a minority. What seems to have happened is that perhaps 2000 or more women were deceived and forced into prostitution of a most demanding kind - meeting the demands of men day and night.
"Many suffered injury and infection and few survived the journey home. The women sent to Rabaul to satisfy the sexual needs of Japanese servicemen probably had a higher death rate than any Australian unit that fought in World War II."
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