In recent years I have been involved in an academic debate over the comfort women. “Comfort women” is a direct—and too-literal—translation of ianfu (慰安婦), a euphemistic Japanese term meaning a woman (fu) who provides ian, something which might best be expressed in English as “pleasurable solace.” The euphemism is obvious in its double entendre, a very thin veil over a very unpleasant reality. Comfort women were prostitutes. They were contracted, usually by Korean brokers or other middlemen, to work at brothels next to Japanese military bases in East and Southeast Asia and elsewhere during World War II. The brothels were extensions of the domestic prostitution licensing system which Japan had institutionalized in law prior to the war.

The debate about the comfort women is, at one level, a rather arcane one.

It is in part about the contractual arrangements that structured the prostitutes’ travel to and from the brothels and the amount of sex work they were expected to do while there.¹ As far as anyone knows, no comfort women contracts survived the war. However, there are a great many secondary sources—sample contracts, police regulations on how contracts were to be concluded and inspected, army reports on the business specifics of comfort stations, payment details for individual comfort women, diaries written by army doctors (who inspected the women for disease) and brothel brokers, testimonials by surviving former comfort women, and so forth—that attest amply to the contractual nature of comfort station prostitution. Scholars in the United States, South Korea, and Japan who have examined the sources tend to agree on the overall portrait of the comfort women and their milieu. The gist of comfort women work is that it was sex for money during wartime.

At another level, however, the debate is about definitions. This is where scholars go in very different directions.² Even if there were contracts, some argue, one must not discount power balances. After all, a contract between an individual woman and a brothel operating on the tacit understanding of the Japanese military is not an agreement between equals. Yet others insist that prostitution should never be considered voluntary, no matter how freely a woman enters into it. This should be especially true of the comfort women, such scholars maintain. After all, there was a war on, and many of the comfort women came from desperately poor farming villages. Some were even sold into prostitution by their parents. So, whether or not the comfort women entered into contracts, those involved in the debate often stress that the wider circumstances must be considered when discussing them. What some people call prostitution may very well have been closer to forcible sex work, even rape.

I agree wholeheartedly that one must take in the whole social, economic, cultural, and historical picture when discussing the comfort women. This is one reason I much admire a South Korean scholar named Park Yuha, a Sejong University professor emerita and the author of some richly contextual books about the comfort women.³ Professor Park was acquitted in late 2023 of criminal defamation for adding nuance to the comfort women debate.⁴ She defied the all-too-neat convention that sees comfort women as simply victims of history, refusing to reduce them to a single narrative about power, money, politics, and sex. Instead, Professor Park delved deeply into the comfort women’s personal lives to find them striving for better days ahead, longing for their hometowns, enjoying the money they were making, and even falling in love with Japanese soldiers. That Professor Park was criminally indicted for countering the simplistic narrative preferred by many who take part in the comfort women debate gives some idea of how contentious this issue is in East Asia. It also gives some idea of Professor Park’s courage in trying to tell the full truth about what the comfort women suffered and how they overcame extraordinary hardships in attempting to live human lives amid often unthinkable conditions. Although economic logic must be included in historical considerations about sex during wartime, what matters most to me about Professor Park’s work is her understanding of the women in context, as human beings in a particular place and at a particular time. No matter how awful history was, or how awful (or wonderful) we want it to have been to fit whatever political motives we have in the present, the agents of history are human beings who can never be reduced to their circumstances but who always seek somehow to rise above them. The comfort women have much to teach us about the human spirit, if we have the humility to put our politics and our prejudices to the side and listen to them as Professor Park has done. In a book I and a colleague published this year on the comfort women, we try to do just that—that is, to understand the comfort women on their own terms, as part of the world in which they lived, however broken that world may have been. We do our best to see the women as individuals, not defined by their world, but always searching for ways to better themselves within it.⁵ And yet, truth be told, while I admire the grit and resourcefulness of the women who worked at wartime brothels in Asia, I hate the side of human life that sees the weak subjected to the designs of the strong. Although we make no normative claims in our book, sticking strictly to the empirical evidence without interjecting our own judgments on what poor young women (and their parents) did in East Asia more than eighty years ago, I do have views of my own. I think prostitution is evil. There is no justification for it. Men should not treat women that way. They do, of course. We live in a fallen world and the reality of societies in every place and time is that some men pay for sex, and some women sell it.⁶ It is a hateful reality, and I wish I could make it so that it was not true. But it is true, and as a researcher my job is to find out what happened and tell the truth about it, no matter how distasteful I find that truth to be. In other words, the comfort women have much to teach us, but I often find I lack the stomach for the lessons of that unfortunate past. Here is the hardest lesson for me yet. It is true that prostitutes follow armies. This has been so since the first war waged by humans and will, I fear, continue until the last war ends us. But while those of us in the debate over the comfort women go back and forth over how best to situate them, historically and otherwise, within the wider scope of World War II in East Asia, I have recently begun to think that focusing too heavily on wartime prostitution may also be a mistake. Some recent volumes by Japanese researchers have helped me see that the comfort women issue is not, strictly speaking, a phenomenon peculiar to World War II. This is historically true in that the comfort women system continued through the Korean War and, arguably, continues today.⁷ But it is true in an even bigger sense as well. So much does the suffering of women form a baseline of history that I am beginning to think it makes more sense to speak of war in the context of prostitution than of prostitution in the context of war. An even harder historical reality than the fact that young women volunteered for, or were sold into, prostitution to service troops in East Asia more than three-quarters of a century ago is that the degradation of women goes on long after the men have put down their weapons and the shooting war is declared over.

To put it another way, men who survive wars get to go home, but whether there is a war going on or not, the ugly business of selling the body for sex continues, one way or another, in both war and peace. The real forever war, the longest forever war, is the war against the people who never should have been targeted in the first place. Women—and also children—are hurt by the denial of human dignity, and go on being hurt regardless of whether there is a war going on or not.

To my mind, one of the best examples of someone writing history about East Asia that sees the consequences of wars for individuals, and especially for women and children, is Shimokawa Masaharu, a former Seoul bureau chief for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper and now the author of two books on the “hikiagesha,” the people—mostly women and children—who were evacuated (hikiage) from Manchuria, the Korean peninsula, and other parts of the Japanese Empire as World War II ended in defeat for Japan. In his 2017 book The Forgotten History of Evacuation (Bōkyaku no hikiageshi), Shimokawa tells the story of Izumi Sei’ichi (1915-1970), a scholar and humanitarian who helped set up a shelter in Futsukaichi, not far from the port city of Fukuoka in southern Japan, for women and children who made it back to Japan from the Asian mainland. Tragically, the shelter also arranged abortions for women who had been raped, often by Soviet soldiers, during the flight away from the collapsing Japanese Empire.⁸ In a new book, Senryō to hikiage no shōzō: Beppu 1945-1956 (Portrait of Evacuation and Occupation: Beppu, 1945-1956), Shimokawa focuses on Beppu, another city in southern Japan, describing how average Japanese people there negotiated life in a defeated country. Particularly poignant is Shimokawa’s research on war orphans (sensai koji) and mixed-race children (konketsuji), the latter often the product of rape by enemy soldiers. War orphans and mixed-race children were, and remain, part of the nearly forgotten history of the Second World War in East Asia. Shimokawa helps us recover that history, as well as the history of the good men and women who opened their hearts to children in need. Shimokawa’s books are good history. They also make me think of even bigger questions. There are statues aplenty to war heroes, for instance, but I wonder why there are few if any statues dedicated to those who work to pick up the pieces of shattered lives once wars are over—especially tiny lives left in ruins by the horrors that adults have visited upon the world.

Shimokawa’s work, which is meticulously researched, is not biased against Americans or other groups. The unfortunate reality, however, is that it is painful as an American to read much of what Shimokawa writes. As he explains in The Forgotten History of Evacuation, postwar Occupation authorities in Japan were among those pushing the Japanese government to adopt what became known as the Yūsei hogo hō, the Eugenics Protection Law (1948) that, upon amendment the following year, opened the door to virtually unlimited abortion.⁹ Brigadier General Crawford Fountain Sams (1902-1994), an army doctor tasked by General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), with overseeing public health in occupied Japan, was one of the forces behind the scenes pushing for the adoption of the 1948 law. Sams stressed the importance of population control in a Japan ravaged by war and the economic and physical suffering that wars always bring to their losers. And there were even darker motives, such as concealing the human proof of sexual violence by American GIs against Japanese women.

This last subject—how the American occupiers treated (and often mistreated) Japanese women—is taken up in great detail by Hitotsubashi University researcher and author Hirai Kazuko in her 2023 book Senryōka no joseitachi: Nihon to Manshū no sei bōryoku, sei baibai, ‘shinmitsuna kōsai’ (Women under the Occupation: Sexual Violence, Prostitution, and “Fraternization” in Japan and Manchuria). From the beginning, women were at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Early in the Occupation, American and Japanese authorities worked together to set up tokushu iansho, “special comfort stations,” for American servicemen stationed in Japan. The Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) secured or commandeered buildings for what was essentially the pimping out, by American and Japanese officials working in tandem, of Japanese women for the sexual pleasure of American men.¹⁰ It is jarring in the extreme for those of us raised to admire “the greatest generation” to learn what really goes on during wartime, but, as one anonymous Japan-based GI put it in a letter to Time magazine in November 1945, “We, too, are an army of rapists.”¹¹

The subject matter of Hirai’s 2023 work overlaps with Kyoto University researcher Chazono Toshimi’s 2014 book Panpan towa dare nanoka (Who Is a Pan-pan Girl?). The word “pan-pan” is a “derogatory term for the street prostitutes who served the soldiers of the Allied forces, mostly from the USA, during the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, and who sometimes became the local girlfriends of GIs.”¹² In a fallen empire, the men bear the humiliation of military defeat, but the women face the very real danger of being driven to prostitution to survive or to feed the children of their husbands who have been killed by the conquering army.¹³ The Americans in Japan in 1945 and after used the term “pan-pan” and also sometimes “geisha girl” (betraying a profound ignorance of what a geisha is) to describe the women who were left with little choice but to sacrifice their pride, their reputation, and often their health and even their life in a society that lay ruined by a terrible war. What looked to many on the American side like “liberation” and, of course, victory, was, for the women on the other side of the line, a nightmare.¹⁴ This nightmare continued for many of the women: In a land missing many of its men, women suffered the daily humiliation (to say nothing of the risks) of working as prostitutes for the occupiers, and in this way supported their families and others. Together, the women supported entire communities.¹⁵

Like Hirai, Chazono also brings up Brig. Gen. Sams, who, as head of the Public Health and Welfare Section (PHW) of the Occupation, in September of 1945 began instructing the Japanese government to carry out testing on women involved in prostitution as a way to protect American servicemen from contracting venereal disease.¹⁶ This was just one part of a systematic effort by both Japan and the United States to arrange for Japanese women to provide sexual services to GIs. Even before Sams and other GHQ officials began applying pressure, and in many cases even before American troops had landed en masse on the islands of Japan, various regional and local governments in Japan had already started their preparations, virtually press-ganging women into serving as prostitutes as a way to protect the “good families” (ryōke) from the ravages of a foreign horde.¹⁷ Incidentally, the Japanese government referred to the places set up to accommodate what must be admitted to be the predatory instincts of men on both sides of the fighting, Japanese and American, by the same name used in East and Southeast Asia and elsewhere: comfort stations. The logic of prostitution had been extended to wartime, and then, when the war was over, the same logic was extended from wartime use back to domestic circumstances again.¹⁸

Of the many recent books about the effects of the Second World War on individuals in East Asia, the one that has haunted me the most is Enari Tsuneo’s 2021 book Shaohai no Manshū. The word rendered “shaohai” in Japanese pronunciation is xiaohai (小孩) in Chinese. It means “small child.” The title of the book translates therefore something like “Manchuria as Experienced by Small Children.” Japan once ruled Manchuria, or Manchukuo as it was known under Japanese dominion, a vast and fertile land now part of the People’s Republic of China (largely comprising the northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning, and Jilin). But things fell apart very quickly. When World War II ended in Asia in August of 1945, there was a panicked scramble among Japanese residents of the Asian continent and elsewhere to get back to the Japanese home islands. Some of the harrowing stories of this scramble—rape, murder, group suicide of women and their children—are told in the work of Shimokawa Masaharu, some of whose books I introduced earlier in this essay.¹⁹ Another set of stories from that pitch-black time involves the young Japanese boys and girls—the xiaohai—who, for various reasons, got left behind in Manchuria and elsewhere on the Asian mainland when the Japanese Empire collapsed.²⁰

Enari’s book is both a searing history and a visual reflection. There are photographs on page after page of the people (now adults) who were abandoned to their fates as Japanese children in Manchuria, taken in by Chinese relatives or friends or kind strangers, and raised in China.²¹ I have spent a long time looking through the pages of Enari’s book, wondering what kinds of lives the people in the photos must have led. As Japanese in China, they suffered discrimination, mockery, racial taunting.²² There are short biographical sketches accompanying the photos; many of the people’s lives were very hard. In addition to bullying, there was the general problem of poverty—of not having enough to eat or a decent place to live. Many photos in Enari’s book show the surroundings of the once-abandoned children who have grown into adults. Tumbledown brick shacks, farms worked with horsedrawn carts and wooden implements, interior house walls of peeling plaster with one or two calendar pictures or advertisement posters tacked up in a sad attempt to brighten a life lived rough and lonely. But for all the vacancy in those lives, for all the thoughts of what might have been and the wishes the men and women express to meet parents and relatives in Japan whom they will probably never see again, something buoys up, unconquerable. I think that something is what we call dignity. There is human dignity in these faces. Someone recognized that dignity when the people in the photos were just babies or toddlers. It comes through no matter how hardscrabble the village or how lined the face with worry and pain.

Worry and pain are not just East Asian phenomena, of course. And there is much more misery out here than just World War II. The books described above are in Japanese, and I know of no plans to translate them. This is a shame, because they are all very much worth reading. My study of the comfort women has opened my eyes to an entire world of pain hidden behind the dates, places, and battle names of modern East Asian history. As armies and empires ranged Asia and the Pacific vying for political and civilizational dominance, women, and children, often got chewed up in the machinery of grandly envisioned history-making. For every general or warship or land campaign whose name makes it into the history books, there are thousands—upon thousands—of nameless noncombatants who often bore the wounds of war long, long after the shooting had stopped. The xiaohai, the comfort women, the mothers who fled with their children from advancing invasions—these stories are still continuing, even though World War II is nearly eighty years behind us.

The stories of how war destroys lives differ in detail from place to place, but the story of the longest war, the forever war against women and children, is always the same, no matter what part of the world one examines. When I was in Vietnam a dozen summers ago, I sometimes saw people whose faces were different than the others going by. GIs left behind children in that beautiful, bruised country, too. So did Koreans, who fought alongside the Americans long ago. No one is innocent. And war never ends. The mass rape of Israelis by Hamas, the Uighur women forced to marry Han occupiers, the child brides of Afghanistan, the children trafficked into sex slavery across the southern border of the United States—these and countless other crimes do not get written down in official histories. Perhaps because there is no book long enough to tell the story of the human race’s longest war.

NOTES

1. J. Mark Ramseyer, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” International Review of Law and Economics, vol. 65 (2021) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818820301848

2. There is a good overview of many aspects of the definitional problem in Yamashita Yon’e, Shinban, Nashonarizumu no kyōkan kara: ‘ianfu’ mondai to feminizumu no kadai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2022).

3. See, for example, Park Yuha, Rekishi to mukiau: Nikkan mondai, tairitsu kara taiwa e (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbun Shuppan, 2022).

4. Kenji Yoshida, “Park Yuha Acquitted, Wins a Crucial Victory for Academic Freedom,” JAPAN Forward, November 1, 2023 https://japan-forward.com/park-yuha-acquitted-wins-a-crucial-victoryfor-academic-freedom/

5. J. Mark Ramseyer and Jason M. Morgan, The Comfort Women Hoax: A Fake Memoir, North Korean Spies, and Hit Squads in the Academic Swamp (New York, NY: Encounter, 2024).

6. For a history of prostitution over the past four centuries, see Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Noss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, eds., Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s to 2000s (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

7. See, for example, Tim Shorrock, “Welcome to the Monkey House: Confronting the Ugly Legacy of Military Prostitution in South Korea,” New Republic, December 2, 2019, and Akemi Johnson, Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa (New York, NY: The New Press, 2019).

8. See Jason Morgan, “The History of the Unspeakable: Shimokawa Masaharu’s The forgotten history of evacuation,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 19 (2018), pp. 644-654.

9. Jason Morgan, “Chūzetsu no ‘shi no bunka’ wo hirogenu tame,” Sankei Shimbun, May 25, 2022.

10. Hirai Kazuko, Senryōka no joseitachi: Nihon to Manshū no sei bōryoku, sei baibai, ‘shinmitsuna kōsai’ (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2023), pp. 13-17.

11. Quoted in Terese Svoboda, “US Courts-Martial in Occupation Japan: Rape, Race, and Censorship,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 7, issue 21, no. 1 (May 23, 2009), p. 1. See also generally Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in WWII France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

12. Rumi Sakamoto, “Pan-pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature,” Portal Journal of International Multidisciplinary Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (July 2010), p. 1. See also Hirai Kazuko, Senryōka no joseitachi, op. cit., p. 172, as well as endnote 1 (p. 200) to the relevant passage, for a definition of “pan-pan” and an explanation of the possible etymologies of the term.

13. Hirai Kazuko, Senryōka no joseitachi, op. cit., pp. 143-154.

14. This is hardly limited to Japan. See, for example, Yuri Doolan, “The Camptown Origins of International Adoption and the Hypersexualization of Korean Children,” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 24, no. 3 (2021).

15. Hirai Kazuko, Chapter Four, “‘Hataraku onna’ ga sasaeru machi: Atami no jūmin to ‘panpan’ tachi,” in Senryōka no joseitachi, op. cit., pp. 171-201.

16. Chazono Toshimi, Panpan towa dare nanoka (Tokyo: Impact Shuppankai, 2014), pp. 222-224.

17. Hirai Kazuko, Senryōka no joseitachi, op. cit., pp. 31-37.

18. The logic goes much deeper into the Japanese past than this, of course. See, e.g., Sone Hiromi, Shōfu to kinsei shakai (shinsōban) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2023).

19. See also “(2) Manshū hikiagesha to gaikokujin hanayome ni tsuite,” in Nakamura Eri, Sensō to torauma: fukashika sareta Nihon hei no sensō shinkeishō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2018), 286-289.

20. Manchuria was a vibrant part of the Japanese Empire, and was filled with Japanese and other peoples engaged in a variety of pursuits. A good, short, vivid sketch of Manchurian life before the collapse of the Japanese Empire is “(3) ZaiMan Nihonjin no naka no kodomo ya josei,” in Tsukase Susumu, Manshū no Nihonjin (shinsōban) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2023), pp. 183-189.

21. Hunger and desperation drove some parents to give their children to Chinese families to raise. See Hirai Kazuko, Senryōka no joseitachi, op. cit., pp. 154-157.

22. Enari Tsuneo, Shaohai no Manshū (Tokyo: Ronsōsha, 2021), p. 240.

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Original Bio:

Jason Morgan is an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.