[Njxatsbf]

What is there left to discuss?

[IrrettelatWet]

Originally posted by aneeshm
What is there left to discuss? Patriarchy

[syncFisee]

Also in perspective...McArthur did shut it down, so it isn't like some top down project.

[Jourgenz]

Originally posted by aneeshm
What is there left to discuss? I thought "discuss" is the usual addition in case one doesn't know what to write...

Seriously, I didn't expect a huge debate on this, but I think it's (at least) an interesting bit of history and you never know how a thread develops....so discuss....or don't.

[Trissinas]

A lot of 'em older than 19, since the draft reached real deep, but most of them had been overseas for a long time, and spent far more time getting shot at and having the shits from various tropical bugs than they did getting laid.

Nothing surprising, but it's really not even the tip of the iceberg as far as Japanese orchestrated or committed atrocities. It was done for a lot longer and under a lot worse conditions for the women in Korea and China.

[CedssypeEdids]

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun
Bunch of 19 plus guys visit brothels? Shocking! I don't think that's the main point here....

[CHEAPSOFTOEMONLINE]

The Japanese (especially in Korea and China) weren't interested in allowing women to "go to the big city looking for jobs" or particularly concerned with their "desperate financial straights."

In occupied territories, "comfort women" were taken by force from the best available of the native population, and worn out quickly, then killed or simply discarded and left to die.

A lot of Koreans were "imported" for close to slave labor, and young Korean women were also brought back to Japan to be served out in their domestic "comfort stations." I don't know about now, but in the 80's, it was still not uncommon in western Japan, especially factory towns and the countryside, for pimps and madams to refer to prostitutes as "Korean women."

Throw in a few Japanese orphans and internally displaced (lots of refugees during the war, and you're not likely to have many women who "volunteered" for any such duty. Nobody in the Japanese government of the time would be particularly interested in the concept of their consent or lack thereof.

The bit about paying them well, etc., is just more of the same Japanese euphemisation, revisionism and denial about their conduct at the time. On the scale of the rape of Nanjing, human medical experimentation, the Bataan death march, the murder of civilian construction workers on Wake island, mass use of Chinese civilians for bayonet and sword practice, beheading contests, and the like, the treatment of "comfort women" was pretty minor on the scale of Japanese atrocities, so the vehemence and level of revisionism isn't quite as far out there as it is with the other sorts of Japanese actions.

Besides, they were only women, and women of no consequence, anyway.

[ConoMadura]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Besides, they were only women, and women of no consequence, anyway. Misogynistic humor would say something like, "Aren't all women?"

The angrier nationalists would say something like, "Turnabout is fair play."

Of course, there's a slight difference between these Japanese "comfort women" and the actual comfort women, namely that the poor Japanese ones simply seemed to have been coerced in a fashion not unlike how many Eastern Europeans/Russians/Latin Americans/Southeast Asians are these days--economic coercion, you know.

Not at gunpoint.

[markphata]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
The Japanese (especially in Korea and China) weren't interested in allowing women to "go to the big city looking for jobs" or particularly concerned with their "desperate financial straights."
You might notice that this was talking about Japanese women recruited (sometimes deceptively) by the Japanese government to "service" the occupying American force.

You might notice that I was comparing the process to the way women end up as prostitutes without being recruited or forced by a government or army.

[yQvpyNt3]

History is cruel. How is this news?

At least this is better than an invasion of their homeland which may have resulted in them dying. They should be thankful we dropped the A bomb and used their comfort women.

Okay that last sentence was a serious troll. .

[auctionlover]

Originally posted by BeBro
The article says "coerced into prostitution".
Originally posted by Straybow
You might notice that I was comparing the process to the way women end up as prostitutes without being recruited or forced by a government or army.

[AlexanderPalamayr]

Need I say it again. Morals of the day were not very high compared to modern standards. It is unfair to compare the U.S. of then to the U.S. of today. We already know the U.S. was not the good guy it was portrayed to be. Fire bombings in germany and Japan have shown this.

Prostitution all over the world was probably like this. Women are always coerced into prostitution. Japan was taking the brunt of the ciriticism, when I'm sure even in the U.S. women were forced into prostitution in those days. They still are in some instances. But things are much better now days. But street prostitution is still a problem. Especially in Las Vegas where prostitution is illegal. Not that legalizing it would help. Because legal prostitution is too expensive. And some poor people need their quick fix as well as middle class and rich people.