Tokyo – Japan’s practice of enslaving women to provide sex for its troops in World War II has a little-known sequel: After its surrender – with tacit approval from the U.S. occupation authorities – Japan set up a similar “comfort women” system for American GIs.
An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution.
Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to U.S. troops until the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down.
The documents show the brothels were rushed into operation as American forces poured into Japan beginning in August 1945.
“The strategy was, through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect regular women and girls,” recounts the official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police Department.
“The comfort women … had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just yesterday were the enemy, and because of differences in language and race, there were a great deal of apprehensions at first. But they were paid highly, and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully.”
Police officials and Tokyo businessmen established a network of brothels under the auspices of the Recreation and Amusement Association, which operated with government funds.
Seiichi Kaburagi, the chief of public relations for the RAA, wrote in a 1972 memoir that occupation GIs paid up front and were given tickets and condoms. The first RAA brothel, called Komachien – The Babe Garden – had 38 women, but due to high demand, that was quickly increased to 100. Each woman serviced from 15 to 60 clients a day.
Kaburagi said the sudden demand forced brothel operators to advertise for women who were not licensed prostitutes.
Natsue Takita, a 19-year-old Komachien worker whose relatives had been killed in the war, responded to an ad seeking an office worker. She was told the only positions available were for comfort women and was persuaded to accept the offer.
According to Kaburagi’s memoirs, Takita jumped in front of a train a few days after the brothel started operations.
The U.S. occupation leadership provided the Japanese government with penicillin for comfort women servicing occupation troops, established prophylactic stations near the brothels and, initially, condoned the troops’ use of them, according to documents discovered by Toshiyuki Tanaka, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.
A Dec. 6, 1945, memorandum from Lt. Col. Hugh McDonald, a senior officer with the occupation’s General Headquarters, shows U.S. occupation forces were aware the Japanese comfort women were often coerced.
“The girl is impressed into contracting by the desperate financial straits of her parents and their urging, occasionally supplemented by her willingness to make such a sacrifice to help her family,” he wrote. “It is the belief of our informants, however, that in urban districts the practice of enslaving girls, while much less prevalent than in the past, still exists.”
