Sex Slaves for American GI’s Accepted Mass Rape--“Peacefully”?

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” --Maya Angelou

I just presented a paper on “Sex Trafficking and the Military” at a conference where I focused on the ‘Occupation Comfort Girls,’ sex slaves raped by the U.S. Military in Japan after WWII. The day after I came back from my trip, an AP story, “U.S. GI’s Visited WWII Sex Slaves” by Eric Talmadge (April 26, 2007), ran on a number of newswires across the country, and the world. It recounts how ‘comfort stations’ were set up for American soldiers in Japan in 1945 and stocked with ‘Occupation Comfort Girls’ forced into sexual slavery to service the men. Details beyond cruelty have emerged: the way some girls were raped 60 times a day; the way demand was so high girls had no time to eat or sleep; the way men stood two abreast, in lines a block long, at the Yokosuka ‘Rape Station’ (my word for it) to get at the girls imprisoned inside. The way the men were told to not pay more than 10 yen for a short mount. Ten yen was less than a pack of cigarettes cost at that time. (Rape is economical.) The men were brought in by the truckloads and told to wear condoms no matter ‘how good it felt.’ I guess rape feels good for the rapist.

The above details are just a sampling of this atrocity.

Interestingly, Talmadge takes some of his article from the ‘official’ Japanese history of the enslavement and it reads like this: “As expected, after the comfort stations opened it was elbow to elbow. 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.”

The rest of my article will definitely argue a very different point of view--that no woman accepts rape “peacefully.” It is a point that would not seem to need proving, but the notion that a prostitute cannot be raped because she is paid and because she asked for it and the idea that if she is Asian, it is part of her culture to be a whore—these ways of thinking predominate among the soldiers who frequent prostitutes. Someone has to express that it is not so. Someone has to express that paying does not making rape okay. I wish I could find another person to do this since it troubles me deeply to be only one voice in a world that regards the whore as a disposable non-entity who feels no pain.

The way journalists refuse to express the pain of the tortured in the service of some imaginary ‘objectivity’ betrays the extreme suffering these women endured. And it leaves the reader with the idea that a woman will accept rape by 60 men “peacefully.” Talmadge’s article does not mention the pain the women experienced. Nor does he in any way refute the idea that the women came to accept mass rape “peacefully.” So, it is up to me to add the view of the whore whose body is violated 60 times a day. There does not seem to be anyone else around to do it.

For one, contrary to the above statement, the girls were not paid highly. They were held in debt bondage, as are all sexually enslaved girls, thus little of the money would have gone to them. Even if they had been ‘paid highly,’ how could this in any way make constant rape palatable to them? Let alone “peaceful.”

As for the girls having “some resistance” to selling themselves to enemy men of a different race, the resistance was major: the girls cried and screamed and tried to run away when the GI’s entered the brothels. Terrified of these huge men, they held onto things to keep from being pushed down and mounted. Girls who tried to escape were shoved back in by MP’s.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During WWII contains the following assessment of the girls’ fear: “The first comfort station, Komachien, was set up in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. It was opened as early as August 27. The women were petrified of the U.S. soldiers pouring in and began weeping. There were even some who clung to posts (holding up the roof) and wouldn’t move.”

How is crying and being terrified considered “some resistance.” How could the men mount the girls if they were so terrified? How else can you analyze this behavior except as rape? And I would like to ask the girls who were mounted 60 times a day if they came to accept this “peacefully.” I would like to ask them how their bodies felt after 60 rapes and how they managed to not bleed to death in just one day, let alone being able to withstand this day after day after day. Were they stunned into shock the whole time? Were they even aware of who was mounting them, so deep would have been the shock to their bodies and minds? Hopefully, they did what other mass raped women report doing: become numb to bear the unbearable, and become indifferent to the disgust of intercourse with serial soldier rapists.

The male view that this activity can be accepted “peacefully” must be countered. Did the Japanese officials who observed the girls being raped into “acceptance” perhaps mistake the comatose state of the in-shock body for “peace”? Did they mistake the expression in the rape-dead eyes for “peace”?

Someone has to ask the comfort girl what is was like for her. Talmadge’s reporting does not include how she felt. How was she able to sleep at night with her torn body and how was she able to wake up the next day with only more mass rape to look forward to? As she slept, did she feel the stabbing between her legs in her nightmares?

The raped should tell her side of history.

It’s hard to find even a word recorded from the raped Japanese prostitute in the last four centuries, the amount of time since Japan set up its first ‘sanctioned’ brothels. In 1600, Japan established what is called a ‘licensed’ system of prostitution: this means they made the sale and rape of bodies legal and confined it to red-light districts. At the edge of these areas were offices with signs that said, “Sell your daughters here.” The Japanese have offered ‘comfort girls’ to occupying foreigners since the Dutch. Enslaved girls were set up in ‘kennels,’ like dogs, in port cities and forced to service hundreds of foreign sailors. These girls were absolutely terrified of the huge men who constantly raped them. Only one quote have I ever read from a girl herself. Just one, as if in the entire history of prostitution in Japan, only one comfort girl ever spoke out. The word she used for her existence was “wretched.”

Perry’s men would have taken full advantage of the ‘sex slave’ arrangement as well.

Talmadge takes his material from two major sources: John Dower’s Embracing Defeat and Yuki Tanaka’s Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During WWII and the U.S. Occupation. Dower’s book came out in 1999 and Tanaka’s in 2002, so the material is not in any sense ‘hot off the press’ or the wires, so why Talmadge suddenly decided to ‘reveal’ all this in a news story is certainly a mystery, but I am glad he did. But, as with all news stories it only contains the male point of view, and the sensitive bodies of the Japanese girls who were split in two by pain as they lay on their backs in the brothels is not touched upon. It is what I wish to touch upon in a very personal way since the Occupation Comfort Girls are my guiding spirits. They awoke in me the desire to tell my own story of being raped and prostituted, although it is nowhere near as tragic and devastating as theirs.

I think I feel their pain so deeply since they suffered so much more than I did. On a scale of one to a thousand, I would put their torment at the thousandth percentile, and mine down around one or two percent. Yet the rape/prostitution I managed to survive destroyed me forever.

Military prostitution is a subject I have been writing on for about two years, and the pathetic tragedy of the Occupation Comfort Girls has been at the center of my consciousness the whole time. They have become the talisman for my search to understand how soldiers can rape the small and helpless, the little whore who is defenseless, as if it were his right, and a norm of military life.

(I need to pause and say a word about terminology. In my own writings, I use the word ‘whore’ not to degrade but to defuse the power to stigmatize and scorn and destroy that men have invested in it for centuries. To me a whore is a damaged, exploited, ravaged woman who can never heal. Thus, I ally myself proudly with all women who have been treated so. It is the only reparation I can make them, to try to take away the terrible suffering the word has inflicted by appropriating it for my own purposes.)

I am, of course, touched and moved by all those women, in all wars, who have been enslaved and raped by soldiers, but I cannot acknowledge the pain of all in one article, so I have to start somewhere. Why these particular Japanese whores, the ones given to the GI’s in 1945, touch me so much comes from my own background. I lived on military bases for the first twenty years of my life, part of that time in Japan, and although it was years after WWII, I saw those tiny mincing timid prostituted Japanese girls and the big soldiers who bought them and the spectacle of their helplessness, and poverty, tore at my heart. The sadness in the girls’ eyes haunts me. The way they looked like small children, barely half the size of their GI rapists, hurt me and I wondered how soldiers could even contemplate forcing sex on a such a childlike body.

I felt guilty that I was a safe, protected girl while these girls lived in such misery and degradation.

Later, when I was in my twenties, I was gang raped by soldiers—this is a story I tell elsewhere in my articles so I will leave out the details here—and then I worked as a prostitute for two years near a U.S. military base. At the time, I went into prostitution due to despair and pain and a messed up body and a messed up life and a feeling that all I was fit for was more rape, but I now know that I re-enacted my own gang rape when I worked as a whore. And I must have unconsciously wanted to take upon myself the suffering of ‘comfort girls’ everywhere. I must have wanted to live their lives so I could understand what they felt. So I went into the place that terrified me, the place of being violated every day, so I could ‘understand.’ One meaning of that word is to ‘stand under,’ to support and aid, and I wanted to lay to rest the troubled ghosts of those girls by becoming one of them. I now know that it was so I could write about them, many years later, but at the time this ‘understanding’ was hidden deep inside me. In fact, I did not know the details of any ‘comfort’ girl’s life until much later since their stories were covered up after WWII. But I did see around me, in Japan, girls bought like meat, and my whole life I’ve been sensitive to how if a man rapes one woman, he also rapes me. Even without ‘history’ to tell me it happened, even before my own time of being raped/prostituted, my body had always felt the rape of all women.

My own rape and my whore life took place thirty years ago. After I left prostitution all those years ago, I simply buried the memory of that time, and tried to hide from the rape pain of others. I went to school, worked, traveled, always hiding from rape pain, not wanting to know about the ravaged girls in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Rwanda. These savage events happened, and I heard about them, but I tried to read as little about them as possible. As if there was much written—there wasn’t since the least reported event of war is the sexual torture of women.

Two years ago the ghosts of the Comfort Girls (all of them—Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Bosnian, the list could be extended for miles of pages), and my own ghosts from so long ago, came back to haunt me. Two events triggered this haunting. First, I found myself in a situation where I felt threatened by several men. I don’t need to go into the details except to say they were close to me, all of them, surrounding me, and they were big; and far from feeling protected, the way I do when big, kind men are near me, I felt the old rape fear hit me. I managed to get away from them, but for several days, I felt unreal and frightened and full of chills and nausea, almost as if I had a physical illness. For whatever reason, this small incident brought back the rape, and the time in prostitution, full force. I felt as if I was in a different dimension, not in my safe place and life anymore. And I felt very alienated from other women, the way I had felt so many years ago when I worked as a prostitute.

The second trigger that brought back the ghosts was a walk through a local library, where I passed a book and glanced at the title. It was Tanaka’s Japan’s Comfort Women and I tried as best I could to simply pass it by. I knew a tidbit of who they were from some sketchy news coverage here and there, but didn’t really want to know more. For thirty years, I had tried to ignore any mention of prostitution or rape in the media. I was always in partial hiding from this subject.

I moved away from the book and then I kept circling back to it.

I took it home and read it in just a few hours and leaned of the terrible torture and extremes of sexual suffering the historians and journalists from WWII never tell us about and what the mainstream media still never tells us: how the girls were virgins when procured and how they were raped 30-50 times a day; how their vaginas were swollen and bleeding; how their torn-up, infected wombs rotted in their bodies.

I made it through the Korean Comfort Girls’ part without a nervous breakdown or irreversible trauma. But when I read Tanaka’s chapter on the behavior of American troops with the Japanese comfort girls given to them at the end of WWII, a heavy shocked haunted unbearable pitying sadness grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. I am not finding the words to describe the impact of this chapter about the occupying forces in Tokyo and elsewhere and what they did in the brothels to the destitute girls conscripted for their pleasure. It was identical to the way the Japanese had treated their ‘comfort girls.’ And it was far from comfort for the girls The word ‘comfort’ is such a cosy one. Comfort and joy. Holding a child or small animal tenderly, to comfort it. Did the girls hold the soldiers to their breasts, to comfort them, the way a mother would a child, as they were being raped?

It was the same rape of virgins on the part of the GI’s--most of the girls had had no previous sexual experience: they were simply unprotected and living in the ruins, with no food and ragged clothes and some were barefoot when conscripted. It is no wonder some of the girls committed suicide. To go from being a virgin to having to ‘comfort’ big frightening men up to 60 times a day must have been a shock too terrible to survive.

This is not to say that the other girls, including those who had already been prostituted, did not also feel the pain of constant rape. The prostitute, too, was once a virgin, and once had the life and ‘purity’ raped out of her as men turned her into a whore. And some of the original Korean Comfort Women, already raped beyond life and belief, were turned over to the GI’s to be abused by their new conquerors.

Some of the phrasing of the official American reports of the time, quoted by Tanaka, caused me extreme pain, for example, that the girls “desire to remain in this line of work” because it is the only way they can eat. (My big question is how come the army didn’t feed them instead of raping them? But I guess that is an age-old dilemma: occupying armies need cheap bodies for rape fodder; starving girls will lay down to be raped more docilely than well-fed ones.)

There was one sentence that haunted me for months afterwards and still does. It was the sentence that set in motion all the writing I have done over the past two years. It is the center of my mission and my passion to free the ghosts of these girls who bodies were murdered by brothel rape. The sentence was quite a simple one, written by an American officer who described how he saw “50 men lined up to get at one girl—she was very ‘busy.’” That was it. Just that simple sentence. The coldness of this description, of her being ‘busy,’ the complete indifference to her pain hit me so hard I became sick and couldn’t leave the house for several days. My men did this? My noble soldiers? Fifty of them gang raped a small body? And one of them observed this and could only say she was ‘busy.’ That one sentence summed up for me all the hardness and cruelty of the military toward the women that it permanently places in rape hells.

It still sickens me to think of this sentence.

So, I began to write. One non-fiction book has come out of this: Military Prostitution and My Life. And a novel, Tender Bodies and Whore Stories.

One of the girls, a virgin, who committed suicide after several days of brothel rape by GI’s, was named Takita Natsue. (I don’t think she “accepted” her brothel rape “peacefully.”) Since no one else has told her story, I have, in Tender Bodies and Whore Stories. It is not the ‘official’ American account, of how she was ‘busy.’ It is not the ‘official’ Japanese history that tells me she found ‘peace’ through constant rape under the heavy bodies of terrifying soldiers. It is not the account in Talmadge’s article, which is distanced from the pain of the women. It is not the male version of history and the media that controls our vision and narrows our reality, as if rape and enforced prostitution were simply a minor footnote to war. It is Takita’s story, based on my own experiences of bleeding after servicing men.

Talmadge’s article leaves out the way prostitutes bleed when we service too many men. It leaves out the fact that we are like other women. Like those ‘respectable’ women without raped vaginas who would also bleed if turned into whores. And it only takes an hour or so, to turn a respectable girl into a whore. And hour of constant rape is the recipe the GI’ s used, as they raped some of the virgins into unconsciousness and into their new whore status.

Talmadge again quotes the official Japanese report from the time as to why the authorities set up the ‘Rape Stations’: “The strategy was, through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect regular women and girls.” “Special experienced women,” as if the girls designated ‘whores’ are of a different species? As if they do not feel violated when stabbed between the legs 60 times a day? First of all, it needs to be said that even those previously prostituted, those ‘experienced,’ could not be thought of as engaging in ‘special work’ since there is really no training ground by which to become ‘experienced’ for this kind of work. Did the prostitute, when she was a virgin, walk into a brothel and say, “Rape me constantly, to give me ‘experience’ for this kind of work. Make me ‘special,’ by raping me. Make me different from ‘regular’ women. Rape me until you make me a whore.” Then, did her rapists give her a certificate, which she proudly took to the newly opened Rape Comfort Station, where she said, “Now, I am a ‘special, experienced’ woman ready to lay down for more rape, much more rape, by the American soldiers”?

The male differentiation between ‘regular’ women and ‘whore’ women is highly suspect since it depends on the male action of raping a virgin body in order to turn it into a whore body. How is this action, which is beyond the control of the girl, a way of consigning her, forever, to the category of whore, that is defining her as a disposable vagina, a dumping ground for excess testosterone? If the girl were not weaker than her violators, she would not let them turn her into an object of raped degradation. Cruel brute male strength is the only reason for the differentiation between ‘whore’ and ‘regular’ woman.

The rape stations were set up under the auspices of a fancy organization called the RAA (Recreation and Amusement Association) and it even had a head of Public Relations who reports seeing the hundreds of GI’s lined up as soon as the places opened and that the men were so rough and noisy and unruly that the MP’s could barely keep the men under control. An interesting position, a Japanese businessman who is Head of Public Relations for Rape, for places that sell young girls like insensate meat to rough sailors and soldiers. How rough and cruel must have been the intercourse these eager rapists inflicted on the terrified girls. And the girls must have passed out with fear, or vomited with fear, and peed from fear, when they heard the hundreds of men in the streets, waiting to get at them. And did the Head of Rape PR then go home to dinner with his wife and daughter, after being paid handsomely off the earnings of the helpless raped occupation whores?

The entire mass rape system set up for the GI’s in Tokyo and elsewhere had the full cooperation of the American military. Then, in late 1946, the Americans came out with some nonsense about prostitution being against women’s rights and said they were closing the brothels.

Talmadge writes: “MacArthurs’s primary concern was not only a moral one.”

Actually MacArthur’s primary concern was not a moral one at all. If it were, why didn’t he stop the setting up of the Mass Rape Stations in August 1945? He knew they were there. He knew about the long rapelines. By failing to stop the system at its inception, he tacitly condoned the rape of these girls’ bodies thousands of times by thousands of men.

In fact, according to Tanaka, the reason for closing down the brothels was simple: the GI’s had given the majority of the girls VD. It did not go in the opposite direction since most of the enslaved were virgins before they screamed and cried under the heavy men and the first rapes. (It makes one ask where the GI’s were raping whore bodies before they landed in Japan. Some of the men had been in the European theatre and then were transferred over to the Pacific, so one can assume that that the starvation prostitution forced on the French, German, and Italian girls had infected them with VD as well.)

Women’s rights be damned. It is the old formula: you don’t want an army of diseased penises; it lessens the effectiveness of the men. The same old story. Clemenceau’s response to American commanders during WWI, when they complained that use of French whores was infecting their ‘wholesome’ boys, was, “I will give the soldiers clean whores.” The Prime Minister of France offering women’s bodies as rape fodder.

Womens’ rights has never had anything to do with it. It is purely a matter of VD. The welfare of the women is irrelevant to the ‘hygiene’ of the soldier.

It has always been this way due to the male idea that the whore is to blame for her own degradation and she is the carrier of the diseases. When a big whore industry flourished around U.S. bases in the Philippines, Filipina women objected to only the prostitutes being tested for VD, saying that it was the GI’s who had brought AIDS to the country. Sure enough, there is strong evidence that American servicemen carried AIDS from Mombasa, a port city where militaries from around the world rape African whores, into the Philippines.

Talmadge writes that the U.S military knew of the plight of the Korean Comfort Women, knew fully what they had been subjected to, yet did not reveal this ‘minor detail of war’ to the world. And it is no wonder. As Tanaka, and another historian who writes on this subject, George Hicks, point out, since they needed comfort girls to service their own men all across the Pacific and in Europe, why would the Americans criticize the Japanese for setting up such an efficient Mass Rape System.

Talmadge also writes that the U.S. military commanders in Japan were aware that the girls were coerced into the Rape Stations. Now, how much intelligence it would take to figure this out, I don’t know. A lot I guess, since it never seems to occur to the male military mind that no woman would ever, ever, ever invite the rape that is prostitution on her body if she had a choice. Please tell me what woman would actually lie down and invite 60 men to climb on top of her? With all of the bleeding and soreness and tearing and uterine and bladder damage and nausea and fear that this entails. And the indescribable disgust of being mounted by men you don’t know.

If the American commanders were capable of imagining how much the girls were bleeding, why did they not close down the rape stations? The big mystery, of course, is how all these ‘wholesome’ American boys could actually force intercourse on girls who were screaming and crying. When the girls lost consciousness from the extremes of pain, did the men keep raping them? Since it is obviously irrelevant to the man who buys an enslaved creature whether a woman is attached to the vagina or not, probably so.

What is really alarming is that Dower believes usage of prostituted bodies in post-WWII Japan by GI’s was almost 100%. This means almost every father, son, and brother there was a rapist. How could these men go home and dare be allowed to ever touch another woman, given their rape behavior in Japan? When they had daughters, precious daughters, how dare they even be allowed to be in the presence of these precious girls after their rape behavior in Japan.

It seems that the civilian non-whore female mind also has a hard time figuring out that whores don’t like the mass rape of their bodies. Japanese non-whore women knew about the rape stations. They saw the lines. Why didn’t thousands of them form a barrier between the GI’s and their sisters?

Supposedly, the whores were there to form a breakwater, a big dumping ground for oceans of menacing semen and lines of phallic spears, so as to keep the ‘decent’ women safe from marauding, pillaging GI’s. This never works since men encouraged to regard bodies as cheap rape fodder in brothels will carry this attitude over to the civilian population. And the GI’s did, raping thousands of ‘good’ girls despite the availability of cheap ‘bad’ girls.

Indeed, those GI’s in the Yokosuka mass-rape lines set in motion a Culture of Rape that continues to this day. Those WWII soldiers who raped whores so freely passed this tradition on to their sons, who did the same in Vietnam, and now the current generation has inherited these rape values and this rape culture: GI’s are currently using girls trafficked into ‘entertainment’ centers near U.S. bases in Korea. Raping whore bodies freely, and with impunity, has long-term consequences: American women live in this rape culture, struggle against it, all unaware of its progenesis--ongoing violation of the bodies of hundreds of thousands of prostituted enslaved bodies overseas, in war, and in peacetime (during occupation). The American woman’s willful ignorance and lack of sympathy for the foreign raped body is part of the problem, but that is a topic for another article.

Details upon details, every one even more pathetic than the last, emerge from the documents uncovered by Dower and Tanaka (and Hicks as well). Above the rape area of each girl was a sign that read “Well Come” and below that her name. By the etiquette of enslavement, a Japanese whore is supposed to bow and welcome her rapist to her bed, and then when he is done with her, she is supposed to thank him for the rape. The Korean Comfort Girls had been instructed to do this with their Japanese captors and the Occupation Girls the same with their GI assailants.

If the girls were unconscious after hours of rape, I am not sure how they could manage to stand up and bow, or to be aware they were supposed to thank the man for the torture of their body.

What kind of degraded submissiveness of womanhood could lead to this male version of enslavement etiquette is hard for me to grasp, given that I still try to hold on to some small measure of dignity in a world that turned me into a rape dump. To actually thank my rapist for raping me?

Talmadge ends his piece with a note about the fund set up to compensate the Korean Comfort Women. Of the 200,000 or so, most were Korean but some Japanese women were enslaved as well. Talmadge quotes Haruki Wada, administrator of the fund: “The vast majority of women did not come forward.” Talmadge writes: “Though they were free to do so, no Japanese women sought compensation.” Wada concludes: “Not one Japanese woman has come forward to seek compensation or an apology. Unless they can say that they were completely forced against their will, they feel they cannot come forward.”

The above statements by Talmadge and Wada do not even remotely approximate the psychology of the Japanese whore that would prevent her from coming forward. First of all, she is not ‘free to come forward’ in any way since she lives in a world that will scorn and blame her for her own rape. Of the few former Korean Comfort Women who told their stories of enslavement, they had to brave heavy censure from family and neighbors. One woman reports others calling her ‘whore for the Japanese’ and saying, “You must have been really tough to take on 50 men a day.” ‘Take on’ as if she invited her own ravaging.

During WWII, as the Korean Comfort Women traveled, enslaved, with the troops, from city to city, they were scorned by local populations as whorefilth. Children threw stones at them, and local women objected to how unsightly the long rapelines were, objected to how the didn’t want their daughters and children contaminated by the presence, in their city, of such dirty women. These objections took place while the comfort women were on their backs, being mounted, greatly against their will, for 12 to 15 hours a day. Local civilian women were also glad the women were there as rape sites since they thought it would save their own vaginas from invasion. ‘Decent’ Japanese women thought the same in August, 1945, glad to have a ‘breakwater’ wall of raped girls for the semen to wash up against. But they were mistaken since the GI’s raped ‘decent’ girls as well, and turned them into whores.

During WWI, European women on the way to church objected to seeing long lines of soldier in front of brothels. It was not ‘seemly’ and would be a bad influence on the children.

Nothing has changed since WWI or WWII. Whores are still scorned and blamed for their own whore status and their own rape. (I know that I am frightened of my past being uncovered, of being degraded all over again once having been a rape dump and a piece of whore garbage: this can never be erased.) ‘Decent’ American women still regard whores as filth and dirt overseas seducing GI’s and making the poor boys ‘impure’ by forcing them to succumb to temptation. At least this was certainly the attitude I heard on military bases as I grew up. When the American military wives and daughters would even talk about the subject—it was extremely rare to acknowledge the existence of the comfort women outside the gate, except to label them ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ and ‘sinful’ and without ‘morals.’

No censure of the GI was ever heard.

So, Talmadge’s statement that any former Japanese comfort woman was ‘free’ to come forward does not hold up. What kind of freedom can she possibly have in a world that blames her for the rape of her own body? Neither can I puzzle out Wada’s idea that the women didn’t reveal themselves because they couldn’t prove they were forced. How many rapes are needed to ‘prove’ force? One Korean Comfort Woman reports being raped 300 times over a period of 18 hours. She had to pee where she lay. She ‘took on’ a different man every 3 or 4 minutes, and the men had to thrust very hard to come quickly. Would this number, and this amount of excruciating pain, be sufficient proof of force?

Since I have great difficulty talking about what happened to my own body, and the sexual violence inflicted on it was far less traumatic than lying down on a filthy mat and being mounted all day by brutal men—since I feel cold fear and misery and fear of being shamed when I mention my own experiences, how much worse must be the shame and terror of these other poor women, who were the object of a suffering so extreme, they kept silent for six decades. And the few who ‘broke’ silence, found no peace. To a woman, those comfort girls who told their stories said: “No reparation is possible. The soldiers took our girlhood and womanhood away from us, they took our lives away from us.”

As did the GI’s take away the lives of the girls in the Rape Stations in Japan, 1945. Not one man has been punished for the murder of these girls’ bodies.

Once the comfort stations were closed in 1946, the Japanese girls were not magically rescued from prostitution. Most stayed in due to destitution and due to feeling they were worth nothing after so much rape. In fact, Dower states that over 20% of the girls interviewed in the years after the war said they became prostitutes as a result of rape by GI’s. After that event, they felt more rape was all they were fit for. It is a common sentiment among prostitutes and a major reason it is so hard to escape this rape prison. You cannot see beyond it while you are in it since you feel so ruined.

After the closing of the ‘official’ rape camps, brothels by no means disappeared. Rather, they flourished in even larger numbers and did, according to Tanaka, “a roaring business” among the GI’s.

Japanese organized crime was heavily involved in procuring girls and running the brothels, so it is unlikely the women themselves made much money. As is common around the world, to this day, the whore’s body bears the pain, the customer takes his pleasure, and her owners take the money. If she survives, she usually has several STD’s as well as other health problems, and life-long mental illness from the constant rape. Conditions are so brutal in this world for most prostitutes that CATW (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women) says that the average lifespan in many brothels is only 25 years. One reason for this startling statistic is the advent of AIDS. Girls are often sold so young (age 8 or 10 or even younger sometimes) that they are dying of the disease by their 20’s.

On occasion, after WWII, a kind GI tried to rescue and marry a Japanese whore but this was strictly forbidden by the U.S. military. Extensive background checks were necessary and if she was even suspected of being a ‘bad’ girl, she was too impure for marriage with a clean American soldier. The military has yet to explain to me how the GI’s raping ways kept them ‘pure’ and ‘spotless’ while the men transformed the girls underneath them into dirt.

Cornelius Ryan, writing about the situation in Tokyo just after the war, complained that it was a shame all these American boys only got to know the Japanese woman as prostitute, as ‘fake geisha,’ rather than the ‘real’ Japanese woman, the ‘decent’ one with her gentle submissiveness and beautiful womanhood. Sorry for the GI’s who took full advantage of helpless bodies? Sorry for the GI’s who without mercy inflicted extremes of sexual torture on girls with no choice and no escape, except death, for those who managed to commit suicide? When I read this Ryan statement, quoted by a woman scholar who saw nothing amiss in the idea, I tried to pierce the kind of mind that can feel sorry for the rapist and have no sympathy for the raped. I wasn’t able to.

Reading Talmadge’s article bothered me due to the way the sheer unbearable misery of the girls was left out. It also bothered me because I had just come from a conference where a number of men and women read papers in favor of recognizing the terrible rape of the trafficked (the term now being applied to enforced prostitution). This handful of people think the way I do: that it is time to stop celebrating the rapist as courageous and noble and beyond reproach because he is a soldier. And it is time to stop shaming the women he rapes.

To actually meet a handful of people who share this view was special. It was magical. For one brief moment, I felt as if I was not alone. It was a shining moment that gave way, all too soon, to despair when I came home and read Talmadge’s article.

Despair, not because of the article itself. As I said, I am glad he wrote it. I am glad the few people at the conference who heard my own article on the Occupation Comfort Girls are now not the only ones who know this. His AP piece went out to many papers.

The despair came when I read responses to the article across the internet. Attitudes such as this piece was not ‘newsworthy’ and ‘leave the subject alone already,’ it is in the past, it does not matter now, how can we criticize our noble GI’s, and—this was the corker--the article is not ‘accurate.’ Talmadge makes reference to his sources, to the impeccable research by Dower, who is a Professor Emeritus at MIT, and Tanaka, an historian at an Australian university who is an expert on Japanese war crimes. I would like to add here that I have huge respect for both Dower and Tanaka, not only for uncovering this long-ignored topic, but because both men show great sensitivity as they write about it. They acknowledge and realize the girls’ pain. Tanaka is even troubled by what he might have done if he had served in the Japanese army during WWII. Would he also have made use of the ‘comfort girls,’ he asks in his book.

Tanaka-san, thank you, you are my hero. As are you John Dower. And I would like to add George Hicks to the list, a third man who writes with compassion about both groups of comfort women and shows politeness and softness when he interviews these miserably wounded women.

Many more attitudes in the internet comments were equally disturbing. One woman was afraid she would be called a ‘prude’ if she thought it was disgusting for a whore to have intercourse with 60 men a day. The woman said that even after two men, that’s enough, so how can another woman do 60? It is good that she objects to mass rape of another woman, but why on earth and in all the heavens would she be afraid this objection would label her a ‘prude’? Are we women so controlled by male entitlement to commercialized rape that we cannot see beyond it? Are we afraid we will seem ‘prudish’ if we stand up against the sexual torture of another woman?

The idea that all this had been covered before and that we should “leave it alone” astounded me so much that I had to do some deep breathing exercises. This subject has never been covered before. Of the hundreds of thousands of articles written on WWII, this is the first on the Occupation Comfort Girls. And the male voices out there think that one article on this subject is too many? U.S. servicemen have inherited the tradition of ‘brothel rape’ from the men who stood in the Yokosuka rapelines in 1945. Since no one has ever dared approach this subject until recently, I wonder how one AP article can actually be considered excessive? And if we continue to silence and shame the victims of military rape, it will go on and on and on. And is doing so right now, anywhere militaries and NATO and UN Peacekeepers are stationed. There has never been a move to actually help the whores created by military demand. We are overdue on this one by about ten centuries.

The attitudes of vets was particularly troubling, although I should have expected it, since I talked to many, many soldiers during the 1960’s and 70’s and 80’s and they expressed the same ideas. In response to Talmadge’s article, which reveals unbelievable brutality in the comfort stations, some vets were bragging about their own phallic adventures all over the world, as if it were fun and games to screw enslaved girls from Thailand to Morocco. “Line forms to the rear” was the attitude” and “horny guys off the ships gotta get in there and get drunk and find a whore to screw. “ Comments like this, as if the men had not even read, or registered, the horror in the Talmadge article.

The inability to regard rape as rape sickened me to the point of despair. I reach out to try to understand. I would ask the soldiers, “If your sister were on her back in front of the rape queue, would you say, ‘Line forms to the rear,’ as if it were all a joke?”

Other vets just took it for granted, that the soldier had to have his cheap sex, it is the way things are, boys will be boys, it will always be this way. At first, I wanted to say, “If you think this way, the rape lines will only grow longer.” And they are, growing longer. Trafficking in humans is now more lucrative, according to the United Nations, than the drug trade.

Then I realized that the men who think this way want to. It is convenient for them to have whores to screw around the world. Why would they want to give up this centuries-old masculine privilege? I now see the reasons behind the joking about the girl’s rape pain. I now understand how those GI’s in Japan in 1945 could mount, one right after the other, despite the way the girls screamed and cried. The men are upholding an entitlement to sexual domination that is sacred to them. It is part of being a man for them.

The politics and privilege of soldier rape is still active. It was interesting that some comments on the Talmadge article considered brothel rape a thing of the past. “Glad that’s over with.” I wonder what planet these people came from. Did they miss the whole 20th century? Are they not aware that due to trafficking; due to the huge presence of militaries and multinational forces around the world, creating customer demand; due to the strength and pervasiveness of transnational gangs; due to the low status of women in the third world; due to deep levels of poverty, there are more women and girls in brothels at this moment than there have been in the collective history of our species? And do these people from that other planet not realize that the attitudes of U.S. serviceman, far from having changed, are identical to those of the men in the Yokosuka rapelines? Badly damaged girls, girls held in debt bondage, imprisoned, beaten to make them compliant, service our soldiers near bases in Korea, and the men consider the degradations the girls are forced into, like dancing naked on the bars, the ‘norm’ because the girls are there for the man’s pleasure.

It is still puzzles me how the soldiers maintain the illusion that prostitution is always voluntary on the part of the girl, even when she cries, but then I am not a man. I am a gentle woman who has been raped. Sustaining such an illusion would be impossible for me. It would seem an absolutely necessary illusion on the part of the soldier so he can say, jokingly, “Line forms to the rear.”

At my conference, I experienced a brief shining moment. I thought I could make a difference, because I was in the comforting presence of a few people who thought, as I do, that military rape is a terrible thing. I was with a few people who understood (stood under, supported) me. They even understood why I have to create my own vocabulary—‘prostitution rape,’ ‘brothel rape’--since no words exist to reflect a reality that most of the world, and soldiers in particular, simply do not recognize. For them a whore is a whore and she invites her own degradation. No rape involved. It is a cherished illusion they must sustain, in order to enjoy the privilege of rape. Even if it is 60 men is a row, and she cries and bleeds, it is still not rape to them--since she is being paid. Remember the ‘illusion’ of the Japanese officials in the Talmadge article: that the girls were ‘well paid’—as if money can compensate a girl for the eternal nightmare of being mounted 60 times a day.

The vets on the internet expressed the idea that you couldn’t blame the men for mounting the girls—after all, it was offered to them—served up on a rape mat, so to speak. What is a young guy to do? My response would be, “Take responsibility for his actions,” but I now realize that would be impossible. The brief, shining moment at the conference dissolved when I read the responses to the Talmadge article. I had one wonderful moment, with a few people, of actually believing that the words I put down might reach some soldiers, and civilian non-whore women.

Not a chance. And in some ways I cannot blame the men. Biology is against them. If a man has a rapestick, he will use it. And all men have rapesticks. In Korea right now, our military brothers and fathers and sons are using rapesticks on trafficked girls. Girls so damaged from being broken they will never recover.

Young men have particularly brutal rapesticks since they combine power with no brakes on that power. And it is no wonder a young man can take pleasure in ramming a small, defenseless, crying whore. It must be the ultimate phallic experience for him. A proof of his superiority to the female, in all her weakness. Why would any man want to have intercourse with a confident woman who is his equal when he can enjoy overpowering a girl who is broken, docile, and completely helpless beneath his manhood? No higher proof of manhood exists than the soldier indulging in brothel rape of an enslaved body.

If you doubt me, then look at the Yokosuka rapelines. Fathers and brothers and sons were in those lines. No man held back. The comfort girls serviced all our men, and the men jostled and pushed and were ‘elbow to elbow’ to get at the enslaved bodies. No man held back. What but the driving power of his brutal noble phallic conviction could lead every father and brother and son to rape with such thoroughness? They knew no higher moment of manhood than when they mounted those terrified, crying girls.

I see non-whore women as heavily complicit in all this. I read feminist ‘lists’ of the types of rape: date rape, acquaintance rape, fraternity gang rape, etc. Not once, in the several decades that I have perused feminist literature on rape have I seen ‘brothel’ or ‘prostitution rape’ included as a type. The concentration is mostly on one-time rape, one man attacking one woman, as if the most raped beings in the world—the prostitutes—simply did not exist. So how can I blame the men in the Yokosuka rapelines when it has taken women all of eternity to even acknowledge that the prostituted body is a vehicle for constant, relentless rape? There seems to be massive sympathy for the body raped just once, and none for the body raped 60 times a day.

I talk to young women on college campuses who are so proud of their local rape crisis center. With happy, satisfied faces they tell me how, now, girls are no longer alone when they are raped. They can get help. Then I ask, “What about the prostitutes?” The college girls greet me with blank faces. “Huh, that’s not rape, is it? The girls get paid.”

Then I ask them if the prostitutes are able to go to the rape crisis center after a night of being climbed on by men they don’t know? For “help.”

Total blankness.

These privileged, safe college girls simply do not recognize that prostitution is sexual violence against women, let alone that it exemplifies extreme forms of oppression, suffering, and degradation. It is as if these safe girls are as incapable of empathizing with the massively violated bodies of prostitutes as the Yokosuka mass rapists were.

The ones who do regard prostitution as rape are those of us who have experienced it. But trying to tell others what it feels like is practically impossible.

At the conference, I had a brief hopeful moment of thinking my writing could make a difference. I remember talking to another woman from the U.S. and looking over at a group of three others, one from Iraq, one from Sri Lanka, and one from India, chatting together. In a small way, this seemed like an historic moment. Women from such different backgrounds all united against this extreme form of sexual violence against our bodies that has ruined us for centuries. A few minutes, in this space, with these other compassionate beings—what comfort. Although the moment was swallowed up in what the world considers far more important concerns, for me it had an historic significance on a personal level since it was so rare to share space with other women who care. It gave me hope.

I have abandoned all hope since reading the responses, scattered across the internet, to the GI rape-torture of the WWII Japanese sex slaves. Vets angry that we should criticize the GI’s for this activity. “Boys will be boys.” If we are not supposed to criticize them for the brutal mass rape of helpless, child-size bodies, then what can we criticize them for? Since no one stopped them in 1945, in front of the Yokosuka Rape Stations, this sexual brutality with impunity sanctioned the tradition of rape by GI’s that continued into Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Okinawa, etc.

Those responses tell me that that kind of rape is widely accepted and celebrated and practiced as necessary for male release in the military. It is widely approved, as tacit policy that cheap sex on enslaved bodies has to be available for soldiers. I now know that no change is possible. Men will always rape whores for fun, and ‘decent’ women will always be indifferent to this because their bodies have never known ‘brothel rape.’

I now know that no healing is possible for me since I cannot help others to heal. If soldiers regard the rape of whores as a norm and a dirty joke, I can do nothing. I now know that I will always be a piece of rape garbage. No matter how many books I write, no matter how many words I put down, I can do nothing to lessen the suffering. I will keep writing, to release my own pain and tension. But I will always be only a raped whore, too dirty to live or have any dignity. Men raped all the life out of me a long time ago. I thought I could find new life in words meant to lessen suffering—but it is hopeless.

Suki Falconberg, © 2007