It’s a tragic and criminal fact that where there’re modern armies there’s prostitution, child sex and human trafficking – Halliburton and Dyncorp in the Balkans war being a case in point – but prosttution was never historically organised openly by the Army command structure – was it? Shadow of The Hegemon has an outraged post at what’s emerged about the US’ postwar occupation of Japan: :
The Americans Kept Comfort Women
There are times when I feel that there’s no real point to keeping one of these things up… when I look at the readership stats and think “is it really necessary”?
Then I read something like this, and remember what it really is… a place to be able to speak out, at least in some small way, and say that THIS IS INTOLERABLE.
Japan’s abhorrent 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An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into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. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war.
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.
“Sadly, we police had to set up sexual comfort stations for the occupation troops,” recounts the official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police Department, whose jurisdiction is just northeast of Tokyo. “The strategy was, through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect regular women and girls.”…
And now we’re finding out that the single most egregious crime of the Imperial Japan, sexual coercion (if not out and out slavery), was enthusiastically embraced by the American occupation? That the “heroes” of the Pacific War, the lions of history, the grandfathers and great-grandfathers that all Americans look up to and venerate were lining up en masse to pay to violate some poor Japanese girl over, and over, and over again?
With the official sanction of the American occupational government?
INTOLERABLE.
We hear so little about other places in the world under historic American or allied occupation protection that it’s easy to forget that US and allied troops have been stationed for many years in large numbers elsewhere than Iraq or Afghanistan. Japan, for instance. It’s easy to take no notice of what they’ve been up to there when there’s much more exciting, photogenic stuff happening elsewhere. So when what really happened comes out, no wonder people are shocked.
I understand the distaste some later generations might have for being made to think of the ‘greatest generation’ as being not actually quite so great after all. No-one likes to be disillusioned, but disillusioned they must be. Take Korea, a decade later:
There are many explanations as to why women became military-base prostitutes during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Philippine occupation, but the most frequent reasons are attributable to either socioeconomic status or government exploitation. For the most part, the “foreign invasion of a nation was understood as a threat to gendered — in this case, female –bodies, which led to closer surveillance of the women and their sexuality.”[3] Some women used prostitution as a means to escape poverty, especially during the Korean War. Korean women were offered money by the government to serve the U.S. military. What these women did not know, however, was that they would never see a majority of their earnings.[4] Women and their families were led to believe that prostitution was acceptable because it would increase a girls’ social status and worth through her economic contribution to the family.[5] However, as Katharine Moon, the author of Sex Among Allies, points out, foreign governments thrived on the misconception that prostitution could increase socioeconomic status. In reality, military-base prostitution did little more than rip young girls away from their homes and throw them into a tumultuous and degrading lifestyle. Moon states that “war, with its accompanying poverty, social and political chaos, separation of families, and millions of young orphans and widows, ‘mass-produced’ prostitutes, creating a large supply of girls and women without homes and livelihoods.”[6] Women and girls were lured, by their governments, into prostitution with the promise of a well-paid government job. Only upon their subsequent enslavement did these women learn that they were to be military prostitutes.[7]
Then there was Subic Bay… I have a hunch there’s a lot more yet to be told about the US’ and other allied armed forces’ own use and encouragement of prostitution historically, and now. Because of the incompetence of the companies that subcontract to provide privatised military functions in Iraq even soldiers have prostituted themselves:
[…]
Having to cope with loneliness, malnutrition and basically captive status inside a heavily-fortified base took its toll. The lack of a bank to dispense funds, in particular, facilitated some of the most lurid events to have transpired at the base – illicit sex and prostitution.“On the base, there was a big gymnasium,” Massoud explained. “It could fit about 2,000 people and had many little side rooms on the second level, like for weight rooms or showers, for example. And a lot of the soldiers would use these rooms for sex, with each other or sometimes with translators, of course all against the rules. The shower room was the most popular.”
In fact, he continued, the soldiers’ steadily dwindling stock of cash led some female soldiers even to prostitute themselves. “There was this beautiful, 30-year-old woman soldier who I was friends with,” Massoud recalled. “And she would sell herself regularly to the other soldiers – for only $20. I couldn’t believe it.”
MacArthur may have banned the official sanctioning of ‘comfort women’ in Japan post-war, but to what extent imight official collusion be happening unofficially still at other US and allied bases worldwide?
The expansion of colonial military bases and the commercialisation of rape by occupying armies is bad enough but our tacit acceptance of sex as an alternative means of conquest means that rape and prostitution has been and is not only encouraged and patronised by occupying ‘civilised’ armies, but it’s being increasingly openly used and accepted as a weapon to subdue populations, as in the former Yugoslavia, Darfur and various Central African conflicts. By accepting the former our governments endorse the latter.
