Sexuality

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An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into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.

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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.

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