Japan's Comfort Women Read Online Free

and other sordid dimensions of Japanese colonialism and war? These are questions for which no answers are presently possible.
    Yet, I think that both my father and my uncles firmly believed that they had adhered to high moral standards during the war – standards defined in the Japanese Imperial Code of Military Conduct. I am sure that they disciplined their soldiers quite well, considering their sincere personalities. I recall, for example, a story my father often told of how he succeeded in eradicating stealing by the men in his unit, through the implementation of various disciplinary measures. Yet, if he was so concerned about stealing, I wonder whether or not my father ever considered trying to eradicate the theft of Chinese civilians’ possessions by his men, who were conducting warfare in a so-called “hostile district” in China. Was it not also true that Heinrich Himmler told his SS men not to steal because it would damage their soul and character? As Jonathan Glover clearly pointed out in his recent work,3 no matter how high and clear the sense of moral identity, if it is not firmly rooted in basic “human responses” and “moral imagination,” it is utterly useless or becomes weaker as a defense against inhuman-ities. In other words, no matter how strongly one embraces high moral standards, the lack of a sincere concern for dehumanizing others will paralyze true moral standards of humanity.
    The extraordinary scale and brutality of the organized sexual violence committed by the Japanese Imperial forces against women is a powerful example of demeaning other people in the name of “high ideals” – in this case, Japan’s claim to liberate Asian people from the toils of Western colonialism. Japan’s military leaders organized the comfort women system based on the conviction that they were protecting the moral and physical character of their troops, and protecting Asian civilians, too. They regarded the system as a necessary and effective means of preventing Japanese soldiers from raping civilians and from contracting VD through contact with unauthorized prostitutes. They undoubtedly viewed their conduct as honorable. Yet, they were completely unaware that their moral standards showed a profound lack of humanitarian concern for others and that the system they had set up would victimize others irrevocably.
    Thus, they remained oblivious to the irreparable violation of the most fundamental human rights of the comfort women who were its victims. Focusing narrowly on the protection and control of their troops, Japan’s military leaders were unable to consider the basic human rights of the victims of the system they created – the Asian comfort women drawn from Japan’s colonies and other occupied territories.
    Hannah Arendt, a German-born American-Jewish political thinker, once summed up the Holocaust with the phrase “the banality of evil,” concluding that everyone is a potential perpetrator of atrocities against others. Describing Nazi “torturers,” Primo Levi wrote that “they were made of our same cloth, they were average human beings, people of average intelligence, and average wickedness: 4
    Introduction
    save for exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.”4 The words “banality” and “average” are particularly apt when describing the crimes that Japanese committed against vast numbers of women, crimes committed not only by the architects of the comfort women system, but also directly by the officers and enlisted men who sexually exploited those women. For me, my father and my uncles were certainly not “monsters.” Indeed they were “average” men and their faces were similar to mine. In other words, I need to face up to the fact that in other circumstances I could easily have become “a young Japanese officer”
    myself. This is my starting-point and it will also be the end point of this study.
    An important question to consider is what causes the disjuncture between a