hankyoreh

Ha Jong-moon, a professor at Hanshin University, speaks to the Hankyoreh’s reporter at the newspaper’s offices in Seoul’s Gongdeok neighborhood on Feb. 21 regarding his recently released book. (Kim Myoung-jin/The Hankyoreh)

Ha Jong-moon, a professor of Japanese history at Hanshin University, first found the war diaries in 2008.

“I've read almost all of the war diaries left by Japanese troops during the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War,” Ha said. “It took me 15 years to sift through the diaries and write the book. Throughout that time, I read over tens of thousands of pages of these diaries.”

The diaries date from the time when Japan started the Sino-Japanese War to 1945, when Japan lost World War II. With his research, Ha carefully sifted repeatedly through the myriad journal pages, specifically looking for excerpts discussing the sexual slavery camps known as “comfort stations.”

Ha mainly did his work during summer and winter vacations. He would go to the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, which Japan established in 2001, to search for diaries. War diaries were compulsory records written by Japanese military units above the level of squadrons, including independent platoons. Nowadays, less than 10% of these dairies remain, most of them found among items seized by American soldiers.

According to Ha, the goal of his work was “to prove that the comfort stations set up and managed by the Japanese military were military facilities deeply linked to the Japanese military’s organizational system and operations, unlike the brothels near military bases that still exist today.”

Ha explained that through the 1993 Kono Statement, made by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, the Japanese government acknowledged that the Japanese military was “directly or indirectly” involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations, “but they did not recognize the comfort stations as military facilities.”

Ha continued, adding that Japan “only acknowledged that military doctors had screened the comfort women for sexually transmitted diseases.”

On Feb. 21, I spoke with professor Ha at the Hankyoreh’s offices in Seoul’s Gongdeok neighborhood. We spoke about his recently published book titled “Japanese Military Comfort Stations Seen through Military Diaries” (Humanist), which compiles the findings of his research over the past 15 years.

Ha brought up records left by the Japanese Army’s 3rd Battalion, 68th Regiment, which was under Japan’s Shanghai Expeditionary Army. This battalion arrived in the city of Zhenjiang in China’s Jiangsu Province on Jan. 10, 1938. The war diaries left by this particular battalion clearly show evidence of the Japanese military’s involvement in both the establishment and operation of comfort stations.

Two days after being stationed there, on Jan. 12, the battalion received a phone call from the 3rd Division’s staff about the “matter of comfort regulations.” Then, on Feb. 28, about a month and a half later, “frontline comfort station regulations” were made and distributed to soldiers. The first visit by soldiers to this comfort station took place on Feb. 1 and is recorded as follows in the war diaries:

“Today, the headquarters’ machine gun company battalion is granted permission to go out and use the comfort station.”

Permission to establish comfort stations as well as their monitoring and supervision were handled by the military police according to orders given by the commanding officer at the military camp. The comfort stations were closed on the 15th of each month and until 5:00 pm on Fridays.

“The diary is full of records showing that the Japanese military had absolute power over life and death, such as [the power to] approve the [creation of] comfort stations, and also regulated the holidays and operating details of the comfort stations,” Ha said.

“My conclusion is that comfort stations were auxiliary facilities set up in proximity to Japanese military facilities, created and operated in liaison with the regulations of the Japanese military units,” Ha responded when asked if he found the answers he was looking for in the diaries.

Cover of the book “Japanese Military Comfort Stations Seen through Military Diaries”

Through writing this book, Ha also revealed for the first time that the Shanghai Expeditionary Army made a request to the Army Ministry back in Japan for 1 million condoms, which they later received by airlift. The Japanese troops stationed in China at the time were seeking to open a comfort station ahead of the fall of Nanjing at the end of 1937.

“The airlifting of condoms is definite evidence that the Army Ministry was actively part of the establishment of comfort stations,” Ha said.

Although the international community has come to see Japanese military “comfort women” as having been sex slaves, the Japanese government still does not acknowledge this.

“If we look at the layout of comfort stations for [Japanese] troops stationed in Dangyang in China’s Hubei Province in 1940, they are surrounded by barbed wire with guards guarding the area,” Ha explained.

“Comfort women were only allowed to go for walks in the area within the barbed wire fencing. On the days soldiers got paid, they had to service dozens of them in one day. They did not have the right to refuse a ‘customer,’” said Ha. “They were sex slaves operated as part of the Japanese military system, which was designed for warfare.”

In the book, Ha also presents several records that show that the Japanese military clearly included comfort women in the category of civilians attached to the army or “civilian employees.” For example, in 1943, the manager of a Japanese military comfort station in Yangon, Burma (now Myanmar), sent his and a comfort women’s money through the field post office, which is a military organization.

In addition, comfort women stationed on Oki Daito Island in southeast Okinawa were not allowed to leave the island in early 1945, even when US warships were expected to launch a naval bombardment. This is because these women were not officially recognized as civilians and thus not included in the regimental headquarters’ directive for civilians to leave the island.

“Even in Burma, the comfort women remained on the battlefield where the Japanese and British armies were fighting. Although I can’t confirm it for lack of data, the same thing would be a likely answer for what happened in the case of Okinawa,” Ha said.

Ha also described the hasty establishment of comfort stations by the Japanese Central China Area Army at the command level ahead of the fall of Nanjing in December 1937 as “a ‘big bang’ in the establishment of comfort stations.”

“There were comfort stations before the Sino-Japanese War, but they are very different in character,” Ha noted. Before the Sino-Japanese War, the focus regarding prostitution was mainly to control the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among soldiers. After this, however, Ha said that “the military began in earnest to take part in the establishment and operation of comfort stations through the system.”

Ha explains that the so-called “prostitution management rules,” which deal with, among other things, STD prevention screenings for workers at private prostitution facilities, were not mentioned at all in Japanese military documents after the Sino-Japanese War. “[This] is supporting evidence of the military’s direct involvement in comfort stations,” Ha said.

On Nov. 15, 1938, according to the war diary of the 3rd Company of the 2nd Division of the Japanese Army, there was news that “a comfort station will soon be opened” at a military camp in Yingcheng near Wuhan, China. This was only 15 days after the Japanese army seized control of Yingcheng.

Since the theater hadn’t been completely pacified and enemy forces remained at large, soldiers in the unit weren’t allowed to leave the base on Sunday, but they were given passes to visit the comfort station.

Why did the Japanese military hurry to set up the comfort station?

“Maintaining control of the unit wouldn’t have been easy after the battle was over. They were no doubt seeking to assuage the soldiers’ bloodthirsty impulses,” Ha said.

Ha noted that the comfort station “was regarded as the only form of ‘recreation’ and the only safe place that Japanese soldiers were allowed to visit in the aftermath of the battle.”

After graduating from the anthropology department at Seoul National University, Ha switched his major to Japanese history and received a doctorate from the University of Tokyo on the topic of the development of Japan’s wartime workforce policy. His interest in Japanese history is partly due to his family’s experience: both his grandfather and his father’s older brother were migrant laborers in Japan.

Ha summarized the significance of his research into the comfort stations as follows.

“The existence and the testimony of the comfort women survivors was our most powerful weapon in the comfort women issue, but of course many of those women have passed away. I thought that research into comfort stations would offer a new direction for continuing comfort women research and activities,” he says.

“If we can turn up more records about the comfort stations and publish the truth about them, I figure that we’ll be able to demonstrate the historicity of the former comfort women’s testimony.”

“While I don’t plan to keep researching the comfort stations in the future, I will share the material I’ve collected with any researchers who ask for it.”

“Going forward, what we need is research into the comfort women’s passage [to other countries], including how they boarded boats. We need to explore the subordinate relationship with the Japanese military that enabled the comfort women to acquire travel passes,” he said.

In a book published three years ago titled “Why Does Japan Want to Conquer Korea?” Ha argued that making the Korean Peninsula neutral is “the only strategy to produce and guarantee stability in East Asia and Korea’s survival.”

Toward the end of the interview, I asked Ha why he advocates neutrality for the Korean Peninsula.

“The reason the Japanese sought to bring the Korean Peninsula under their sway was that they thought it would be a threat if controlled by a hostile power. To be sure, there was also the intention of expanding their own sphere of influence,” Ha said.

“I think the neutrality of the Korean Peninsula is needed to ensure that Japan doesn’t have a pretext for that kind of aggression. Neutrality is the only way for Korea to get on well with both China and Japan while preventing any shake-ups in the balance of power in East Asia.”

By Kang Sung-man, senior staff writer

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]