Yuki TanakaJapan's Comfort Women (Asia's Transformations)

I needed to do a book review a few years back. I used this for my cultural feminism course. Interesting read and it keeps your attention.

Interesting book. The term "The Evils that Men Do" more than fits this.It give you insight on what War is and how it goes way beyond the battlefields.

NICE insular society you've got over there - there is no common sense or logic or native comprehension of right and wrongIt must be government policy and it must be that IRIS Chang was CORRECT when she said Hirohito and his extended family designed sexual violence policy. That is the most likely reason for the weird way Japan falls against their OWN rape victims.It WAS policy.Where are the JAPANESE women who were raped for the pleasure of Japanse soldiers - how come they're not memorialized at Yasukuni?For everyone still serving the hunchback, that could be YOUR mother, YOUR sister, YOUR daughter or in the case of Comfort Gay, that could be YOU.It's NOT vendetta unless it happens to them - the hunchback et al. They sit at the top and they make the orders to destroy lives - it should happen to them.

Yuki Tanaka's work on the topic of comfort women was a good eye opener.His writing, based on fairly extensive research, and not on his or someone else's opinion will add to the depth of understanding for any student of Japan.This book does not fall into the category of "Japan Bashing", instead helps the reader to understand that first, the use of comfort women was incredibly more prevelant than one might have otherwise thought, second, the effects of this practice are still very relevant today as Prime Minister Abe continues to deny the practice ever occurred, while many other parts of Asia still feel the pain caused by the practice.Modern Japan still seems comfortable portraying women in a manner that would not be acceptable in the west. Any student of Japan, should be interested in understanding the "why" of such phenomenon, and this book may help toward that end.Highly recommend this book for people who have a strong interest in Japan, Asia, psychology, war or peace for that matter.It is not a light read, it is a thought provoking one.

This is one of the few books that deal with what happened to the "comfort women" after Japan's defeat in WWII. Namely that they switched to serving American GIs - for reduced pay.It sort of hits you in the gut after being indignant about the comfort women issue for a while and then discover that your grandfather probablly had a good time with them too.This book, however, does not go into the extent to which the women were abused in American hands when the Japanese army was no longer there to protect them. It was an "out of the fryingpan and into the fire" story. It is a tragic end to a tragic story that we all should know about.

In the past quarter century, there has been a growing effort in Japan to counter or deny the terror wrought by the Japanese Imperial forces against other Asian nations. While Japanese Ultranationalists often deny mass atrocities committed by Imperial forces during the Pacific War, many Japanese scholars have taken a different approach. They tend to compromise, admitting that some atrocities occurred, such as the Rape of Nanjing, but then will strongly dispute the numbers of those killed or raped which are accepted by Western academics.In the case of “Comfort Women”, most Japanese scholars do admit some forced prostitution, but downplay the numbers of kidnappings while insisting that many Korean and Chinese women transported to “comfort stations” were already prostitutes and went to those stations of their own accord. In “Japan’s Comfort Women”, Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka uses Imperial Japanese Army records to support his contention that many Asian women became “comfort women” out of economic necessity or were deceived by Korean/Taiwanese/Chinese recruiters—not Japanese authorities. Tanaka describes how many Korean women moved to Japan in the 1920s and eventually became prostitutes due to lack of work. Tanaka uses anecdotal stories along with news articles to support his view, then arrives at a total of up to 80,000, but no more than 100,000 Asian women becoming sexual slaves of the Imperial Forces.These numbers differ significantly with those used by Western, Korean, and Chinese academics. In Korea alone, it is estimated 300,000 to 400,000 Korean women, many of them teenagers, were ultimately forced into sexual slavery by Japanese Imperial Forces. Tanaka neither discusses or obviously accepts these larger numbers, although he implies that he has credible documentation to support his figures and that other estimates cannot be supported by documentation, which non-Japanese scholars would dispute.The most disturbing issue about Tanaka’s “Japanese Comfort Women” is that it uses only the first 60 pages of this 182-page book to address the issue of Japanese “comfort women” during the Pacific War. The remaining two-thirds of this book take a different direction, primarily to dispute the use of sexual slaves in Indonesia by Japanese forces and to attack the Allied Occupation as a major user of the “comfort women” system for its own forces after WWII. The Allied Armies are painted as major hypocrites for brutalizing and using unemployed as prostitutes, and so why should the Allies be characterized as different from Japanese Imperial forces in this instance? This is a common theme among Japanese Ultranationalists when they describe the “horrors” of the Allied Occupation.Tanaka uses a number of pointed anecdotes about rapes and murders perpetrated by American servicemen against Japanese women in Postwar Japan going up to the present day. There can be no dispute that these unfortunate incidents did occur, but this is only a fraction of the entire story. The vast majority of Allied military men stationed in Japan were not vengeful or degenerates, but fairly well-behaved. Most did not use the prostitution “services” set up by the Japanese government, and this “service” was ended by 1947. Otherwise interactions between military men and the local native population was no different than that to be found worldwide. This book has useful documentation and case histories, but should NOT be used as a sole reference on the “Comfort Women” issue, as it needs to be balanced by more impartial texts, which unfortunately nowadays are only found outside of Japanese academia.