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, Burma . August 8, 1945. An Ethnic Chinese woman who was in one of the Imperial Japanese Army 's "comfort battalions" is interviewed by an Allied officer.]] The size and nature of sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II is still being debated, especially in Japan. Many military brothels were run by private agents and supervised by the Japanese Army. Some Japanese historians, using the testimony of ex-comfort women, have argued that the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were either directly or indirectly involved in coercing, deceiving, luring, and sometimes kidnapping young women throughout Japan's Asian Colonies And Occupied Territories .6 Other Japanese historians argue that there is no hard evidence to prove Army's order to coerce the women. After its defeat the Japanese military destroyed many documents for fear of war crimes prosecution.7 The testimony of Japanese Army officers that they kidnapped women is disputed. Some of the testimony from self-identified victims state that they were kidnapped by ''somebody like a soldier'', but they didn't know who they were. The Japanese government and many historians have searched for evidence of the Army's coercion, but again no such official document has been found. They found many documents giving instructions ''not'' to treat comfort women violently. Thus some historians argues that there was no "sexual slavery" forced by the Imperial Japanese military.[http://hassin.sejp.net/Hata-Ianfu_text.pdf In their view there was violent treatment of comfort women by private agents, which would make the Japanese Army only responsible for insufficient supervision. NUMBER OF COMFORT WOMEN Lack of official documentation has made estimations of total numbers of comfort women difficult, as vast amounts of material pertaining to matters related to war crimes and the war responsibility of the nation's highest leaders were deleted on the orders of the Japanese government.''Burning of Confidential Documents by Japanese Government'', case no.43, serial 2, International Prosecution Section vol. 8; 9 10 Herbert Bix, ''Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan'', 2001, ISBN 006019314X, p.528; 11 Historians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation which indicate the ratio of number of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women, as well as looking at replacement rates of the women.12 Historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi , who conducted the first academic study on the topic which brought the issue out into the open, estimated the number to be between 50,000 and 200,000. Based on these estimates, most international media sources quote about 200,000 young women were recruited to serve in Japanese military brothels. The BBC quotes "200,000 to 300,000" and the International Commission of Jurists quotes "estimates of historians of 100,000 to 200,000 women."13 However, historian Ikuhiko Hata estimates the number to be more likely between 10,000 and 20,000. Because, in the 1930s, there were 200,000 prostitutes in mainland Japan where there were more than 30 million customers, while the number of soldiers was only 3 million in all Pacific front. COUNTRY OF ORIGIN The proportion of countries of origin of the women are also in dispute.
Historian Ikuhiko Hata's study concludes that 40% of them were from Japan, 20% from Korea, 10% from China, and others making up the remaining 30%. According to Kanto Gakuin University professor Hirofumi Hayashi , the majority of the women were from Japan , Korea , and China . |
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