Maverick Japanese mayor confuses prostitution with sex slavery
Philip Cunningham says it's vital to see use of 'comfort women' for troops as a grievous war crime
The right-wing revisionism of Japan's ruling party, stacked to the decks with organisation men who are either progeny of former war criminals and war profiteers, or unduly inspired by the warriors interred at the Yasukuni Shrine, is worrisome enough, but even independents are marching to the militant drumbeat.
Osaka's maverick mayor Toru Hashimoto recently said that the so-called "comfort women" - long-suffering and justice-deprived sex slaves and prostitutes - were necessary to Japan's war, and, in the spirit of consistency, he urged the US to use the prostitution services in Okinawa to keep its own "courageous" troops happy.
According to the rigid sexual roles of the day, that women should do their utmost to support and comfort the soldiers
It's easy to express outrage about the latest verbal gaffe but is there any way in which Hashimoto's comments can be at least partially understood as an honest reflection of a deeply non-Western worldview?
Like the Yasukuni rightists in the national government, Hashimoto showboats his respect for the fighting men of Japan's ruinous war; his basic logic being that extraordinary demands upon women were justifiable because so much was demanded of the men.
In wartime Japan, men served as soldiers on the front line and in doing so put their lives at risk; so it followed, according to the rigid sexual roles of the day, that women should do their utmost to support and comfort the soldiers. It was not just a sexual thing; while being trained for their missions, the young kamikaze pilots were famously "mothered" by mama-sans in bars and hostels near airbases.
Hashimoto's observation that prostitution goes hand in hand with war is not without merit, but it evades a key point. Prostitution is one thing, sexual slavery something entirely different. The real crime was not finding women who wanted to comfort at-risk males, but forcing girls and women to service soldiers against their will. That many of the women were Korean and Chinese, drawn from the occupied territories of nations that had been effectively raped and beaten by the marauding troops of imperial Japan, only made matters worse.
Prostitution is too nice a word to describe the political cruelty of the ianfu system, but the victims weren't all sex slaves, either. Inasmuch as there are historical records of prostitutes plying their trade for the money, revisionists can imagine the entire system as voluntary.