Comfort women: A final solution

The rationality of irrationality?

By no means does this author try to rationalize Japan's brutal war policy. My purpose is simply to take into account this historical fact of life in its totality. In this regard, the degree of evilness does matter.

In pure logical inference, Japan's comfort women practice can be comprehended as a case of what the 2005 Nobel Prize of Economics winner Thomas Schelling calls "the rationality of irrationality". [13] This means an act - no matter how irrational or even brutal according to others' opinion or today's moral standards - may have its own "merits". Japan's wartime brothel system actually provided some "public goods": directly for millions of Japanese military personnel and indirectly for hundreds of millions of Asian women.

Decades later, a Japanese source offered three reasons for drafting hundreds of thousands of young women, mostly from Korea, following the initial but failed effort to recruit a large number of Japanese prostitutes: to prevent a worsening of anti-Japanese feelings in China; to prevent the spread of venereal diseases among its troops; and to avoid leaking military secrets as a result of contact with Chinese women. [14] All tried to limit the contact with local women.

At least two additional factors were behind Japan's comfort women policy.

One was a culturally specific belief, or superstition, that sex before going into battle worked as a charm against injury, and sexual deprivation was considered to make one accident - prone. [15]

Secondly, the Japanese military's sanctioned brothel system was a natural extension of Japan's state - organized and licensed prostitution at home. As a modernized and militarized Japan started to expend its military presence outside its homeland from the late 19th century onward, Japanese karayuki-san (meaning "Ms Gone Abroad" or travelling prostitutes) were also "exported" to many Japan - occupied areas. This was done during the First Sino - Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo - Japanese War (1904 - 05). Both wars were fought in China, hence the literally meaning of karayuki-san as "Ms Gone to China".

These culturally specific beliefs and practices aside, the Japanese military in early 1938 was perhaps more concerned about its tarnished international image in the midst of the Rape of Nanking. [16] American priest John Magee, then chairman of Nanjing Committee of the International Red Cross Organization, used his 16mm movie camera to document more than a hundred minutes of film: men being beheaded by the Japanese soldiers, women raped, and corpses lying everywhere. [17]

The killing and raping in Nanking even sickened John Rabe, the leader of the German Nazi party in the area and head of the International Safety Zone in Nanking. When he failed to persuade Japanese military authorities to stop the atrocities, Rabe began to roam the city, trying to prevent the atrocities himself. He'd go anywhere raping was taking place. On one occasion, Rabe even lifted a Japanese soldier off a young girl. [18]

The atrocities committed by the Emperor's soldiers in Nanking even alarmed General Matsui, commander of the SEF, who was not present in the early stage of the atrocities because of illness and was temporarily replaced by an uncle of Emperor Hirohito, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who issued an order to "kill all captives". [19] Matsui reportedly said to his subordinates: "I now realize that we have unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on this city ... I personally feel sorry for the tragedies to the people ... I offer my sympathy, with deep emotion, to a million innocent people ..."

Perhaps genuinely worried about the wide dissemination around the world about the killing and raping spree in Nanking, Matsui confided to an American reporter that "the Japanese army is probably the most undisciplined army in the world today". [20]

The rapid expansion of the comfort system at this point was, at least, a soft "cushion" between the bad and the worst.