Rap3 And Abuse of Japanese Women By American Soldiers During WW2

It is difficult if not impossible for historians to overturn popular myths. Myths are popular because they represent stories we want to hear; they feed into the collective psyche. Anzacs behaving badly is not something we want to acknowledge.

The “summary executions” tweet (below) made by McIntyre is a case in point. Most people are familiar with the Japanese treatment of Allied POWs, but Australian soldiers killed Japanese prisoners in Papua, including on at least one occasion wounded Japanese soldiers in hospital.

Take the 1943 diary entry of Eddie Stanton, an Australian posted to Goodenough Island off Papua New Guinea. “Japanese are still being shot all over the place,” he wrote. “The necessity for capturing them has ceased to worry anyone. From now on, Nippo survivors are just so much machine-gun practice. Too many of our soldiers are tied up guarding them.”

This was tit-for-tat killing. Anzac and American troops systematically shot Japanese prisoners in the Pacific, in part because it was expedient to do so, in part out of revenge after being witness to what the Japanese were capable of, and in part because there was so much racial hatred. The Pacific theatre was a racialised war in which atrocities were committed on both sides.

It is naïve to expect men to kill and die for their country, to live through the horrors of a particularly barbaric war, and to come out the other end unscathed. Hence McIntyre’s tweet that Anzacs raped – among others – Japanese women.

Listen to the testimony from an Australian officer, Allan Clifton, who acted as interpreter in Japan in 1946:

"I stood beside a bed in hospital. On it lay a girl, unconscious, her long, black hair in wild tumult on the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before she had been raped by 20 soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on a piece of waste land. The hospital was in Hiroshima. The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australians.

The moaning and wailing had ceased and she was quiet now. The tortured tension on her face had slipped away, and the soft brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child that has cried herself to sleep." Every invading army, regardless of the side they are on, regardless of the war, rapes. The Allies raped in France and the Philippines, in Italy and Japan. According to American historian Bob Lilly’s estimate, between 14,000 and 17,000 women were raped by American military personnel in Europe between 1942 and 1945.

And that is not counting the Pacific. Australians may not have behaved as badly as the Russians in Germany, but thousands of Japanese women were raped in the years after the war, some of them by Australian and New Zealand soldiers who made up the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan.

 Japanese historian Oshiro Masayasu writes about the large scale rape by American soldiers in Okinawa in 1945. He reports the incident at a village in Motobu peninsula where GIs landed and found only women, children and old folks there. What followed was abominable. There was a hunt in broad daylight for Japanese women who were ravaged mercilessly.

According to Toshiyuki Tanaka, 76 cases of rape or rape-murder were reported during the first five years of the American occupation of Okinawa. However, this is probably not the true figure, as most cases went unreported.

Some women were also raped when they went to US camps to receive food hand-outs.

US troops landed on Zamami Island, a small island west of the main island, and began raping women there in March 1945, shortly after they had landed. They abducted the women, carried them one by one to deserted coastal areas and gang-raped them. After being raped, the women were allowed to go. There is also a testimony that some Okinawan nurses and local women patients who had been admitted to the US Field Hospital were raped by US soldiers. One of the victims, a young girl patient, was raped by a GI in front of her father who was in the tent attending to her. These victims had nowhere to report the crime even if they had wished to do so, the Japanese police system of Okinawa having completely collapsed during the battle.

American soldiers took young girls from civilian houses at gunpoint. These girls would later return with their clothes torn off. Some were even killed, although the perpetrators were never caught.

At about 11:00 am, only a few hours after the landing began and three hours before General MacArthur stepped out of his plane at Atsugi airport, two marines on an “inspection tour” entered a civilian house in Yokosuka, and raped a 36-year-old mother and her 17-year-old daughter at gunpoint. About 6:00 pm that day, two other marines entered another home in Asahi-chd and found a housemaid at home alone. While one of the marines was on watch at the door, the other made lewd gestures and tried to grab her. In fear she fled upstairs. The marines followed and raped her in turn in a small room upstairs.

1 Around 12:30 am on September 1, three American soldiers intruded in to the house of Mr. B. I., [the details of the address], Awa district in Chiba prefecture. These intruders showed something like a ten yen bank note to the housewife N., 28 years old and claimed intimacy to her by making gestures while upon receiving her flat refusal they brought her to the inner room and raped her in succession. 2 At about 2:00 pm the same day another four American soldiers intruded into the house of Mr. A. T., [the details of the address], the same village. They threatened the wife, T. aged 30 as well as his mother and then chased the three to the next room and one of the Americans violated T. in the first place. But at that time another three American soldiers entered the same house. They withdrew from the house without attaining their intended purposes satisfactorily. 3 At the same hour on that day seven American soldiers while ransacking the village office in Nishiki village, resorted to indecent acts such as touching breasts of the girl clerks or rubbing their cheeks. 4 Another several Americans resorted to the same acts to the girl clerks in the post office located in the same village

About 6 o’clock, in the afternoon of September 1st, two American soldiers in a truck forced two Japanese to guide them around the Yokohama city. When they came to Shojikiro, at Eirakucho, Naka-ku they forced Miss K. Y., aged 24, a maidservant, to board the truck against her will and absconded to the US Barracks in Nogeyama Park. There altogether 27 of the American soldiers violated her in turn and rendered her unconscious

There were also 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture after the Japanese surrender.

Schrijvers, Peter (2002). The GI War Against Japan - For instance, rape--which is considered a way to sharpen aggressiveness of soldiers, steeling male bonding among warriors, and, moreover, "reflects a burning need to establish total dominance of the other" (p. 211)--was a general practice against Japanese women. "The estimate of one Okinawan historian for the entire three-month period of the campaign exceeds 10,000. A figure that does not seem unlikely when one realizes that during the first 10 days of the occupation of Japan there were 1,336 reported cases of rape of Japanese women by American soldiers in Kanagawa prefecture alone

 Burritt Sabin of the Japan Times reported in 2002 that just days before the R.A.A. was to open, hundreds of American soldiers broke into two of their facilities and raped all the women.

Two weeks into the occupation, the Japanese press began to report on rapes and looting. MacArthur responded by promptly censoring all media

Five months after the occupation began, one in four American soldiers had contracted VD. The supply of penicillin back in the U.S. was low. When MacArthur responded by making both prostitution and fraternization illegal, the number of reported rapes soared, showing that prostitution and the easy availability of women had suppressed incidents of rape.

John Dower writes in his Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II that while the U.S./Japanese-sponsored brothels were open **“the number of rapes and assaults on Japanese women were around 40 a day,” ** but after they were closed, the number rose to 330 a day.

Yuki Tanaka records two major incidents of mass rape around the same time. On April 4, fifty GIs broke into a hospital in Omori and raped 77 women, one a woman who had just given birth, killing the two-day-old baby by tossing it onto the floor. On April 11, forty U.S. soldiers cut off the phone lines of one of Nagoya’s city blocks and entered a number of houses simultaneously, “raping many girls and woman between the ages of 10 and 55 years.”

French researcher Bertrand Roehner has made available the texts of hundreds of directives from the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers to the Japanese government (called SCAPs, SCAPINS or SCAPINs) that reveal much more sexual violence occurred than has ever been acknowledged, a small window onto what went on behind MacArthur’s wall of censorship.

For example, the SCAPIN of August 31, 1949 is illustrative of another tactic MacArthur used to suppress reports of rape and other crimes by occupying forces. It shows that five Japanese were sentenced to hard labor “for spreading rumors derogatory to occupation forces” when American soldiers were accused of raping Japanese women. Another instance of this policy is noted by Takamae Eiji:

Comfort women were subject to numerous instances of sexual violence. For example, on the evening of September 4, three Australian soldiers visited a comfort station at Higashiyama in Kyoto. They were apparently former POWs who had been released from a POW camp somewhere in Japan and were staying at a hotel in Kyoto, waiting to be repatriated. After they were entertained at this station, they insisted on being accompanied by three comfort women to their hotel, where their fellow Australian soldiers were staying. The manager of the station refused the request. However, they forcibly took the women away, shouting at the manager that “Japan lost the war and your police have no power at all!” At the hotel, the women were confined to one room and gang-raped by seven drunken former POWs. In the following morning these women were sent back to the comfort station. The Australian men apparently kept the women’s underwear kimonos.