American Comfort Women

I mentioned the Japanese practice of forced prostitution during World War II in a previous blog entry. Of course the good church-going Americans immediately stopped this practice in occupied Japan after the war. Didn’t they…?

After its surrender, with tacit approval by US occupation authorities, Japan set up a similar “comfort women” system for the Americans.

Newly translated documents show US authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution.

The Americans by then had full knowledge of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women across Asia.

Tens of thousands were employed to provide sex to US troops until March 1946, when Gen Douglas MacArthur ended it.

Of course, most American GIs, being from church-going America were not involved.  

By that time, Tanaka says, more than a quarter of all American GIs in the occupation forces had a sexually transmitted disease.

Those are the ones that got infected. Many more took precautions. These men have been called America’s greatest generation. I think I will withhold that appellation. Obviously every single soldier was not involved in this, but my guess would be most were. 

While MacArthur stopped the practice officially, it obviously continued. 

One reason the extensive American military bases in the Philippines were lost was the effect these bases had on Pilipino women. 

In Olongapo and Angeles in the Philippines, where the U.S. Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base were respectively located (until the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1992), “[t]here was virtually no industry except the ‘entertainment’ business, with approximately 55,000 registered and unregistered prostitutes and a total of registered 2,182 R&R establishments. By 1985 the U.S. military had become the second largest employer in the Philippines, hiring over 40,000 Filipinos. . . . The sum of their salaries amounted to almost $83 million a year.”

The Americans left behind more than just the buildings they no longer wanted. They left behind other unwanted “things.” 

The withdrawal of U.S. naval bases from the Philippines in 1992 also left behind a legacy of approximately 50,000 Amerasian children in the Philippines, with an estimated 10,000 of them living in Olongapo, which had housed the U.S. Subic Naval Base. The law firm of Cotchett, Illston, and Pitre of Burlingame, California, filed a class action suit against the U.S. government on behalf of Amerasian children left behind in the Philippines in March 1993. The plaintiffs would “ask the federal court to order the Navy to provide funds for the education and medical care of these children until they reach 18 years of age.” The prostitute-mothers of these children and several leading Philippine civic organizations, such as GABRIELA, as well as the Council of Churches, mobilized such legal action.

In this same webpage there was this comment:

i want to find my dad.. can somebody please help me.. my mom wont tell me his name..hes former navy personnel. My mom met him in the philippines while he stationed in olongapo im in america now and ive been searching for him all my life

I was filled with melancholy as I read this comment.

This same book excerpt talks about what became of many of these children. Many Asian countries are prime vacation sites for pedophiles. These children, due to their Caucasian features, are in high demand. 

The American Empire, debauching young women for over 100 years! In fact things are so bad in American Culture that the previous sentence I wrote, if converted to a poster, would probably increase enlistments. 

Let me conclude with a story I heard about an acquaintance who felt the urge to serve his country and joined the Peace Corps. Yes, he felt the urge all right. He told a mutual acquaintance that he had two African women who lived with him while he was there to “help.” I was told by another acquaintance that the practice in one village was to assign one woman to the volunteer in order to keep him from debauching the whole village. The concept of the Peace Corp was a beautiful thing. In practice I wonder how much it has contributed to hatred of America. 

Argo

I thought the movie Argo was worth watching even though it was clearly a propaganda piece to prepare us for the war on Iran. Here is how Wikipedia summarizes the film:

On November 4, 1979, during the Iranian Revolution, a group of young Iranian revolutionaries took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran in retaliation for the country's support of the recently deposed Shah. Although most of the embassy staff are taken as hostages, six evade capture and hide in the home of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber). With the escapees' situation kept secret, the State Department begins to explore options for "exfiltrating" them from Iran. CIA specialist Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), brought in for consultation, points out the fundamental weaknesses in all of the proposals for how to do so, but is at a loss to suggest an alternative until he gets an idea while watching Battle for the Planet of the Apes on TV with his son: create a cover story that the escapees are Canadian filmmakers, scouting "exotic" locations in Iran for a similar film.

Ben Affleck tried very hard to keep the propaganda part of the film under wraps. He begins the film by giving a history of the US’s rather gross interference in Iranian affairs. (He can’t even get that right as he confuses the difference between the parliamentary system of Iran with an elected presidential system.) He must have thought that repeating this history with the obvious corruption and brutality of the US surrogate, the Shah of Iran, would dampen the propaganda nature of the film. He failed in this because ultimately the attitude of the film can be summarized by my paraphrase of one CIA agent in Washington. “The Shah may be a bastard, but he is our bastard.” The dark swarthy Iranians as a stereotype could not be overcome. Even the character of the good Iranian maid could not overcome this stereotype, as the “students” were quite menacing. 

Did Affleck plan a propaganda film? I doubt it. But that is what he made. How can I be certain? The response to the film by the audience tells me it had a great propaganda effect. The applause was rather loud. Another interesting point was the age of the audience. At 58 I was one of the younger members of the audience. While I did not applaud, I did join with the audience in not immediately getting up when the credits rolled. It was a movie that made you think. 

I recommend you see the film. It might even be worth the theatre ticket price—just do not eat the popcorn. 

Band of Angels (Behold He Comes)

One movie I remember watching, back in the day, was Band of Angels. I never forgot the painfulness of watching it. It was about a young southern belle in the pre-Civil War days who was shocked to discover she was black. Anything with Yvonne de Carlo was always of interest, but this movie also had Clark Gable. Here is how Wikipedia summarizes the plot:

Amantha Starr (Yvonne De Carlo) is the privileged daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner. However, after he dies, a shocking secret is revealed: These two movie posters show how this movie was marketed.unbeknownst to Amantha, her mother had been one of her father’s black slaves. Legally now property, she is taken by a slave trader to New Orleans to be sold. On the riverboat ride there, he makes it clear that he intends to sleep with her, but desists when she tries to hang herself; as a beautiful, cultured young woman who can pass for white, she is far too valuable to risk losing.

Amantha is put up for auction. When she is callously inspected by a coarse potential buyer, she is rescued from further humiliation by Hamish Bond (Clark Gable), who outbids the cad, paying an exorbitant price for her. Expecting the worst, Amantha is surprised to be treated as a lady, not a slave, by her new owner. At his city mansion, she meets his key slaves, his housekeeper (and former lover) Michele (Carolle Drake) and his conflicted right-hand-man Rau-Ru (Sidney Poitier). Rau-Ru is grateful for the kindness, education and trust Hamish has bestowed on him, but hates him anyway.

Of course this is Hollywood, so after a number of crises (apparently that is the plural of crisis), the two flee the South together. While this made an enjoyable, if possibly somewhat controversial, movie at the time, it does led to one obvious question. How common was this? 

The short answer is to look at black Americans and the abundance of Caucasian features that are present. 

I have heard many times about the greatness of the American Constitution. To some degree I agree. However it was based on a faulty foundation, that of slavery. Having a country that was 1/2 slave holding and 1/2 non-slave holding was not a situation that could continue indefinitely. When you build a building, it is only as good as the foundation. The flaw in the American foundation was not solved until the Civil War—you might say it is still unsolved. 

I remember reading as a youth how our Founding Fathers were against slavery and loved their slaves. Maybe they loved their slaves, but not in the exact way I thought then. 

As in President Thomas Jefferson’s household, the use of lighter-skinned slaves as household servants was not simply a choice related to skin color. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their own children or other relatives. Six of Jefferson’s later household slaves were the grown children of his father-in-law John Wayles and his slave mistress Betty Hemings. Half-siblings to Jefferson’s wife Martha, they were inherited by her along with Betty Hemings and other slaves a year after her marriage to Jefferson, after the death of her father. At that time, some of the Hemings-Wayles children were very young; Sally Hemings was an infant. They were trained as domestic and skilled servants and occupied the top of the slave hierarchy at Monticello.

Since 2000, historians have widely accepted that the widower Jefferson had a nearly four-decade relationship with Sally Hemings, the youngest daughter of Wayles and Betty. It was believed to have begun when he was US minister in Paris and she was part of his household. Sally was nearly 25 years younger than his late wife, and Jefferson had six children of record with her, four of whom survived. Jefferson had his three mixed-race “natural” sons by Hemings trained as carpenters, a highly skilled occupation, to enable them to make a living after he freed them when they came of age. Three of his four children by Sally Hemings, including his daughter Harriet, the only slave woman he freed, “passed” into white society as adults, according to their appearance.

While paternity of a child born over 200 years ago is not something that can be settled today, modern DNA tests have determined that at least one of Sally Heming’s children was a descendant of a Jefferson male. This is not in dispute. But the father could have been Jefferson’s brother, or his brother’s sons. There were in fact 8 different Jefferson males that could have been the father that lived within 20 miles. 

Here is how Wikipedia describes the controversy:

Jefferson's Grandson In response to a PBS Frontline special on the DNA study in 2000, John H. Works, Jr., a Jefferson descendant and a past president of the Monticello Association, a lineage society, wrote that DNA tests indicated that any one of eight Jeffersons could have been the father of Eston. The team had concluded that Jefferson’s paternity was the simplest explanation and consistent with historic evidence, but the DNA study could not identify Thomas Jefferson exclusively of other Jefferson males because no sample of his DNA was available. 

I agree. Jefferson was probably the father of Sally’s children, with the possible exception of her eldest. Remember that Sally had no real choice in the matter. 

This post is a continuation of the series about sexual immorality and war. In this case there was no war involved until the Civil War. Such liaisons were relatively common in the South. It was built into the custom and society of the time. George Washington was likely involved in this kind of situation as well. Yes, the reason so many recently emancipated blacks chose the names “Jefferson” or “Washington” was to honor the forefathers—but some many have had a more direct claim to the surname. 

A Gettysberg AddressSo why am I writing about this? 

My main point in this series is that “what goes around, comes around.” Keeping generations of black women as sexual playthings, and then keeping the children as slaves was a practice of generations of slaveowners. America still suffers the consequences of it. 

Did God reach down and aid the Northern cause in the Civil War? Who knows? The Battle Hymn of the Republic is sung by many churches, and that song thinks that was the case. But the very existence of slavery was one of the reasons the South failed in its secession attempt. The South was unprepared to fight a heavily industrialized North. Fancy southern horsemanship and superior martial skills was not enough. 

No one will ever know how many died as a result of the sin of slavery. The current estimates of 600,000 deaths during the Civil War are now being reevaluated with the estimate now at 750,000 dead. We will never know.

America today is just now finishing the recovery from the Vietnam War where only 50,000 died. 

The sins of a culture build and build until the situation explodes. Two scriptures come to mind from this, the first being 1 Thessalonians 2:

¹⁴ For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews ¹⁵ who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone ¹⁶ in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last. (NIV) 

Sins build up until the situation explodes. In the case Paul is talking about here, it was the Jewish leadership that Jesus fought with that were ultimately destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. In this case the Bible tells us that God was directly responsible for the punishment. 

I also thought of a frequent scripture I quote from Revelation 18:4-8

Get out, my people, as fast as you can,
    so you don’t get mixed up in her sins,
    so you don’t get caught in her doom.
Her sins stink to high Heaven;
    God has remembered every evil she’s done.
Give her back what she’s given,
    double what she’s doubled in her works,
    double the recipe in the cup she mixed;
Bring her flaunting and wild ways
    to torment and tears.
Because she gloated, “I’m queen over all,
    and no widow, never a tear on my face,”
In one day, disasters will crush her—
    death, heartbreak, and famine—
Then she’ll be burned by fire, because God,
    the Strong God who judges her,
    has had enough.

Even if you were not a slave holder in the South (my family archives say they were slave owners until one of my ancestors became a Christian—the denomination—minister), if your society crumbles you suffer too. For the adage that I have been repeating, “What you sow is what you reap,” applies to cultures and nations too. 

The inhabitants of the South could not escape the judgment, even if they were not personally responsible. In the same way today, Americans may not  feel responsible for their collective actions through government. It does not matter, for what a country sows that it shall also reap. 

Maybe I should change the name of my blog to “Flee from the Wrath To Come.” But, where does one flee to? Our flight has to be metaphorical today. Are you ready to flee? 

Behold He Comes: Nazi Sex Slaves

Yesterday I talked about the institutionalized slavery in the Japanese Empire. Nazi Germany did the same thing. Similar to Japan who began by recruiting prostitutes, Germany took over existing brothels. But as with Japan, that was not enough, so kidnappings occurred to fill the brothels. 

A Nazi RaidThe Foreign Ministry of the Polish Government in Exile issued a document on May 3, 1941, describing the mass kidnapping raids conducted in Polish cities with the aim of capturing young women for sexual slavery in new brothels attended by German soldiers and officers. At the same time, Polish girls as young as 15, classified as suitable for slave labor and shipped to Germany, were sexually exploited by German soldiers usually at their place of destination.

It was often unofficial and “consensual.” 

The Swiss Red Cross mission driver Franz Mawick wrote in 1942 from Warsaw about what he saw: “Uniformed Germans [...] gaze fixedly at women and girls between the ages of 15 and 25. One of the soldiers pulls out a pocket flashlight and shines it on one of the women, straight into her eyes. The two women turn their pale faces to us, expressing weariness and resignation. The first one is about 30 years old. “What is this old whore looking for around here?” – one of the three soldiers laughs. “Bread, sir” – asks the woman. [...] “A kick in the ass you get, not bread” – answers the soldier. Owner of the flashlight directs the light again on the faces and bodies of girls. [...] The youngest is maybe 15 years old [...] They open her coat and start groping her with their lustfull paws. “This one is ideal for bed” – he says.”.

Prostitution is not glamorous. I suppose that if a woman is forced into prostitution to eat that is ”consensual.” 

While there was no way for a young German Christian man to avoid the war, barring being imprisoned in a camp himself, they could avoid the rape involved in forced prostitution. I wonder how many of them did? The peer pressure would have been immense. 

Jews, Russians, and Eastern Europeans were a particular target. When the Russians took over Eastern Germany you can guess what happened. Estimates are that up to 2 million German women were raped by Russian soldiers. Even if it was only a fraction of this number, the number of rapes was huge.  What you reap, that you also sow. 

What is interesting is that looking at the advantages Germany had in the war they should have won. It has been suggested that God intervened on the side of the Allies. Maybe. But far more likely is that German ideology cost the Nazis the war. When the German troops arrived in the Ukraine, they were greeted as liberators from the communist Russians. If their ideology had allowed it, treating the “inferior” Ukrainians well, even as a subterfuge, would have made them allies. Instead they stole the Ukrainian’s women to use as sex slaves. This may have cost them the war as the war was lost on the Eastern Front. 

What goes around, comes around. Jesus was proven right when he said that “if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.” Germany lived by the sword and the result was that they died by the sword. 

Why do we as American Christians think that this is not true for the US as well? Since America lives by the sword, if Jesus is correct, America will die by the sword. God does not have to intervene, the natural consequences of war will inevitably lead to America dying by the sword. Has America “lived by the sword”? I suggest you click on the keyword “War” on the right column of this blog for some examples of America relying on the sword. 

I will return to this series next week. Yes, you have guessed it, I will be talking about America. 

Behold He Comes: Japanese Comfort Women

While much can be written about the brutality of the Japanese empire, such as the massacres at Nanking,  I decided to focus on one particular aspect of it. Being in fear of unhappy soldiers far away from home led to the establishment of government brothels throughout the Japanese empire. At first, lured by higher pay and the open nature of prostitution in Japan, the recruits for these brothels were volunteers. But there were not enough women to keep the soldiers happy. So this was the result. 

Young women from countries under Japanese Imperial control were abducted from their homes. In many cases, women were also lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants. Once recruited, the women were incarcerated in “comfort stations” in foreign lands. Other women were rounded up at gunpoint, some being raped before being herded into “comfort stations.” A Dutch government study described how the Japanese military itself recruited women by force in the Dutch East Indies. Some “comfort stations” were run by private agents supervised by the Japanese Army or run directly by the Japanese Army.

It seems to me that this is the natural result of empire. If you separate young men from their natural environment for the defense of an empire, any empire, such things will happen. It is one of the most common, yet most underreported, aspect of any empire. Of course these women were well treated:

Approximately three quarters of comfort women died, and most survivors were left infertile due to sexual trauma or sexually transmitted disease. According to Japanese soldier Yasuji Kaneko, “The women cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.” Beatings and physical torture were said to be common. 

This an aspect of all aggressive militaries. 

Hiroshima was the Christian Center of Japan. This was a church. Even if you are innocent, you suffer if your nation suffers. I see the natural results of Imperial Japan in the suffering the Japanese people during the end of the war and the post-war period. I am not saying that God directed the hands of MacNamara in the war. But I am saying that God made the world in a certain way, and the natural consequences of human action are often eventually that evil will be returned on those that do evil. 

As Paul said in Galatians, “God is not mocked, what a person sows, that he shall also reap.” Japan sowed hate and brutality. Guess what Japan reaped? God does not have to do anything. The natural consequences of an individual’s or a nation’s actions will occur. 

Tomorrow I will talk about the Third Reich. Until then you can look at this video on the Comfort Women.