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Alternet.org said in a report:

Examples are not hard to find. Before and during WWII, the Japanese enslaved as many as 200,000 "comfort" women, and after the defeat of the Japanese, the United States continued to use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves.

The report refers to this dead link.

Did US forces use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves after the WWII?

Sklivvz
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Feralcat
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    Relevant articles on Wikipedia: [Recreation and Amusement Association](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreation_and_Amusement_Association) and [Rape during the occupation of Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Japan). Related Skeptics question: [Was sexually transmitted disease rampant amongst troops occupying Japan?](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15802/was-sexually-transmitted-disease-rampant-amongst-troops-occupying-japan) – Andrew Grimm Dec 27 '16 at 09:15
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    @Andrew Grimm: Re "Recreation and Amusement Association" and similar, how does working as a prostitute equate to being a "sex slave"? – jamesqf Dec 27 '16 at 19:46
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    @jamesqf The wikipedia article points out that while apparently most recruited women consented, in some instances women were forced into prostitution or not allowed to leave. – Cubic Dec 27 '16 at 19:54
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    @jamesqf - even if all of the women were "willingly" working in the sex industry, I think it's safe to say that many (though not all) women enter the sex trade because they have no other options for employment. It's definitely a murky area if a woman feels compelled to sell her body to feed herself or her family. It's a poorly regulated area even today, and I think sex-workers would be much better off if it were legalized and brought out of the underground. – Johnny Dec 27 '16 at 22:08
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    @Johnny: At one point in my life I was a migrant farm worker, because that was the best employment option available to me. Did that make me a slave? Cubic: And if the Japanese people running the "Recreation Association" force some of their workers into their jobs, is that down to the Americans? If so, are you a slaver because your Apple product has components made by companies whose employment practices might not withstand scrutiny? – jamesqf Dec 28 '16 at 02:15
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    @jamesqf You ask those questions as though the answer is obvious and acts as a counter-example, but I would say those are all tricky philosophical questions. The crucial difference in your first example is that you say that was the *best* option available, not the *only* option; you may also have had options within that career of who you worked for and where. If your options are "work for me or starve", then yes, that is slavery; in between there are a lot of grey areas. – IMSoP Dec 29 '16 at 13:24
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    @jamesqf - people generally treat coerced sex work as less desirable, more intimate and much more of a sacrifice than manual labor - even hard labor. How would you feel if when you went for your job, the boss said "Sorry, you're too weak for farm work, that's a _man's_ job. However, most of these men haven't seen a woman in months, so I'll hire you to please them. You sleep with 10 men a day, and if you show them a good time and do anything they want, I'll pay you. Think of your family, do you really want your wife and children to starve because you won't do this?" – Johnny Dec 30 '16 at 00:03

1 Answers1

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Did the US forces use tens of thousands of Japanese women? Yes. The New York Times article Fearing G.I. Occupiers, Japan Urgesd Women Into Brothels indicates the number of Japanese women involved were in the tens of thousands:

Internal documents of the front organization, the Recreation and Amusement Association, show that 55,000 women served in it. The figure includes some office workers, but the great majority worked as prostitutes.

Were those women slaves? There are allegations of some women being forced:

In a few cases, the authorities may have forced Japanese women to work in the brothels. One Japanese book asserts that female factory workers in the city of Kawasaki were trucked to a brothel for Americans and given a speech by a man who said he was from the Interior Ministry.

"You should be proud to be given this mission," he reportedly told the women, who had been told only that they would work in the tourism business. When one woman tried to escape, she is said to have been beaten and her right eye gouged out.

In another case, a women's corps affiliated with the army in Saitama Prefecture is said to have received an order on Sept. 9, 1945, dispatching the members to four brothels in Tokyo. The order, from the Interior Ministry, reportedly said: "You should bear the unbearable and be a shield for all Japanese women."

The sentence quoted is the only sentence in the article that mentions sex involving US forces and Japanese women. This makes it difficult to know exactly what the article is alleging or not alleging.

As the Alternet article doesn't explicitly allege that individual clients knew that the women were sex slaves, or that the US government knew the women were sex slaves, I won't investigate whether there was US complicity in the enslavement.

Andrew Grimm
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  • "*the Alternet article doesn't explicitly allege that individual clients knew that the women were sex slaves, or that the US government knew the women were sex slaves*". How, then, is this an answer to "Did US forces use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves after the WWII?" – RonJohn Aug 08 '19 at 15:27
  • @RonJohn by examining whether or not they were, actually, sex slaves. – Andrew Grimm Aug 08 '19 at 20:15