U.S. Army's "Comfort Women"

Mayor Hashimoto is right when he said that almost all Armies in various countries used some kind of prostitutes. In WW2, there were many documents that German, Russian, and English Army employed many prostitutes. They were unofficial, but Nazis set up an state-run brothel in concentration camps.


Even after WW2, the U.S. Army used Recreation and Amusement Association that employed more than 50,000 prostitutes in Japan. They were official institution supported by Japanese goverment.

The U.S. Army employed many prostitutes in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. According to Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Peter Arnett, a respected journalist who reported the Vietnam War testified as follows:
By 1966, official military brothels had been established within each division’s camp. Each one was a two-building “recreation area” where 60 Vietnamese women lived and worked. The prostitutes decorated their cubicles with nude photographs from Playboy magazine and had silicone injected into their breasts to make the American soldiers feel more at home.
Arnett said that these "recreation areas" were authorized by the Chief of Staff and the Defense Department. He estimated that more than 300,000 prostitutes worked during the Vietnam War.

They were neither kidnapped by the Army nor sold by human trafficking, but it was not only Japanese Army that employed prostitutes in the battle field. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

Comments

m440221 said…
From a concerned reader in the United States.

Since no one seems to have come forward to provide more information about "comfort women" for US soldiers during WWII for this entry, I provide information about its well-known case, which was covered in an episode of the History Channel's series, Sex in World War II. This is a case of brothels for US Army Task Force 5889, which was stationed in Liberia to guard rubber plantations, to keep VD and malaria rates down, and its official account is found in the following US Army's publication (pp. 92-94, esp. 93):

Wiltse, Charles M. 1965. The Medical Department: medical service in the Mediterranean and minor theaters. US Army.
https://archive.org/details/medicaldepartmen00wilt
or http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/010/10-8/

A solider of this unit, George "Doc" Abraham, took pictures including these brothels and "comfort women", and later he wrote a book about his military service, "The Belles of Shangri-La and Other Stories of Sex, Snakes, and Survival from World War II" (NY: Vantage, 2000). The chapter of "The Belles of Shangri-La (pp. 79-99) of this book details the beginning and end of the brothels. His photographs and documents about his military service were donated to Cornell University Library and became a special collection as follows:

The New Release about this collection by Cornell University Library
Cornell Collection Documents World War II's Africa Campaign
http://news.library.cornell.edu/content/cornell-collection-documents-wwii-africa-campaign

The web page of this collection:
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM06777.html

Pictures of this collection including the brothels and "comfort women" can be retrieved by the following URL:
http://insight2.library.cornell.edu:8280/luna/servlet/view/all/who/Abraham,%20George/?&sort=Date,Title,Creator

In addition, it is also a well-known fact that during WWII (up to 1944) Honolulu, Hawaii had prostitution houses that were tightly controlled by the US military governor. The above History Channel series also covered this Hawaiian case and the following book and article cover its details:

Bailey, Beth L. and David Farber. 1994. The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in WWII Hawaii. Johns Hopkins Univ Press. esp. Chapter 3 Hotel Street Sex

Greer, Richard. 2000. Dousing Honolulu's Red Lights. Hawaiian J. of History, vol. 34, pp. 185–202. URL: http://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10524/138

Finally, the following web page about a Japanese-American includes a picture of a brothel street in Honolulu that unmistakably reveals its flourishing business :

Kenneth Hagino: Early Adulthood
http://nisei.hawaii.edu/object/io_1153284469875.html
Men line up for brothels on Hotel Street, Honolulu, Hawaii
http://nisei.hawaii.edu/object/io_1155324690031.html
PS:
While "The First Strange Place" writes procuring white prostitutes by pimps is "not white slavery" (p. 107), Greer's article indicates an FBI agent had material witnesses of "a white slave syndicate [in Ohio] with a branch in Honolulu" (p. 192-3).

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