Japanese mayor says that WWII 'comfort women' were necessary

[Red Cat]

And I don't see how this situation has much to do with army conduct involving rape to maintain discipline.

I don't know. Threats of violence and death perhaps? The evocation of terror as a means of keeping control?

 

[frogwoman]

I know loads of people risked their lives. Where did I say that someone would automatically grass? I just said it's hard for people to know how they themselves would act.

I agree it's very hard to know how you'd act I'm just saying that for myself I know I couldn't do it. I could and have been a cunt in many other ways and I'm not saying I'm perfect or something and better than everything I just know that I wouldn't do that. And I couldn't live with myself if I did do it.

If the gestapo came to my door I'd say either that I didn't know or I'd make up some bollocks preferably about a fash or a collaborator (point them in the direction of a well known fash down the road) and then by the time they came back I'd be gone.

 

[Lea]

Also I fail to see the significance of maintaining discipline by rape. Who other than the Japanese Army and its soldiers benifitted from the rape of these women?

 

[Red Cat]

Who said that anyone did?

 

[freshnero]

to save your own family if the Gestapo came knocking on the door? If you were a soldier in the Japanese army among all that chaos, brutality, and mayhem, and possibly coercion from commanding officers and pressure for your peers, could you hand on heart say that you have protested so loudly against the rapes then as you do on this forum?[/quote]

I know that war works on turning the other side into less than animals, but to put it bluntly how are so many normal men able to stand over a crying distress woman and able to get a erection

I just can't imagine being able to be come aroused in such a situation

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

In the context of imperial Japan's relationship with its neighbours, the two could be said to be indivisible. When a society is so rigidly heirarchical, and where social and physical violence are standard tools in the maintenance of the social status quo, then that social patterning acts as a template for how client states and their people are treated. The treatment of subject nations and their peoples was a direct function of internal social processes, hence you can project how most empires treat their vassals through looking at how they treat those of their own who are on the lowest social rungs.

Does your theory extrapolate well to the treatment of subject nations by the British Empire; or the American empire?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

The effect on individual military operations and everyday conduct of allowing "casual" rape by frontline soldiers; the creation of a culture of impunity among Japanese troops that could possibly fuel rebellion in client states to a greater degree than already existed (the high command missed the boat on this one - the culture of impunity had already existed for decades, but the Japanese power elite were too corrupt to notice); the "homogenisation" of sexual activity so as to control any adverse medical effects.
All of which are horrible, and better dealt with through "commercial" routes, but Japanese culture was arguably such at the time that acknowledging such a thing, and ceding "control" of the matter wouldn't have occurred to anyone in a culture more interested in "face" than the rights and wrongs of imperial policy.

But the institutionalized slave-brothels didn't seem to curtail casual rape, nor did it curtail the sense of cultural impunity. One need only look at the horrific treatment of the Chinese population by the marauding Japanese forces, culminating in the Rape of Nanking.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Does your theory extrapolate well to the treatment of subject nations by the British Empire; or the American empire?

To the British empire, but not to "the American empire", probably because what the US has done has only recently come to be viewed as direct imperialism rather than (as we saw it during the "cold war") proxyism - i.e. little of the building of permanent infrastructure and development of entire social strata within the "client state" to specifically serve the needs of the imperial state (something the British empire, the Japanese empire, the Roman empires and even the various Tsarist empires did). They just paid off/pay off the people with the biggest sticks whose ideology is most agreeable to them, then sell them weapons and technology with which to maintain their hegemony.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

how are so many normal men able to stand over a crying distress woman and able to get a erection

I just can't imagine being able to be come aroused in such a situation

The Japanese soldiers who raped children to death at Nanking apparently were able to get erections.

For any who are unaware of what occurred at Nanking, just type Nanking into Google, and hit 'images'. But be warned: it's not for those with weak stomachs.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

They just paid off/pay off the people with the biggest sticks whose ideology is most agreeable to them, then sell them weapons and technology with which to maintain their hegemony.

What about Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and... Japan itself?

 

[ViolentPanda]

But the institutionalized slave-brothels didn't seem to curtail casual rape, nor did it curtail the sense of cultural impunity.

That's quite an assumption, given it's impossible for you to know whether or not prevalence of rape was curtailed.
And I'd already stated that the culture of impunity had already existed for decades prior to any of the Japanese military's actions in China or the wider region.

One need only look at the horrific treatment of the Chinese population by the marauding Japanese forces, culminating in the Rape of Nanking.

Wish I could remember the names of the two books I had recommended to me on Nanking. They pretty much established that the "Rape" was policy. The destruction the Kwantung army wrought was deliberate - a warning to the other mercantile zones/trading cities that if resistance occurred, no-one was safe.

 

[ViolentPanda]

What about Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and... Japan itself?

Have a look at your list and reflect which of these things is not like the other.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Possibly the book by Iris Chang.

Actual sexual rape at Nanking and elsewhere was encouraged [recall our discussion of rape as a tool of genocide]; but the encouragement of rape and murder of civilians is equally abhorrent, although a different species from the enslavement of women by a government for purposes of servicing government forces. The Soviets raped civilians, the Germans raped civilians, and unarguably, British Canadian and American soldiers raped civilians, with greater or lesser degrees of official encouragement, or at least official blindness. None of those armies maintained slave-brothels.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Have a look at your list and reflect which of these things is not like the other.

Or even better, tell me which thing you consider different. This is supposed to be a discussion, not an exercise in the Socratic Method.

 

[Red Cat]

I wonder why when the Japanese Army was so brutal you refuse to see a link between the rape of these women and the actions of its soldiers elsewhere. It seems to me that maybe encouraging violence and brutality towards women (cos rape is not about servicing men's sexual needs) enabled the soldiers to carry out such atrocities as they did in Nanking.