Masculinity, Sexuality and Japanese sexual slavery system in World War Two: Discourses of Justification and Dissent

During World War Two, the Japan’s military system of sexual slavery, the so-called “comfort women” system, was established and developed to provide sexual services and pleasure to soldiers of the Japan’s Imperial Army, as a part of the military plan of the Empire of Japan. As a result, an estimated 200,000 women and girls from the territories colonized and occupied by Japan and Japan’s mainland were taken into the system. This research analyzes and compares documents and arguments issued between the 1930s and 1940s, when the Japan’s sexual system was established, with the statements and arguments in today’s Japan, specifically in 2013 and 2014. The purpose of the research is to understand how understanding of masculinity, sexuality, race and nationhood within the Japanese government and Imperial Army played the role of justifying the system. The analysis tells two main findings: first, patriarchal ideas about male (and female) sexuality, the nation and political ambitions, as well as ideas about Japanese racial hierarchies encouraged the Imperial Army to establish and justify the sexual slavery system. Second, many of those ideas remain in the contemporary Japan’s politics that continues denying responsibility for the sexual slavery system and survivors. At the same time, new discourses of denial have appeared, linked to the renewed power of nationalism in Japan.