The Rape of Japan After World War II

…by Jonas E. Alexis

We all know what the Allied forces did in Germany after the fall of Nazi Germany. They raped virtually every woman civilian they could find. Historian Antony Beever himself says that the Allied forces “raped every German female from eight to 80.” He also describes this diabolical activity as “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history.” This was so great that at least 2 million women were raped, and many of them were raped “as many as 60 to 70 times.”

Let us recap a few things before we move to the atrocities that the United States projected onto Japanese women after the war was over. The Allied forces aspired to morally and psychologically destroy Germany, and one of the best ways they used to humiliate the Germans was rape. As one of the Red Army Field Postal Service letters stated:

“And now we take our revenge on the Germans for all their despicable acts committed against us. We’re being allowed to do what we please with the German scoundrels. German mothers shall rue the day they gave birth to a son. May German mothers now feel the horrors of war firsthand.

“Now we’re meeting up with German civilians, and our soldiers are making good use of German women. There are plenty of women around, but they don’t understand a word of Russian. But that’s even better because you don’t have to talk them into it. Just aim the Nagan [pistol] and shout, ‘Lie down!…take care of your business and be off…Our boys have already tried out all the German women.'”

Stanford historian Norman Naimark notes that although the reasons for raping and torturing German women were many, one of the primary reasons was that the Russians were directly motivated by vengeance.

Rape “was not fundamentally motivated by sexual needs,” Naimark argues, but “is a crime of violence.” To say that “war breeds rape” does not explain the fact that not only did the Soviets rape women on a massive scale, but that long before they came to Germany, they propagandized “more reason for revenge.”

Naimark continues to say, “Throughout the Soviet press, the idea was widespread that the Germans—women on the home front included—would have to ‘pay’ for their evil deeds. It was not untypical for Soviet troops to rape every female over the age of twelve or thirteen in a village, killing many in the process…The reports of women subjected to gang rapes and ghastly nightly rapes are far too numerous to be considered isolated incidents.”

In Danzig, we are told that “It was open season for the Russian soldiers once again. They raped, murdered, and pillaged. Women between the ages of twelve and seventy-five were raped; boys who sought to rescue their mothers were pitilessly shot. The Russians defiled the ancient Cathedral of Oliva and raped the Sisters of Mercy. Later they put the building to the torch. In the hospitals both nurses and female doctors were subjected to the same outrages after the soldiers drank surgical spirit. Nurses were raped over the bodies of unconscious patients in the operating theatres together with the women in the maternity ward. Doctors who tried to stop this were simply gunned down… Many Danzigers took their own lives. The men were rounded up, beaten and thrown into the concentration camp at Matzkau. From there 800 to 1,000 were despatched to Russia twice daily.”

Some might argue that the Germans deserved to be raped and tortured because they brutally massacred innocent and defenseless men, women and children. We certainly do not have time to go over all the details surrounding this issue precisely because we have to move on to the topic of our discussion. But we have to highlight in passing that World War II was forced upon the German people.

Second, what does raping innocent German women have to do with Nazi Germany? As noted British historian points out, “For every European who was involved in the fighting of the Second War, there were at least ten civilians who were not directly involved but who nonetheless were forced to suffer the painful consequences of international conflict.”

You may be thinking, “Well, that was just Germany. The United States weren’t involved in raping women in Japan, were they?” Well, the historian answer is yes. In fact, many US generals cared very little about Japanese civilians. Did you know that US General Curtis Lemay “had no qualms whatsoever of targeting non-combatants”?

From historian Thomas Goodrich: “In one raid on Tokyo alone, in one night, an estimated 75,000 to 200,000 people, mostly women and children, were burned to death. Only the incineration of Dresden, Germany, with an estimated death toll of between 200,000-400,000, was greater.”

Harry S. Truman hated the Japanese and wanted to treat them like beast. He said: “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless necessary.”

Sure enough, the Japanese were treated like beasts. One marine colonel told his men: “You will take no prisoners, you will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that’s it.” There is more. Thomas Goodrich writes:

“Understandably, Japanese soldiers had no more desire to surrender and be tortured than did US soldiers fighting the Indians on the Plains of America a century earlier. Each fought to the finish, but each also saved the ‘last bullet’ for them self. If a Japanese soldier found himself surrounded with no way to escape or kill himself, he committed ‘suicide’ by walking calmly back and forth along the enemy lines until a bullet found its mark. Sometimes ten, even twenty, Japanese would thus kill themselves simultaneously…Not only were there virtually no survivors among the 30,000 men of the Japanese garrison on Saipan, but two out of every three civilians—some 22,000 in all—were either murdered or committed suicide. ‘We just blew it all up,’ admitted one marine. ‘We don’t know if there were women and children or whatever, we just blew them up.’”

It was common among US forces to treat Japanese “dirty yellow rats.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Leahy knew that the Japs were treated inhumanely. He said: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were almost defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

Then there was the rape problem: “Soon after the U.S. marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines ‘mopped up’ the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started ‘hunting for women’ in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.”

The following is from historian Thomas Goodrich:

Because the great bulk of fighting in the war against Japan was fought on the water, in the air or across islands either uninhabited or sparsely populated, rape is a word seldom mentioned in American war diaries or official reports during the years 1941-1944. When US forces invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa, however, this changed.  Almost immediately, and in spite of the bloody fighting, US soldiers began the sexual assault on the females of the island. In one prefecture alone, during a ten-day period, over one thousand women reported being raped. Since most victims would never come forward and voluntarily suffer such shame in a society where modesty and chastity were prized above all else, the number of rapes was undoubtedly much greater than reported.

Incidents like the following became common: Marching south, men of the 4th Marines passed a group of some 10 American soldiers bunched together in a tight circle next to the road. They were “quite animated,” noted a corporal who assumed they were playing a game of craps. “Then as we passed them,” said the shocked marine, “I could see they were taking turns raping an oriental woman. I was furious, but our outfit kept marching by as though nothing unusual was going on.”

So pervasive was the crime, and so frightened were the people, that hundreds of Okinawa women committed suicide by swallowing poison or by leaping from the steep cliffs of the island. With their nation’s surrender in August, 1945, Japanese officials were so concerned about the mass rape of their wives and daughters by the victors that they rounded up tens of thousands of girls from poorer families throughout the nation and all but forced them into prostitution at various brothels, or “comfort stations.”

Although such stop-gap measures did prevent wholesale rape on a German scale, this was small consolation to the women and children who had to endure the sanctioned sex attacks.  Earning anywhere from eight cents to a dollar a day, a girl working in the “rape stations,” as they more commonly were called, might be brutally raped and sodomized from 15 to 60 times a days.

“They took my clothes off,” remembered one little girl. “I was so small, they were so big, they raped me easily. I was bleeding, I was only 14. I can smell the men. I hate men.”

Despite hundreds of thousands of American and Australian occupation soldiers using the rape stations, thousands more preferred taking their sex violently.  In the days, weeks and months after the surrender, numerous atrocities were committed as the victors laid claim to the “spoils of war.”

In the spring of 1946, American GI’s cut the phone lines in Nagoya and raped every women they could get their hands on, including children as young as ten.  At another city, US soldiers broke into a hospital and spent their time raping over 70 women, including one who had just given birth.  The mother’s infant was flung to the floor and killed.

Had Allied occupation commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spent even half the time on stemming rape as he spent censoring news from Japan or running down real or imagined Japanese war criminals, the attacks would have been curtailed. But, like his opposite in Europe, Gen. Eisenhower, he did not.

Now here is the rub: the U.S. cried crocodile tears when Japan hesitated to apologize for past war crimes. We are told ad nauseam that Japan is guilty of war crime; but the U.S. is not. Obama was the first president to visit Hiroshima, but then again he did not apologize for the atomic bomb that blasted at least 226,000 Japanese, many of them civilians. Those who survived the bombing are still suffering from cancer and other diseases, including genetic damage. But it is Japan that needs to apologize, not the U.S.!

We all know by now that this is total nonsense. The interesting thing is that Japan has raised the same question over and over, and the US has tried to ignore it. Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto blew everything out of proportion when he said:

“It is a hard truth that even these nations used local women for sexual reasons. This is a historical fact and there is hard evidence that proves it was true. Based on the premise that Japan must remorsefully face its past offenses and must never justify the offenses, I intended to argue that other nations in the world must not attempt to conclude the matter by blaming only Japan and by associating Japan alone with the simple phrase of ‘sex slaves’ or ‘sex slavery.’”

Even the Daily Mail had some sense when they pointed out, “While some other World War II armies had military brothels, Japan is the only country accused of such widespread, organized sexual slavery…. Hashimoto also claims singling out Japan is wrong, alleging the issue also existed in the armed forces of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and the former Soviet Union during World War II.”

Some may say again that the Japanese deserved to be bombed, tortured and raped after the war. But we also have to remember that the United States provoked the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. Keep in mind that virtually no American wanted the United States to enter World War II. In fact, 80 percent of Americans said that they wanted to stay out of the war. So the Roosevelt administration looked for a diabolical excuse. That was why they provoked Japan. And the provocation was almost exclusively the work of a Jewish individual by the name of Harry Dexter White, who himself was a Soviet agent in the White House. As historical writer John Koster puts it,

“Harry Dexter White, the most intelligence and best informed advisor of all, had his orders from the NKVD—an American war with Japan was necessary for the survival of the Soviet Union in the fight now raging with Hitler. FDR, in his bereaved confusion and his preoccupation with the survival of Britain, let three self-serving hacks and a Soviet secret agent provoke a war that he himself did not want….Harry Dexter White and his puppet [Henry] Morgenthau wanted war and were prepared to push all the necessary buttons….Harry Dexter White had intended to provoke the Japanese beyond any hope of peace.”

Right after Pearl Harbor, Henry Morgenthau, another Jewish revolutionary in the Roosevelt administration, “asked J. Edgar Hoover what he thought about rounding up the entire Japanese and Japanese-American population of the west coast. Hoover was appalled and bluntly told Morgenthau that Attorney General Francis Biddle would not approve any ‘dragnet or round-up procedure.’ Many of these ethnic Japanese were American citizens, Hoover reminded Morgenthau, and such an action would be illegal.”

But by March of 1942, just a few months after Pearl Harbor, “Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, establishing the War Relocation Authority,” which many people have never heard of. “Japanese-Americans born and raised in the United States, many of them Christians, many of them graduates of American high schools and colleges, were moved on a few days’ notice to ten concentration camps in isolated mountain and desert locations. Some collapsed of heat stroke before they arrived at the hastily constructed tar-paper and clapboard barracks, where multiple families shared a single rom.”

By June of the same year, 112,000 Japanese-Americans “were interned behind barbed wire, eating wretched food in harsh climates. About a done inmates were shot dead by guards, and many others were beaten, sometimes to avenge a fallen brother or friend, sometimes because they wandered outside the safety zone, often trying to catch fish to supplement their rations. Many elderly Japanese succumbed to culture shock and simply gave up the will to live….The average Japanese-American from California, Oregon, or Washington sent about nine hundred days in concentration camps during World War II for a single crime—the wrong racial background.”

This was all the work of one man, Harry Dexter White. He actually “changed history by engineering the diplomatic responses that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor and stranding, consequently, thirty thousand Americans in the Philippines to be decimated by the vengeful Japanese. Pearl Harbor was Harry Dexter White’s first military victory for Stalin.”

So, the next time you hear a political prostitute or intellectual ideologue talking about how bad Japan was during World War II, then tell him quite bluntly: “You hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of your own eye; and then shall you see clearly to cast out the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

References:

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Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, ed., The Expulsions of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War (San Domenico, Italy: European University Institute, 2004).

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Jean-Louis Panne, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

Milton Diamond and Ayako Uchiyama, “Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 22(1): 1-22, 1999.

Steven E. Aschhem, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890-1900 (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

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E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008); Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2012); Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2000).

Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-1939 (New York: Schoken, 1985).

Elizabeth Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity,” American Historical Review, 1996: 354–395.

Frank Dikotter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1952 (New York: Walker & Company, 2010).

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Dower, John W. (1986). War Without Mercy. Race and Power in the Pacific War. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 64–66.

Ferguson, Niall (2007). The War of the World. History’s Age of Hatred. London: Penguin Books.

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Hoyt, Edwin P. (1987). Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict. London: Arrow Books.

Charles A. Lindbergh (1970). The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Antony Beevor, “’They raped every German female from eight to 80,’” Guardian, May 2, 2002.

Jonas E. Alexis and Thomas Goodrich, “The Rape of Japanese Men and Women After World War II (Complete Version),” VT, March 6, 2016.

Jonas E. Alexis, “Postmodernism and the (Sexual) New World Order in Japan,” VT, September 27, 2015.

“Britain and US also kept sex slaves during World War Two, says Japanese mayor who claimed use of ‘comfort women’ was justified,” Daily Mail, May 28, 2013.

Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

“US Won’t Apologize for ‘Test Blasts’ at Hiroshima, Nagasaki that Killed 226,000,” Sputnik News, September 8, 2016.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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