This paper is a critical examination and analysis of several works regarding the role and use of forced prostitution by the Japanese during and immediately following World War II. During the war, the Japanese army forced Korean and other Asian women into military sexual slavery to serve its soldiers, and this organized trafficking system of "comfort women" has become a widely publicized subject. Less well examined are the "RAA comfort women," Japanese women who were forced into prostitution to serve the occupying forces following Japan's defeat. Although prostitution and militarization of civilian women have been practiced by many societies throughout history, the Japanese army's systematic, well-organized, and inhumane system of military sex slavery reached a new level of exploitation. Much about these women remains unrecognized and unexamined, and these writings shed some much-needed light on a very dark subject.
Sheldon Garon (1993, June) traces the roots of the state's involvement in prostitution in Japan in "The World's Oldest Debate?" He contends, "The history of licensed prostitution in Imperial Japan . . . bespeaks the state's fervent commitment to 'social management'" (p. 711). He chronicles the facts of the state's attempts to control and regulate the world's oldest profession and considers why the movement to abolish such practices failed in the emergence of a competing cafT culture before the second world war.
Garon (1993, June) argues that the state's establishment of the Recreation Amusement Association (RAA) following WWII provides "the most telling case of the continuities in official thinking" (p. 730). The RAA was created to try to manage the occupation forces in the same way that Imperial Japan had tried to manage its own citizenry. Garon's article provides important background history for examining the subject of Japanese comfort women during and after the war.
In "The Origin and Development of t...