Comfort Women
- History Fix Podcast
- 2 hours ago
- 23 min read
Episode 156: How 200,000 Women Were Forced Into Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Government
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Picture Japan. Maybe you’re thinking of Mount Fuji towering in the distance, framed by cascades of pink cherry blossoms. Perhaps a buddhist temple perched serenely beside a lake dotted with lotus flowers, ever floating, gliding slightly in the mostly still water. Japan seems… nice. It seems calm. It seems peaceful. In the back of our minds maybe we know Japan was on the wrong side of World War II. There was Pearl Harbor and all that. But we don’t tend to let it taint our views of the country. Japan’s fine. We like their culture, their food. Japan is fine by us over here in the west. But is it possible that’s because, in our western-centric minds, we are blissfully unaware of the atrocities Japan actually committed? I’m not talking about Pearl Harbor folks. I’m talking about unthinkable acts of violence and cruelty towards innocent civilians in neighboring countries. I’m talking about 30 million dead. I’m talking about unethical scientific experimentation. I’m talking about torture. I’m talking about rape. Lots and lots of rape leaving behind countless women, nameless women, invisible victims, too afraid to utter what happened to them. They called them comfort women but nothing about being a comfort woman was comfortable. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. A few months ago I delved super deep into Japan’s involvement in World War II, talking about events leading up to the war, Pearl Harbor, Japanese internment in the US and the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was really important to me to cover that side of the story because I find we often neglect eastern history here in the west. I think people are a lot more knowledgeable about what happened in Germany with Hitler and the Nazis. And maybe that’s because, I don’t know. I think people feel more connected to stories about people who look like them, or people with similar cultures to their own. I think that’s a natural, biological thing humans do, grouping together based on similarities. But, I don’t think, not for one second, that we should neglect to learn about history because it played out on the opposite side of the world. Or it involved people who look different and speak differently and live differently. That sort of neglect is dangerous because there are important lessons to be learned there. So I’ve been personally trying to learn and share more non-western history because it seems to me an area that really needs fixing. We have neglected it in the west and we gotta fix that.
So I wanted to return to that world today, the world of World War II era Japan and China and I really wanted to focus on the victims this time. Back in episode 142 about Pearl Harbor, I talked a lot with my guest Quin Cho about this general and that general and this battle and that and politics and that’s all super important too. But this time around, I want to focus on the people that have been mostly forgotten, the victims. And, it being Women’s History Month of course, I decided to hone in on the female victims of Japan’s atrocities during that time, women, called comfort women, who were forced into sexual slavery essentially, to benefit the Japanese Army. And because I’m admittedly not an expert on eastern history, I’ve recruited a special guest, once again, to help me tell this very important story.
Jenny: My name is Jenny, Jenny Chan. And I'm the director of Pacific Atrocities Education. And I know that you've had Quin on the show before.
Shea: Yes, it was awesome. So knowledgeable. He was great. Just a wealth of knowledge.
Jenny and Quin both work for Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in California with the mission of raising awareness about Japan’s often overlooked war crimes during and in the years leading up to World War II. Jenny has also written a historical novel called The Undrowning Lotus that is based on a true story and, in writing that book, she interviewed survivors, women who served as these comfort women and were lucky enough to survive and brave enough to tell their stories. So she’s really the perfect person to enlighten us about this very dark part of history. And just trigger warning, some of what you’re going to hear in this episode is hard to hear. We’re going to talk about some extremely shocking things, things that may not be appropriate for younger audiences. So keep that in mind. Also, I have links to both the Pacific Atrocities Education website and to Jenny’s book The Undrowning Lotus in the description of this episode in case you want to learn more. You might want to because, I promise, this one is going to be hard to stop thinking about. Anyway, let’s get into it.
Shea: So, you know, I love the topic that we're here to talk about today because it's so perfectly History Fix. It's something I didn't know anything about. You know, since you kind of suggested it, I've read a couple articles, but I'm really looking forward to you enlightening me further. Can you just tell me a little bit about Chinese comfort women during World War II?
Jenny: Yeah. So a lot of people have heard about Korean comfort women, but Chinese comfort women was also a thing. In fact, the first like military conscribed um sexual slavery, military brothel was in Shanghai. After 1932, the Shanghai incident, um a lot of soldiers were caught raping women. And so they were thinking that, well, if we were going to um If our soldiers are like raping women, we might as well create something that is systematic for them and is military controlled. And that is their solution of military sexual violence, which is quite shocking. um it's kind of ironic, isn't it, that their only way to fight sexual violence is with more sexual violence itself.
Shea: Right, it seems like the way to fix one atrocity is by committing another atrocity, but almost like a government sanctioned one. It's almost worse in some ways, right? Because it's like, yeah, almost more acceptable or something, which of course isn't.
Jenny: Yeah, it's more like a legal thing. They like, um the Japanese government at the time kind of justified it by saying that it was a wartime logistical policy. And it's really rooted to serve the soldiers who were already very upset about serving this war. And so then that's why if you see a lot of the comfort women um documents from the National Archives, our organization has like digitized about a million pages from World War II and onto our digital archive. And if you look into the digital archive, like, I mean, into the National Archives, a lot of these comfort women were just amenities. It's almost like it's a side note of history. We imagine wars of generals and battles, but then we don't imagine what women have gone through in the war. It's an interesting thing. It's very shocking too, because not only were they amenities, they were also used as tools to stop sexual violence. But you can see during the rape of Nanking, it really didn't do anything because so many women were raped in 1937 during the rape of Nanking. But in their justification, they said that these comfort stations are meant to control soldiers, reduce backlash, and manage disease that they would get from like, know, but it just, I mean, yeah, just institutionalized this kind of sexual slavery during the war and it's very fascinating because in Korea, like in the US media, we always think that Korea and Japan are like friends, but like every Wednesday, um there were, even when I was visiting Korea, there's uh ongoing protests in front of Japanese embassy. um Every Wednesday and like my Airbnb host invited me to go and like protest. I'm like, wow, it was a Wednesday, you know. And it's that kind of scar that Japan has with its neighbors that's like not healing because people still remember what they did in World War II.
Shea: I remember talking with Quin Cho about that. I never know if it's Nanking or Nanjing. you know what the...
Jenny: Yeah, Nanjing is more like a pinyin and Nanking is more older style of calling it.
Shea: I remember touching on that massacre and sometimes it's called the rape of Nanking or Nanjing and I still am just like traumatized from just learning, didn't really know a whole lot about that until talking to Quin Cho and I still think about it. I find myself thinking about it all the time and just how absolutely horrific that was.
I know I’ve mentioned the Rape of Nanking and the Nanking Massacre several times now but in case you’re just now joining me, this was an event during the Second Sino-Japanese War that preceded World War II in which the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Nanking or Nanjing, the then capital city of China, and proceeded to rape and brutally murder just everyone they could get their hands on, we’re talking civilians, men, women, children, the elderly. Anyone. It’s one of the most horrifying acts of brutality I’ve yet to learn about in my pursuit of historical knowledge. If you find yourself on the Nanjing Massacre Wikipedia page, please proceed with caution as the photos they have there are very graphic and difficult to view. But having that small bit of context, knowing how many women were raped in Nanking, I had to ask…
Shea: Do you feel like rape was a big part of that. There were some tens of thousands of women raped during that, you know, among other atrocities. But do you feel like that influenced..? Did they set up more of these comfort houses or these comfort stations afterwards? Or were they already happening before that? I'm wondering how influential that was.
Jenny: They already set it up in 1932. Okay. And that was like the first incident that China and Japan well, one of the first incidents. That's like five years before, you know, um the rape of Nanking. And if you think about it, too, it's shocking because Korea was handed to Japan by Teddy Roosevelt after the Treaty of Portsmouth. So one can only imagine what kind of violence that Korea had to go through.
Okay pause. What’s Ted doing meddling in Korea. So, the Treaty of Portsmouth officially ended the Russo-Japanese war that was fought in 1904 and 1905 between, you guessed it, Russia and Japan. This was over Russia trying to expand its territory in East Asia, as if Russia wasn’t big enough already. Japan won this war, forcing Russia to stop expanding into Asia, and becoming the first Asian power, in modern times at least, to defeat a European power. So this treaty was sort of brokered by US President Theodore AKA Teddy Roosevelt. Why? Was the US involved in the Russo-Japanese War? Nope. The US, if you haven’t caught on yet, just likes to meddle in other country’s business whenever possible. Not to like help other people though, mostly to protect US interests overseas as was the case here. So anyway, Teddy Roosevelt brokers the treaty which essentially gives Korea to Japan which will of course have all sorts of consequences. He more or less threw lambs into a lion’s den by doing this. But don’t worry, Ted got a Nobel Peace Prize for it in 1906. He was actually the first American to win a Nobel Prize for his negotiation skills in ending the Russo-Japanese War. Did anyone bother to ask Korea to weigh in? Of course not.
Jenny: And it's also insane to me that like, we post on Instagram and like there are still people denying what happened.
Shea: Yeah, I was gonna ask you that. What has Japan's response as a country? I mean, I assume they've acknowledged it. Have they apologized formally or paid any reparations to any of the survivors that you know of? What's Japan's stance on it today?
Jenny: Yeah, so that's very fascinating and it's a very long story. So in 2014, I visited one of the comfort women in Shanxi and her name was Jiang Xianchu. And she went to court in like the 1990s with Japan and ultimately they agreed that it happened but never paid a reparation for it. And oh then in the 2000s, I think they also established like this um Asian woman fund. But the payment for the Korean comfort women was so minimal that there was a video online of these uh Korean comfort women calling their Korean prime minister a sellout for agreeing to this compensation because it was so low and it's almost humiliating. It's also interesting because a lot of these survivors, because in Asia sexual violence is such a taboo topic, I feel like that they don't talk about it outright until they're super like they're very old and they it's like something that they want to get off the chest, you know?
Shea: Yeah, I imagine for a long time. Yeah. I mean, especially if culturally, it's not really spoken of. You wouldn't want to just like come out and admit what had happened to you. There's probably a lot of like shame and it would be to about.
Jenny: Yeah. In 2014, I went to Shaanxi to like interview a bunch of them and a bunch of them like I interviewed them in 2015. It took me two years to write the book because of like how emotionally heavy it was for me. in one of the comp, like she was swept up in like the 1942. like during one of the bigger like anti-cruel fighters in Northern China and she lived in like basically in those, it was like a cave for that like little comfort station. And she was basically raped like daily for like, for like a year. And like 10 to 15 like, uh rape, like happening a day.
Shea: Oh my god.
Jenny: And uh she was just like, and then afterwards she was pregnant. Because you know, I guess some people didn't use protection or you know, it failed and whatever. And she was telling me that after the war, like her mom and her went to like a cave nearby and buried that baby alive and like just never thought about it again. So it's not just like, you know, it's one victim, you know, you have like this lineage of victims. And then her mom told her, don't ever tell anyone about this because you know, it's just too embarrassing. And so she didn't talk about that until like the 1980s and the 1990s until she's like older because she wanted to have like, you know, when she was younger, I guess she wanted to have more of a future. You don't want to talk about that. Like when you're younger and like, it's like a taboo topic, you know? And yeah, so it's just like an emotionally heavy, traumatic experience that happened between like, you know, Japan and its neighboring country. And it's not just like Chinese also, like they were also like the Dutch Indies were also colonized. And I forgot this woman's name, Jan. She has a book about her, her, her experience as a Japanese comfort woman. And she also didn't talk about it until like well after the war. And she even wrote a book about it. And she was Dutch and her family were in the Dutch Indies and um she described how it was like serving so many men in like one day, you know, and yeah.
Shea: How did they, so I know there were Chinese women and Korean women and even from, you know, other places, but how did they acquire these women? Like, was this something, I mean, I assume they didn't like sign up willingly for it. How did they get the women to be part of this?
Jenny: So Korea was one of the largest sources because Korea was a colonial, I would say, was kind of a colonial infrastructure. So a lot of the women living in like rural Korea, weren't like so they weren't really well off. So then Japan, the Japanese government would say something like, oh, we're recruiting women to be dishwashers, nurses and whatever, promising some high paying jobs. And then they just take them and they end up being comfort women instead of like being dishwashers or nurses or maid that they were promised to be. And then I realized that when I was going through some of the documents and going through like um that, there were also different tiers of comfort women. So for example, there were like geisha and like prostitutes type that will come from Japan and they would like serve the higher ranking like general and then the Koreans would probably serve like you know the mid-tier soldiers and and then like whoever that they abduct from military operation in the local area those who served like the infantrymen and like the lower tier of um soldiers and so it's um yeah it's a tier system. And it's interesting because we always think about war and people who dressed up in uniform, they go to battlefields, but then we don't think about the consequences and what happened to the victims of war. And going back to the rape of Nanking, it's so shocking that even a Nazi, John Rabe, wrote to Germany and was like, “I can't believe our friends are doing this in China right now.” And, uh and like he covered his building in swastika to try to save like women and children.
Shea: That's pretty bad if Nazis are calling you out.
Jenny: Yeah, it's very bad. um And so yeah, it's just like, and it's interesting too, because like, nowadays, I mean, this has happened to me like multiple times now, um posts about comfort women on our Instagram page is like very scary for me, because like these people are like, oh, uh there are a lot of deniers out there um that disagree about what happened. And they would say something like, oh, this didn't happen. They were just they were looking for jobs and blah blah blah or they would be like, oh they had child bride system and we were trying to liberate them. Like I've seen all kinds of excuses like throughout our social media life that uh it's interesting. It's so crazy to me too because now the Japanese Takaichi just won a landslide victory, the LDP. And the LDP was actually founded by a class A war criminal, Kishinobusuke.
He came up with economic policy and a lot of the policies regarding like wartime Japan. And that's why he was captured at the end of the war. And he was allegedly a class A war criminal. Some of the other things that he did was like in Manchuria, he captured like the Japanese captured four million slave laborers and like 40 % died right away from like hardship. And, and it's so after the war, um he was in Sugamo prison. And there's even a whole memoir about that. But then the whole Asia was supposedly falling to communism. And so Eisenhower and the CIA took him out of Sugamo prison and knew that he knows how Japanese politics worked and had him basically become Prime Minister within 10 years of being a war criminal. He established the LDP party. And his grandson was Shinzo Abe, which I'm pretty sure you know, was assassinated like a few years ago.
Shea: Yeah.
Jenny: And so the LDP party just won in the landslide, which is just and this is the kind of party that also this current prime minister also was a frequent visitors of Yasukuni shrine, which like, um it's kind of like idolizing uh Japanese war criminals. And so if you think about it, you know, it's just like, not only are they not… can you imagine if Nazis or Germany suddenly decided to have a shrine for uh war criminals, class A war criminals, how that would look for like, how that...
Shea: I even think about it because I live in the American South, and I even think about it with some of these Confederate uh war memorials and sort of... uh glorifying Robert E. Lee and some of the Confederate generals who really fought to continue to enslave people in this country. How there's been more sort of people are starting to realize more and more how maybe we shouldn't have this statue glorifying this guy who fought for this really unjust thing. But yeah, that's even a Nazi version or like in Japan, it's like, yeah, it's a little distasteful. feel like it's a little.
Jenny: Yeah, it's just very uncomfortable too, for like other people like their neighboring country. And that's why I think Korea is continuing to have their um their protests every Wednesday. And in the Philippines, they had a comfort women statue. And but because of how Japan had paid for a lot of the Philippines infrastructure and contributed economically that they basically said that, um let's take it down. We can't have this comfort women's statue. Let's not remember what they did during the war. So it's like a lot of this like economic and political like issues as well.
Shea: But you know, we talked about how these women didn't want to talk about it and they didn't want to admit and part of that was this cultural thing. But that really facilitates it makes it possible for them to kind of sweep it under the rug and pretend like it didn't happen. You wonder if it took place in a different culture where it was less taboo and where the women felt more comfortable sort of telling what happened to them as victims. You wonder if they would have had to take more accountability. So it's like this perfect storm of like we don't talk about it in this culture and that has led to them sort of being able to almost get away with it. You know, they really haven't, if they're still protesting every Wednesday, it's like, clearly this is still an issue, you know, we have not resolved this. That's really sad.
Jenny: And if we think about it too, the 200, like women, the estimate of the 200,000 women who were coerced into comfort stations, right? Like these are the women who were accounted for, you know, throughout the Pacific, like 30 million people died. So there are like villages that got like looted and then like, it was like mass killing and then just burned down all the evidence. So what happened to the woman there? You know, we never know and we will never know what happened. And in fact, it was so brutal that I mean, it's, you can see some of the OSS documents of like, how they describe the Japanese atrocities. It was so brutal that it's shocking. And so with all these mass graves and whatnot, you can't even account for what happened to women outside of the comfort stations. And so I think it's inside and outside of the comfort station that had all these sexual violence on women.
Shea: Yeah, they just, it almost seemed, I mean, they're so objectified. Like they seem like these commodities and it's so dehumanizing. And I think about it just in calling them comfort women, you know, like they were not comfortable at all. Certainly the comfort isn't referring to them. It's the comfort of the men and even just the name comfort women really emphasizes how much the focus was on, the concern was on the men and the wellbeing of the men and do they have what they need? And no one's thinking about these women. You know, no one's worrying about their needs and their comfort. So even just the name to me is so telling of sort of the mentality that goes into that kind of thing. And you know, I imagine now it's been so long. I imagine there aren't many survivors still alive. I mean, they would be quite old, you know.
Jenny: Yeah, I'm glad I did the interview in like the 2010s when I did it. And it was also shocking that like, um because one of the Harvard professors, he was, I'm pretty sure he still is, sponsored by Mitsubishi, which is like one of the Japanese corporations in Harvard. They sponsor Harvard Professorship, apparently. That professor did a whole video about how these comfort women were just prostitutes during World War II. I'll send it to you later, but it's so bizarre. I forgot his name. But yeah, people were just like outraged by his claim. And then that's how I realized that apparently a lot of these like, academic chairs are also, you know, sponsored by, by corporations, or sometimes they have their own political agenda.
Shea: Hmm. Well, it's just like, it goes, yeah, you kind of spiral when you start thinking about that stuff. I did read in one of the articles that I that I kind of glanced over, it mentioned that um US soldiers may have even used these comfort houses um after the war, but up until like 1946, I think they didn't shut them down. They were still operating. Do you know anything about US involvement there?
Jenny: I don't. I haven't done any research into that, but it would not surprise me, to be honest with you. Given US occupation of Japan, was… and that's the kind of thing that like when men go into war, like we don't tell the kind of untold stories about what happens after or during, you know? And it's like, there's such a chaotic wartime system that we don't really know precisely what happened. Like we still don't know precisely how many comfort women there were. Right.
Shea: Do you know like what? I mean, I know obviously they were being abused daily. Do you know like what the living conditions were like their, accommodations, were they fed well? Did they have like a comfortable place to sleep? I mean, do you know what it was like in those conversations for the women?
Jenny: Yeah, so when I was interviewing uh one of the women, um she said no, basically, because you just basically being raped repeatedly 10 to 15 times. So she just closed her eyes and pretended that she wasn't even there and like she had maybe like a meal a day if she can even eat because it's like not even appetizing like who could be eating while going through that kind of living condition, right? But I suppose that if you're if it was like a higher tier comfort woman maybe but I recently read a memoir by like the so-called higher tier Japanese comfort woman. I don't think she was living that great of a life either. It's just all very sickening. It exposes really what war can do like to people.
Shea: It feels very animal, you know, it's like very like we're killing and we're raping. It's like we've gone back to this animalistic uh way of being almost like it brings out the worst in the worst in humans. But but it makes sense. You know, like you said, we don't really find out a lot of what these soldiers go through. They're witnessing these horribly traumatic, they're killing people and they're seeing people blown apart and they're losing friends. It's just this horrible thing war, right? So when you're in that, it's probably easy to justify doing one more horrible thing. It's a different reality. But it's a shame that the women have been so victimized in those instances. Like you said, we don't even know how many and we don't really know. We haven't really been able to talk about it. It's like this untold story that holds so many important lessons that needs to be told. So I love that you've been able to interview some. That's amazing that you've been able to actually interview some of these women and get their stories. It's so important.
Jenny: And can I say something else? So I was looking into like unit 731. This is what we do most of our research in because it's now like so complete with our data set. And it's so shocking to me how they do human experimentation. They would force a pregnant woman to contract syphilis by another male prisoner that they have already given syphilis to, to see if it would infect a baby. And that's the level of cruelty, I think, of this level of brutality. And unit 731 was like a human experimentation camp run by Ishii Shiro in um near Harbin, China in Manchuria when they captured Manchuria. Um like a lot of those, I mean, the prison, there was no survivor. So you don't even know what they go through. But then like you can read some accounts of like what the Japanese scientist was doing um they were doing. And it's how do I state this? It's they kind of justify what they were doing just by saying like, oh, you know, this is going to further science advancement and it was not just like one or two scientists who had gone rogue. We're talking about like thousands of scientists at this time who have gone rogue. And we have lesson plans about like what happens when there's no ethics ah in science. And I think that's why the humanities is so important. I think that's what that's why what you do is so important, like History Fix, because like what is science without the humanities? Right. And so and what is like you know, what is never again if the first time was really never told. And with a lot of this like, evidence being destroyed, that were destroyed, whatever we found are just like by the luck of chance that these documents survive because between surrendering and occupation, there were a whole two weeks, you know, that they can have is not like with the Nazis, where Americans were like right on the grounds right away so there's still a lot of gap of the stories that we're trying to tell. That's why I think it's more important than ever. Like when we go to the National Archives, a lot of the pages are now in like very fragile conditions. Because during World War II, they use like whatever they could grab to make paper. And so it's like onion peel paper or like, know, buy compound material. Even the Civil War, you it's in a more um better condition because it was more cotton bound paper. um yeah, it's just, yeah, it's just, it's just, when you when I was reading all of these like documents, I'm like, the human psychology, like the human mind is actually very weak, you know, um maybe these were ethical people. And then when I was reading the Sugamo prisoners and like how the villagers are trying to like have all these other um testify for these people who were so-called innocent, the villagers are like, no, he's a very good village doctor. He means very well. He's very nice to everyone. But then you read the war crimes like atrocities, you're like, wow, this is actually this guy, you know, during the war had totally gone out of um his way to kill people. It's insane.
Shea: It's hard to make sense of because it's like good and evil become these very confusing things because, you know, people are saying he's a good guy. but then you look at what these people are doing and you're like, well, that's not a good guy. So it's yeah, it's hard to make it's hard to make sense of. And it's like you said during war, it's you know, you can't justify it but it is it's almost like people become so desensitized by all of these horrible things that are happening that they almost are able to justify to themselves committing these things. um But yeah, it's, it's hard to make sense of for sure. Yeah, definitely.
Jenny: It's like it's been, I've been doing this for 10 years and sometimes I'm just like, wow, this is another thing that is just so creepy.
Shea: Yeah. And I think here in the US at least, I think people are pretty aware of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and all that. I don't think people are as aware of the Pacific atrocities, so I love that you're bringing that to light. You know, I think we tend to focus on more Western history and Western issues here. And then this is really more of an Eastern of an Eastern issue, Eastern history. So it's it's I think it's it's lesser known than what was happening in like the European front of the war. But really, like, I don't want to say more shocking or where it's not like certainly not worse, but like really horrific. It's really, yeah, it's shocking.
Jenny: We can't compare atrocities. We also can't look at the world in such a Western centric lens that we ignore all of the other sufferings.
Shea: Yeah. Yeah. So I love that you are shedding light on this and on the stories of these women. You mentioned, so you interviewed those women for your book, was that correct?
Jenny: Yes, it's called Undrowning Lotus, because I picked that name because Lotus is such It's like, you know, it always floats no matter what happens to them. And so, so then for these people, it was almost like when I was listening to their stories, it almost felt like they're, you know, they're resilient and they're always floating no matter what had happened to them. um And it's just like about that resilience. I mean, if I if that was happening to me, I don't know what I would do, you know,
Shea: Unthinkable.
Jenny: Yeah
Unthinkable is a good word for it. After our conversation, something Jenny said really stuck with me. She said quote “what is never again if the first time was really never told?” end quote. That gives me chills because it’s everything. It’s the whole mission of History Fix. It’s the whole mission of Pacific Atrocities Education. We have to tell these stories. We have to tell the story of a nameless, faceless Chinese woman who lived on the other side of the world almost a century ago. We have to tell her story because she matters. Because if no one knows what happened to her, if no one knows what she went through and how much she suffered, then how can we be sure it won’t happen again? An undrowning lotus. She floats, she floats through it all and so it’s easy to overlook her suffering. But don’t confuse resilience with tolerance. It’s hard to hear. It’s painful, these stories. It’s so much more comfortable to say “oh that didn’t happen. They were prostitutes, they chose to do that, they chose to be there.” Wouldn’t that be nice? To assume these women had some kind of agency, some control, that they weren’t the victims of human weakness, of cruelty and brutality that harkens back to an animalistic, uncivilized sort of savagery. It would be comfortable to delude ourselves into thinking that humans, that men, soldiers, generals, whatever, that they weren’t capable of this sort of savagery. That would be more comfortable. But, if there’s anything this story of comfort women has taught us, it’s that comfort is a rather subjective term. We need to be uncomfortable hearing these stories. We need to understand what we are capable of, to fear it, because, only then, can we actively prevent it from happening again.
Sources:
Frenchquarter.com "Micaela Almonester Pontalba: The Baroness of Extremes"
The Historic New Orleans Collection "The Woman Behind New Orleans' Famous Pontalba Buildings"
The Historic New Orleans Collection "How Did Louisiana Become Spanish?"
Emerging Civil War "Micaela Almonester, Andrew Jackson, and Myths"
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