On Contract
Jan O’Herne was nineteen years old in February of 1944. By then, she had been living in a Japanese prison camp for nearly two years. Her family was Dutch-Indonesian – they ran a sugar plantation on Java – and when the island fell to the Japanese, Jan, her mother, and her two younger sisters were taken to a prison camp at Ambawara. In the prison camp, they scrounged for chicken bones from the Japanese canteen’s garbage. They ate snails and lizards and ground-up eggshells. All around them, women and children were dying – starvation, malaria, dysentery, measles. But Jan and her family survived. And so, on the afternoon when a truckload of Japanese army officers rumbled into the camp to “recruit” unmarried girls, Jan was among the ten women who were loaded onto an army truck and driven away.
Jan spent the next three months confined at the “House of the Seven Seas,” where she was raped countless times by Japanese soldiers. As she recalled in her memoir, she fought – viciously – every time. When she complained to the doctor that her imprisonment and rape violated the Geneva Convention, he laughed. Then he raped her, too. “I was left with a body that was torn and fragmented everywhere,” she wrote. “There was not one inch of my body that did not hurt” (97).
After nearly fifty years of shame and silence, Jan O’Herne came forward with her story in 1992, inspired by the example of the Korean former “comfort woman” Kim Hak Sun. (O’Herne, like many of the women who were confined and raped by the Japanese military during the Pacific War, found the term “comfort woman” offensive – she preferred “war rape victim” or “sex slave.”) O’Herne saw her testimony as a demand for justice on her own behalf, but also as an act of solidarity across lines of race and nationality. “Perhaps when a European woman came forward,” she wrote, “Japan would take notice” (142).
As O’Herne clearly recognized, her whiteness, along with her high level of education, made her story impossible to ignore. And to this day, hers is practically the only survivor testimony that denialists do not contest. Instead, they argue that Herne’s situation was tragic, but exceptional. The “Coalition of Three Parties for Communicating Historical Truth,” an ironically named rightwing group, included a paragraph on O’Herne in a 2016 report about “comfort women.” Hers was “an isolated case,” they argued, and the “brothel” where she was confined was promptly shut down by the Japanese command when they learned of its existence.
The denialist account of O’Herne’s experience omits many details. There is no mention of the dozens and dozens of officers who patronized the brothel, or the military doctor who raped O’Herne when she invoked the Geneva Convention, or what happened to her in the aftermath of her “liberation” from the comfort station. “When we reached the [new] camp,” O’Herne recalled, “the Japanese told us that we were never to tell anybody, ever, of what had happened to us. If we did, we would be killed, along with our families” (104)
But to me, the most interesting – and damning -- detail is the one that very few people have noticed. After Jan O’Herne was ripped out of the prison camp and deposited in the comfort station, she was asked to sign a contract.
The detail about the contract is interesting because the existence or non-existence of contracts for Korean “comfort women” is at the center of the seemingly endless controversy over J. Mark Ramseyer’s recent article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” Ramseyer’s article (which I critiqued along with a group of other scholars here) asserts that the Korean women confined in the Japanese military comfort stations were prostitutes held to standard contractual arrangements in which they were paid large sums of money upfront for their service. The problem is that Ramseyer produces no such contracts, and, as many scholars have pointed out, one cannot conduct an analysis of contracts that do not exist.
In response to this critique, a small, unrepresentative group of Japanese and Korean rightwing scholars has rushed to Ramseyer’s defense. They argue that it does not matter that Ramseyer did not cite any contracts. Surely, they must have existed. And it is true that there are scattered references to contracts in oral testimony, even though none has yet been discovered. The rightwing scholars’ point is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The Waseda professor Arima Tetsuo went so far as to say that Ramseyer cannot possibly be fairly criticized until his critics knock on every door in Korea and conduct a thorough search for the missing contracts.
This argument is ridiculous on its face. Even if someone found a storehouse full of a thousand contracts in Daegu tomorrow, a scenario that is exceedingly unlikely, that would not change the fact that Ramseyer did not have them and did not cite them. However, the more interesting question, to me, is whether it would matter it all. If someone did happen to discover a contract for a Korean comfort woman, what would that mean?
As denialists like to point out, the Japanese army’s own regulations insisted that prostitution at comfort stations should be “voluntary.” But it was extremely difficult to persuade women to consent to be raped for months or years on end in a warfront brothel, even when they had few other choices. O’Herne’s case suggests that, like oppressive modern regimes everywhere, the Japanese army solved this problem with paperwork: a “contract” attesting to the woman’s consent, presented and signed under extremely coercive circumstances.
This is how O’Herne describes the situation in which she was presented with a contract: “The officer in charge produced some papers for us to sign. They were written in Japanese, which, of course, we could not read, but we had a faint idea of what they were about. We refused, we did not sign. Even though we were beaten and threatened and yelled at, we did not sign!” (77)
O’Herne successfully resisted, and, apparently unconcerned, the Japanese officers in charge raped her anyway. After all, the paperwork was merely a convenient fiction. But other women, including others in Indonesia, did sign. As a Dutch government report in the mid 1990s made clear, even the women who volunteered for service in private brothels that served the Japanese military did so under coercive circumstances: “In some cases, the police and the Kempeitai (the much-feared military police) intimidated the women by, for example, threatening the lives of their families; in others, the threat of internment in the civilian camps, with their extreme shortages of food and medicine, played a role.”
If we were to discover those contracts today, moldering away somewhere in Jakarta, they would look like legitimate agreements. And so would the contracts that some of O’Herne’s contemporaries signed at the comfort stations, including those of women who had previously worked in the sex trade and really did volunteer for service. As Yuki Tanaka points out, “One of the women [who had been in a prison camp] took her two children (age two and four) with her to a comfort station. It was unusual that a comfort woman was allowed to keep her children with her at a comfort station. It could be the case that she ‘volunteered’ on the condition that her children would be fed at the station” (73).
Some might argue that coercive “contracts” were employed in Indonesia, which was occupied enemy territory, and not in Korea, which was part of the Japanese empire. Hypothetical Korean contracts, which certainly existed even though they are not extant, would be evidence of legitimate agreement! And if someone could find them, perhaps by knocking on all the doors in Korea, they would prove that Korean “comfort women” were voluntary sex workers and exonerate Ramseyer’s argument!
But this misses a few obvious points. First, as Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert point out, we don’t know what language these contracts would have employed or precisely what they said. Second, most Korean women who found themselves in the position of being trafficked were illiterate, and they could not have known what they had agreed to. Third, Korea was not simply “part of Japan,” it was a territory under colonial domination, and its people had a different relationship to the Japanese government from that enjoyed by citizens of the home islands. Finally, so what?
It’s true that “so what?” is an obnoxious rhetorical question, but in my defense, I’m only asking it in frustration, in response to an obnoxious rhetorical argument. Given what we already know – that the Japanese military insisted on contracts as a paperwork solution to the problem of coercion – what would the existence of a contract prove? As any legitimate legal scholar should be able to tell you, a contract is not a contract when you have a gun to your head – whether that gun is a literal gun, a bayonet, or the threat of your family’s death by starvation in a prison camp. And it is not valid if it can’t be dissolved — for example, if you are being held captive in a frontline “brothel” and you are completely unable to escape.
By insisting on the validity of contracts – and insisting that their appearance would absolve the Japanese military of culpability – the men writing in Ramseyer’s defense are adopting the exact logic of the Japanese officers who presented a “contract” to a terrified, nineteen-year-old prisoner of war in Java in 1944.
Jan Ruff O’Herne died in 2019, but she would have understood their argument perfectly.