Disturbing article which, although in places it might seem a little like a slanted or conspiracy view, is supported by references.
I haven’t checked, and generally can’t check, the references, but the view that MacArthur imposed censorship to conceal these issues is entirely consistent with the rest of his arrogant reign in Japan.
U.S. Courts-Martial in Occupation Japan: Rape, Race, and Censorship
Terese Svoboda
“We too are an army of rapists,” anonymous soldier, letter to the editor, Time Magazine, November 12, 1945.
What explains the lack of records regarding the number of rapes in occupation Japan by American servicemen? I briefly review the situation of rape during World War II in the European theater for which there is reasonable documentationto better understand why the names and numbers are concealed or lost. I then examine the situation postwar, focusing particularly on conditions in Japan at the beginning of the American occupation. I conclude by analyzing what little documentation I discovered about an execution for rape while writing Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, my memoir about my uncle who committed suicide after leaving me tapes about his experiences as an MP in Tokyo’s 8th Army stockade.
Our civilian justice system aims primarily to safeguard the rights of property, community, and the individual, perhaps in that order. Short of murder, rape is the most egregious violation to the individual. In civilian life, rape may go underreported for a number of reasons including protection of reputations, confusions about what constitutes rape, or the psychological difficulties of coping with a rape trial.
Before the Uniform Code of Military Justice was instituted in 1950, civilians inducted as soldiers were stripped of most of their individual rights, including due process and trained legal representation. Regardless of the UCMJ, however, for the military, discipline and obedience take precedence over these rights. Rape in the military may be underreported both for the usual civilian reasons but also to prevent the loss of manpower, to avoid housing criminals, and to maintain an appearance of order. These military reasons are invoked most often during a war when manpower is crucial, bivouac at a minimum and order paramount. But they also apply, if with less urgency, during military occupations and in the basing of troops overseas.
The decision of whether to report a rape, and whether the offense will come to trial, is made by military commanders who retain enormous discretion, particularly in an investigation’s early stages, such as the preliminary inquiry. If an officer decides that reporting a rape would be detrimental to military objectives, he may not report it. A recent example is a case in which the military discharged a US soldier accused of raping and murdering a 12-year-old Iraqi girl rather than trying him.1
Colliers magazine cover depicting US-GIs in the thrall of Japan
Yet military law, specifically extensive resort to court martial, has long been an important part of US military discipline. During WWII, as many as one in eight US soldiers were court-martialed for crimes committed while in the service.2 Records regarding these cases are hard to obtain. According to Robert J. Lilly, the author of Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during WWII, rape handled by lesser courts [other than the Judge Advocate’s Court] and cases investigated by agencies other than the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division do not even appear in the JAG Branch Office records, the only records of offenses kept by the military.3 Immediately after WWII even Congressional House members of the 1946 Military Affairs Committee complained that “The general Army practice is to let out as little information about courts-martial trials as possible.”4 This was particularly true of cases regarding rape. Discussing “Excessive and Disparate Sentences,” the Committee stated:
The most tragic [of these excessive sentences], of course, are the death sentences not commuted, about which it is so difficult to obtain information.5Robert Lilly estimates some 17,000 rapes occurred in the European theater during WWII; however, the Judge Advocate General reports a total of 854 cases.6 Lilly’s explanations for the discrepancy include: the length of time it took for the European branch of the JAG to open—7 months–with the office being immediately and permanently overwhelmed, the large number of rapes handled by lesser courts with little documentation, many complaints going unprocessed in order to prevent embarrassing the soldiers or tainting the careers of officers, Army prejudice regarding the rape victim, and a military culture that placed little symbolic value in disciplining soldiers for rape. During a period of high incidence of rape, there might simply be too many cases to process.
R.A.A. women waiting for GI patrons
Postwar, the laws governing rape by the military during WWII remained in effect. Factors specific to occupation may have made rape more common. Soldiers, fresh from battle may have lusted for revenge, and in the absence of military action, rape was one easy outlet. “Lust, liquor and loot are the soldiers’ pay” according to a “red-faced major” quoted by John Dos Passos in an article written for Life magazine, January 7, 1946 about the GIs occupying postwar Germany. Some soldiers may have blurred the distinction between prostitution and rape. The Christian Century for December 5, 1945 quoted the American provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald F. Bean, as saying “that rape presents no problem for the military police because a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seem to make the rape unnecessary.”
Immediately after the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the Japanese Ministry of the Interior made plans to protect Japanese women in its middle and upper classes from American troops. Fear of an American army out of control led them to quickly establish the first “comfort women” stations for use by US troops.7 By the end of 1945, the Japanese Ministry of Home Affairs had organized the Recreation Amusement Association (R.A.A.), a chain of houses of prostitution with 20,000 women who serviced occupation forces throughout Japan.8 (Many more women known as panpan turned to prostitution in the struggle to survive in the midst of the postwar devastation.) Burritt Sabin of the Japan Times reported in 2002 that just days before the R.A.A. was to open, hundreds of American soldiers broke into two of their facilities and raped all the women.9 The situation prompted MacArthur and Eichelberger, the two top military men of the U.S. occupation forces, to make “rape by Marines” their very first topic of discussion.10 Yuki Tanaka notes that 1300 rapes were reported in Kanagawa prefecture alone between August 30 and September 10, 1945, indicative of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in the early occupation.11
Historian Takemae Eiji reports that . . . US troops comported themselves like conquerors, especially in the early weeks and months of occupation. Misbehavior ranged from black-marketeering, petty theft, reckless driving and disorderly conduct to vandalism, assault arson, murder and rape. . . . In Yokohama, Chiba and elsewhere, soldiers and sailors broke the law with impunity, and incidents of robbery, rape and occasionally murder were widely reported in the press. 12GIs photographing women
Two weeks into the occupation, the Japanese press began to report on rapes and looting.13 MacArthur responded by promptly censoring all media. Monica Braw, whose research revealed that even mention of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and particularly the effects of the bomb on civilians, were censored, maintains that pervasive censorship continued throughout the occupation years. "It [censorship] covered all means of communications and set up rules that were so general as to cover everything. It did not specify subjects prohibited, did not state punishment for violations, although it was clear that there were such punishments, and prohibited all discussion even about the existence of the censorship itself."14
Censorship was not limited to the Japanese press. MacArthur threw prominent American journalists such as Gordon Walker, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, and Frank Hawley of the New York Times out of Japan for disobeying his orders. Even internal military reports were censored.15
Five months after the occupation began, one in four American soldiers had contracted VD.16 The supply of penicillin back in the U.S. was low.17 When MacArthur responded by making both prostitution and fraternization illegal,18 the number of reported rapes soared, showing that prostitution and the easy availability of women had suppressed incidents of rape. John Dower writes in his Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II that while the U.S./Japanese-sponsored brothels were open “the number of rapes and assaults on Japanese women were around 40 a day,” but after they were closed, the number rose to 330 a day.19 Yuki Tanaka records two major incidents of mass rape around the same time.20 On April 4, fifty GIs broke into a hospital in Omori and raped 77 women, one a woman who had just given birth, killing the two-day-old baby by tossing it onto the floor. On April 11, forty U.S. soldiers cut off the phone lines of one of Nagoya’s city blocks and entered a number of houses simultaneously, “raping many girls and woman between the ages of 10 and 55 years.”
continued