Vaccination, Quarantine, and Hygiene: Korean Sex Slaves and No. 606 Injections During the Pacific War of World War II

Abstract

During the Pacific War (World War II), Japan maintained an elaborate system of sexual slavery by implementing certain practices based on institutionalized policies of hygiene, efficiency, and the use of mostly Korean girls and women. Two hygienic techniques were established—vaccination and quarantine. No. 606 injections were given at mandatory regularly scheduled medical examinations to prevent and treat venereal disease, and to also deter pregnancy, induce abortions, and ultimately sterilize sex slaves. Methods: Secondary textual analysis of data collected from 1995–2000, N = 67 interview transcripts, and participant observation in 2003 and 2006. Geographic area: East Asia and the Pacific Islands.

RÉSUMÉ

Pendant la guerre du Pacifique (la deuxième guerre mondiale), le Japon a maintenu un système raffiné d'esclavage sexuel en mettant en application certaines pratiques basées sur des politiques institutionnalisées d'hygiène, d'efficacité, et de l'utilisation la plupart du temps de filles et de femmes coréennes. Deux techniques hygiéniques étaient établies- la vaccination et quarantaine. Des injections du numéro 606 étaient faites durant des examens médicaux obligatoires réguliers pour prévenir et traiter les maladies vénériennes ainsi que pour empêcher le grossesse, faire avorter, et ultimement pour stériliser les esclaves sexuels. Méthodes : L'analyse textuelle secondaire de données rassemblées de 1995 a 2000, des transcriptions d'entrevue (N = 67), et observation de participants faites entre 2003 et 2006. Secteur géographique : L'Asie de l'Est et les îles Pacifiques.

RESUMEN

Durante la guerra pacífica (Segunda Guerra Mundial), Japón mantuvo un sistema elaborado de la esclavitud sexual poniendo ciertas prácticas en ejecución basadas en políticas institucionalizadas de la higiene, de la eficacia, y del uso sobre todo de muchachas y de mujeres coreanas. Establecieron dos técnicas higiénicas - la vacunación y la cuarentena. Las inyecciones del No. 606 fueron dadas en una manera regular e obligatorio por medio de examinaciones médicas para prevenir y para tratar las enfermedaded venéreas, y también para disuadir embarazos, inducir abortos, y esterilizar en última instancia los esclavos del sexo. Métodos: El análisis textual secundario de datos recogidos entre 1995–2000, N = 67 transcripciones de entrevistas y observaciones etnográficas en 2003 y 2006. Área geográfica: Asia del este y las islas pacíficas

Keywords :

• Asia
• Korea
• rape
• Pacific War
• No. 606
• Japanese imperialism
• hygiene
• venereal disease
• pregnancy
• sexual slavery
• women

Notes

1 In 1910, Paul Ehrlich (1998) introduced the drug Salvarsan (Number 606) as a remedy for syphilis. Salvarsan, a poisonous yellowish powder consisting of an organic compound containing a small amount of arsenic was used in a dilute solution as a treatment for syphilis. Less than a year after being discovered, it became the most widely prescribed drug in the world. It was the world's first blockbuster medicine and remained the most effective drug for syphilis until penicillin became available in the 1940s. It was, however, not the sought-after “magic bullet.” Patients with later stages of syphilis didn't respond well to the drug and physicians found the drug difficult to handle and administer properly (Frühstück, 2003; Fujime, 2006; Izumi and Isozumi, 2001).

2 Hicks has noted that other substances, such as injections of terramycin, potassium permanganate wash, and folk remedies with garlic, dandelion, or obscure local herbs, were also used in the military sex slavery system for treatment of venereal disease. Terramycin injections and a permanganic acid solution were also used as prophylactics against disease (Hicks, 1994, pp.93–96). These alternative substances were often used when No. 606 was not available.

3 Even within the military sex slavery system, there was a racial hierarchy. Because the Japanese aspired to be closer to Europeans than Asians, Dutch sex slaves only served 1–4 officers/day, similar to Japanese military prostitutes (the latter having volunteered to serve the Japanese Imperial Army). Both the Japanese and Dutch did not serve the rank and file soldiers. In contrast, non-Japanese Asian sex slaves were required to serve both the rank and file soldiers and officers, and Filipina sex slaves served between 10–20 soldiers/day, whereas Koreans often served 30–60 soldiers/day. Koreans served a much larger number of soldiers than other Asian sex slaves because of Japanese mythology regarding Korean bodies being “unusually strong.” This mythology had developed during Japanese colonization of Korea (1910–1945) and the implementation of the Japanese licensed prostitution system in Korea before the war (Frühstück, 2003; Fujime, 1997). In fact, in 1992 some of the Japanese Pacific war veterans claimed, “Korean women were so strong” that sexually serving thirty men a day “wasn't hard work for them” (as cited in Schmidt, 2000, p. 153).

4 The vast majority of Korean sex slaves were 13–16 years of age, according to the Western system of counting age. Although most published accounts list Korean sex slaves as 14–17 years of age, this does not take into account the Korean system of counting age, in which a newborn infant is already considered one-year-old, and the counting of years starts with Year One, which is at birth. The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery for Japan is the largest NGO that provides services and advocacy for Korean sex slave survivors and is based in Seoul, South Korea, Staff from this NGO confirms that the age of Korean sex slaves was recorded according to the Korean system of counting age (Kang 2007).

5 What made this denial process possible were that Koreans, as Asians, were not considered human and thus did not merit the same type of justice as Europeans (Choi, 1997; Soh, 2001). In addition, on January 17, 2005, additional documents giving details of the minutes of the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and South Korea were released by the South Korean government. This information suggests that the South Korean government agreed not to demand further compensation, either at the government or individual level against the Japanese government, after receiving US$800 million in grants and soft loans from Japan as compensation for its 1910–1945 occupation, and that South Korea agreed to take all responsibility for individual cases in place of the Japanese government. This further reduces the likelihood of legal proceedings resulting in any formal admission of responsibility by Japan (Comfort Women, 2007). In addition, because of Japan's national collective memory that characterizes Japan as a “victim” of World War II due to the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, the imbalances of power and crimes of humanity perpetuated from the Japanese colonizer onto the other Asian colonized countries often become elided and “leveled” within a “collective victomology trope,” in which all Asian countries are seen to have suffered equally during World War II (Kim, 1997, pp. 83–84).

6 The public announcement and lawsuit were preceded and facilitated by several events. From February 12–21, 1988, three members of Korea Church Women United—Yun Chung Ok, Kim Hye Won, and Kim Sin Sil—made an investigation of relics within Japan in memory of the comfort women. This was followed, on May 22, 1990, by a special administrative tribunal organized by the Korea Women's Associations United and Korean Council of University Women who held a press conference and issued a statement regarding the existence of a Japanese Military Sexual Slavery system. On November 16, 1990 the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan was formed in which 37 women's groups as well as individuals in South Korea participated. The Korean Council is a multifaceted organization encompassing research, publishing, and human rights activities as well as providing direct medical, psychological, and housing services for former sex slaves. As the Korean Council was well connected to many political and human rights groups, it issued a statement of several demands and led a political march on January 8, 1991, when Japanese Prime Minister Kaihoo visited South Korea that garnered much attention. The Korean Council was also instrumental in organizing the press conference and lawsuit where Kim Hak Sun testified (The Korean Council, 2006; Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery by Japan, 2006).

7 What I mean by interventions here are specifically psychosocial interventions for more effective demobilization and reintegration of female child soldier survivors that may be possible through peer-education and support networks of female ex-child soldiers, specifically transnational and intergenerational networks.

8 As previously stated, because of the Japanese culture of “national submission” to the absolute power of the divine Emperor, the medical institution's first loyalty was to the will of the Emperor. Any code of “medical ethics” paled in comparison to the divine mission and spiritual redemption in carrying out the Emperor's will and Japan's victory as expeditiously as possible with the least harm done to the Japanese race (although Asians of other races would be sacrificed as deemed necessary). Ironically, the political leaders of Japan justified that they were going to war in order to establish “world peace” in which all races would know their place and live harmoniously together (Dower, 1986). As both Bourdaghs and Lamarre have illustrated, the medical establishment was deeply complicit with the Nation, and there seemed to be no separate code of “medical ethics” practiced by Japanese medical professionals that would interfere with the needs of the Nation at war (Bourdaghs, 1998; Lamarre, 1998). Besides the sexual slavery system, the Japanese military was also deeply complicit with physicians and scientists within the vast medical and biological experiments on Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, and Russian civilians, and American and European Allied prisoners of war that were conducted in several “special research units” including the notorious Unit 731, known as the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.” Now considered war crimes, experiments on humans, often without anesthetics, included infants, children, the elderly, and women including pregnant women, who had sometimes been raped and impregnated by Japanese physicians. Vivisection, weapons testing, germ warfare development, testing, and attacks, sensory and food deprivation, extreme temperatures, radiation, and injections with pathogens and foreign agents were some of the experiments that were carried out. Hundreds of thousands of people died either as a direct result of experimentation or from attacks by biological and chemical weapons developed from these experiments. After the war, Douglas MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the Japanese physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing the United States with their research on biological warfare (Barenblatt, 2004; Gold, 1996; Harris and Paxman, 2002; Unit 731, 2007; Williams and Wallace, 1989).

9 Examining the use of No. 606 injections and Korean sex slaves not only delineates Japanese military sex slavery as a unique phenomenon but also points to how wartime rapes have been unique from each other. For example, during World War II, young girls from the Solec district and Czerniakov suburb of Warsaw were rounded up by the Gestapo and herded into military brothels. The German brothels, however, were nowhere near the scope of the Japanese brothels. German military sex slave procurement and implementation was sporadic and territorial, and did not operate through centralized control (Schmidt, 2000; Yoshiaki, 2000).

Hyunah Yang contrasts the plight of Korean sex slaves to the mass rapes that occurred in the former Yugoslavia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Muslim women were raped until they were made pregnant. These women were not released until their pregnancies had approached full term to preclude the women seeking abortions. By enforcing the pregnancies of the raped women, Serbs in the former Yugoslavia attacked “enemy” males by expropriating their women's reproductive capacity. As in the Japanese Imperial Army, there was a widespread pattern of Serbian commanders encouraging or even ordering their men to rape with orders most likely emanating from the highest ranking officials (Schmidt, 2000; Yang, 1997). The Serbian rapes differed from the Japanese rapes, however, in that Japan was not at war with Korea, and Koreans were not the “enemy” that the Japanese wanted to destroy. Colonized Korea was part of Imperial Japan, and slave labor Korean female bodies were treated simply as military supplies, a resource to facilitate Japanese victory, and were often transported with other war supplies (Choi, 1997; Schmidt, 2000; Yang, 1997). The Japanese were also concerned with the elimination of Korean women's offspring in contrast to the potential expropriation of Bosnian Muslim women's reproductive capacities (Choi, 1997; Schmidt, 2000; Yang, 1997).

10 The systematic rapes during contemporary conflicts must also be examined in relation to the high rates of HIV/STIs currently present in many developing countries. For instance, in Africa, the widespread ethnomedical practice of female circumcision in Darfur, Sudan, has caused many of the African rape survivors to become more vulnerable to HIV and STIs (Amnesty International, 2004b; Joffe-Walt, 2004; for more information on female circumcision see Boyle, 2002; Dettwyler, 1994; Female genital cutting, 2007; Gruenbaum, 2001; Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2000; Skaine, 2005; Walker and Parmar, 1996). In Rwanda, girls and women were routinely raped with objects such as sharpened sticks or gun barrels, held in sexual slavery, and/or sexually mutilated with machetes, knives, sticks, boiling water, and acid (Human Rights Watch, 1998; Mass Rape in Rwanda's 1994 Civil War, 2006), and in one study 67% of Rwandan genocide widows were HIV positive (United Nations, as cited in Ward and Marsh, 2006). And in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rapes of babies, girls, and women were also often accompanied by sexual mutilation with spears, machetes, sticks, and gun barrels thrust into vaginas where the trigger was then pulled and labia pierced and padlocked, which greatly exacerbated sexually transmitted infection. There were also cases where lips and ears were cut off, and eyes gouged out so that the rapists couldn't be identified (Goodwin, 2004). In one Congolese hospital, 30% of rape victims were infected with HIV, and 50% were infected with STIs, which greatly increases the risk of HIV infection (Goodwin, 2004; Ward and Marsh, 2006). Female child soldiers are especially vulnerable to HIV/STIs because of their repeated exposure to rape and sexual violation. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, of 36 girl soldiers, mostly aged between 14 and 15 years, 17 were reported to be HIV positive, two were pregnant, and eight had miscarried in the bush (Amnesty International, 2004c). At World Vision, a rehabilitation center for former Lord's Resistance Army abductees based in Gulu, Uganda, 50% of children had STIs, including syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. For those children who had been in military captivity for longer periods of time, such as child soldiers, the rate of STIs was 85%. Out of a total of 83 children, 13 were HIV positive, including six girls, although it is not known how many of these had been child soldiers. Three of the girls had children of their own (Human Rights Watch, 2003a).

11 The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan is the main NGO that has participated in the rehabilitation, reintegration, and destigmatization of Korean sex slave survivors. It was formed in 1990 through a collaboration between 37 women groups, along with other individuals. (For more information see The Korean Council, 2007.)

12 These protests were initiated and organized by the Korean Council and have occurred every Wednesday since January 8, 1992.

13 Sharing House, also known as “Nanumae-jip,” is a communal house just outside Seoul, South Korea, where approximately 10 Korean sex slave survivors live. It is funded by a Buddhist charity and there is also a museum on site that is dedicated to the sex slave survivors. (For more information see Kampfner, 2004.)

14 C. Sarah Soh found 13 of 19 Korean sex slave survivors were “married,” although only five were actually legally married, mostly to widowed or divorced men. These five survivors settled in China after the war and their husbands were Chinese and not Korean, which indicates that Chinese men were more accepting than Korean men of Korean sex slave survivors. The other eight survivors had cohabited with married men and were thus essentially their mistresses and did not receive benefits that legally married women had received (Soh, 2006). Without any binding legal agreement, it is also unclear how long these cohabitations actually lasted, and the unions may have often been short-lived. My own research reveals that most of the survivors were single and unmarried, which is also the position of the Korean Council (Kim, 2003). If marriage is defined only as legal marriages, and since most of the Korean survivors settled in Korea after the war where they would not have been able to meet more accepting Chinese men, Soh's research probably supports the Korean Council's position that most of the survivors were single and unmarried.

15 “One Body” policies were part of the rhetoric of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” in which the Japanese colonies were seen as part of the national body of Japan but were expendable “limbs” of this national body (Chung, 1997; Hicks, 1994; Schmidt, 2000; Yang, 1997).

16 This refers to the conflation of the individual body with the national body as previously discussed in this article. (For more information see Dower, 1986 and Frühstück, 2003.)

17 Although it may appear that these medical examinations were not very ethical by contemporary Western standards, they actually originated from Japan's adoption of the licensed prostitution system from Europe that Japan then imposed upon its colonies in the pre-war period. In this licensed prostitution system the burden of disease was on prostitutes, and regular medical examinations were mandatory and carried out by the police, sometimes by force. Japan used many of these practices in the subsequent military sex slavery system during the war (Frühstück, 2003; Fujime, 1997).

18 No. 606 was the preferred birth control method, but not the only method. For instance, an anonymous Korean sex slave was forced to undergo an operation on her way to Jakarta that left her barren, and other Korean sex slave survivors have also discussed receiving abortions (Kim-Gibson, 1998; Schmidt, 2000, p. 120).

19 Sex slaves were encouraged to wash their genitalia with an antiseptic solution, No. 606, after serving each man. Yi Yongnyo describes this antiseptic solution as being able to turn water red if diluted with a few drops. If much of solution was used, it would turn water almost black, and too little solution would turn water pink. She further says that the solution could cause death if swallowed. She also maintains that sex slaves washed themselves with this solution (Yi, 1995d, p. 148).

20 Reliance on No. 606 may also have reflected national pride because of Hata's role in discovering this drug. He is clearly viewed as an important figure in Japanese medical history (Izumi and Isozumi, 2001).

21 Since most scholars agree that there were at least 200,000 Korean sex slaves, it is safe to assume that at least 100,000 were killed during the war. Starting in 1991, the South Korean government has only registered 211 sex slave survivors to receive government assistance for health care, housing, and a small living stipend. Although there may be survivors who have not registered, it is believed that many have, since they are elderly and have usually lived in poverty their whole lives and would welcome the assistance. Approximately 80 out of the 211 have already passed away (The Korean Council, 2006).

22 Kim Hak Sun also notes that the aftertaste is one characteristic of this injection (Kim, 1997).

23 The Pacific War officially started between China and Japan in July 1937 near Beijing, China. When Japan invaded Nanjing (also known as Nanking), the Japanese army committed grave atrocities from December 1937 to January 1938. The Japanese troops entered Nanjing on December 13, 1937 and proceeded to embark on systematic murder of Chinese men on the pretext that they were Chinese soldiers attempting to escape in civilian clothes. Soon after, the Japanese troops began to kill civilians indiscriminately. About 42,000 civilians, mostly women and children, in Nanjing, and between 100,000 and 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war in the vicinity of the city were killed within 6 weeks. This massacre was also accompanied by looting, and arson, and a third of the city was destroyed by fire (Chang, 1997; Schmidt, 2000, p. 186).

24 Although, as previously mentioned in the article, Korean girls were forcibly recruited into military brothels as early as 1905 (Chung, 1997).

25 When army units temporarily escaped into bomb shelters, sex slaves were sometimes forced to entertain the military with singing, dancing, and music. If they failed to entertain, they were beaten. Yi Okpun describes a song that sex slaves learned about life in the comfort station as part of this entertainment. The lyrics included “My body is like a rotting pumpkin left out in summer” (Yi, 1995a, p. 101).