By Griselda Molemans
During the occupation of Southeast Asia by the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy, many women and girls became victims of rape and forced prostitution. Seventy-two years after World War II, new evidence proves that the number of nationalities involved was much higher than previously assumed. And that the Burma-Thailand Railway and the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) form blind spots in international research.
The infamous Burma-Thailand Railway, a connection of over 415 kilometers between Thanbyuzayat and Ban Pong, was built by a work force of allied POWs and indigenous slave laborers. On Oct. 17, 1943, the Burmese and Thai part of the railway was joined at Konkoita. The first train to ride on the single track was a brothel train. As part of the festivities, all the Japanese guards were allowed to visit the women and girls aboard the train: at every station, the train stopped for 48 hours.
From the very start of the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway on Sept. 16, 1942, female victims of forced prostitution were detained along the tracks. In Kanchanaburi, Korean and Taiwanese girls, kidnapped from their native countries, were housed in rows of small huts.
In the Japanese army camp at Hindato, a brothel was set up. After the completion of the railway, a group of British POWs received the unusual order to clean the barracks of the Japanese officers and soldiers. One day, they were confronted with a group of young women, who were housed in special barracks. The British mistook the women for “army whores” instead of victims of forced prostitution.
Several Dutch POWs were in the know of the secret system. Willy Welcker, a Eurasian POW from the Dutch East Indies, spotted two Malaysian girls when he was cleaning the barracks at the Hindato camp. The girls were put to work in a bamboo hut. “They had to work non-stop until they were falling down. Japanese soldiers from nearby camps were queuing up in front of the hut with their trousers unbuttoned.” Early on, during his stay at the Burmese labor camp Payatonzu, Welcker also saw Malaysian girls being put to work as “comfort girls.” “They couldn’t have been older than 15.”
Dutch POW Gerhardus van der Schuyt managed to talk to a Chinese “comfort girl” in the wood loggers camp, Linson. On top of the hill near the POW camp, a Japanese officers’ camp was installed to hospitalize wounded officers from the Burma battlefront. When Van der Schuyt was ordered to chop wood and clean the camp barracks he saw a group of young girls passing by. And he struck up a conversation with one of them.
“She worked in the kitchen and told me that the Japs had forcibly taken young women from British Malaysia, Thailand, French Indochine and other regions. She herself was ‘lucky’ to remain in Linson, but other women and girls were sent to the Burma battlefront. There were some 20 ‘comfort girls’ in Linson of whom the majority was Chinese.”
Near camp Kinsayok another brothel was installed, where one day a group of beautiful Thai girls arrived. Several British POWs tried to approach the girls, but were rejected. A day later, it became clear why: one of the Thai girls whispered to the men that all the young women had contracted an STD. “Which is good for the Japanese. But not for the British, you see?”
Hardly any woman who worked along the Burma Railway was safe from the Japanese occupier. Tamil women who stayed in the labor camps with their husbands were regularly raped by a group of Japanese soldiers, led by major Hikosaku Kudo. Burmese women, working as sales women or cooks, were victims of rape as well.
Elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies archipelago, American victims were drugged and sexually abused during their captivity in brothels on the island of New Guinea.
On Aug. 18, 1944, American marine J. Copple testified in New Orleans before the Military Intelligence Division that he had seen a fellow countrywoman in Hollandia in April 1944, who had been kidnapped from the Philippines in May 1942. The subject of Copple’s confidential report is “Jap Prostitution of Nurses Captured at Corregidor.”
Copple was told by American army officers that the nurse “was forced to submit to and accompany Japanese Army officers after her capture. They carried her with them from place to place in New Guinea until her rescue by the American forces at Hollandia. She told the American officers that 19 more American nurses were with the Jap forces around Hollandia, all in the same plight.”
His statement in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, corroborates with a diary fragment from American pilot Al Blum. On May 29, 1944, Blum wrote that “two American nurses, presumably from the Philippines, were found at a Japanese brothel in Hollandia. They were nearly crazy from drugs and dope.”
Despite this evidence, no investigation of the fate of American victims has ever taken place. Other governments, among others the Burmese, Thai, Malaysian and Indian, never stood up for their female nationals after the war either, preferring trade relations with Japan over human rights.
Griselda Molemans is a Dutch investigative reporter and documentary maker. During research for the book publication “A Lifetime of War,” due out in 2018, she discovered that the system of Japanese forced prostitution claimed victims of at least 26 nationalities.
