Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (14 page)

The pathetic evidence submitted to the military tribunal was conclusive enough. The judgment at Tokyo found that "approximately
20,000
cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of occupation."* In its summation the tribunal stated:

Death was a frequent penalty for the slightest resistance on the part of a victim or the members of her family who sought to protect her. Even girls of tender years and old women were raped in large numbers throughout the city, and many cases of abnormal or sadis tic behavior in connection with the rapings occurred. Many women were killed af ter the act and their bodies mutilated . . . . The bar barous behavior of the Japanese army cannot be excused as the acts of a soldiery which had temporarily gotten out of hand when at last a stubbornly defended position had capitulated-rape, arson and murder continued to be committed on a large scale for at least six weeks af ter the city had been taken.

One month before the Nanking invasion General Matsui had crowed that his mission was "to chastise the Nanking Government and the outrageous Chinese." He wanted, he proclaimed, "to dazzle China with Japan's military glory." Ten years later it was the considered opinion of the Tokyo tribunal that the sack of the city had been "either secretly ordered or willfully committed." For his part in the Rape of Nanking General Matsui was sentenced to be hanged.

Matsui's defense had been to deny all charges of illegal atroc ities, particularly the accounts of rape, which he called mere "rumors, Chinese passing on the information, perhaps in fun." On cross-examination he repeated in exasperation, "I am only trying to tell you that I am not directly responsible for the discipline and morals of the troops under the respective armies under my com· mand." His intelligence officer, Major Yasuto Nakayama, was a trifle more humble, correctly polite. Concerning cases of rape and assaults against women and girls, Nakayama testified, "I believe there were several cases of this to a limited extent, and I regret that such cases occurred.
It
is very improper for me to state an opinion before this Tribunal-however, I hope that such incidents will not in the future occur."

Had it not been for the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal, who would

* Given the size of the city and the concentration of assault, the Rape of Nanking was on a par with an event that occurred thirty-four years later, the Rape of Bangladesh.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

have believed the full dimensions of the Rape of Nanking? The Japanese, like all warring governments, were mindful that rape in war was an unconscionable crime under the Hague Convention, and they did their best to cover their unfortunate traces. The attempted cover-up was duly entered into evidence at the postwar trials.

In February, i939, the Japanese War Ministry issued a set of top-secret instructions to commanders in the field regarding the explicit stifling of certain kinds of conversation heard among men returning home on furlough. This was after the occupation of Nanking and Hankow, and the soldiers of the Rising Sun had been rather loose-tongued about where they had been and what they had done. The orders gave examples of the sort of remarks to be avoided in the future, citing quotes that had appeared in foreign newspaper stories:

-"One company commander unofficially gave [us] instructions for raping as follows:
'In
order that we will not have problems, either pay them money or kill them in some obscure place af ter you have finished.' "

-"If
the army men who participated in the war were investigated individually, they would probably all be guilty of murder, robbery or rape."

• "At--we captured a family of four. We played with the daughter as we would with a harlot. But as the parents insisted that the daughter be returned to them we killed them. We played with the daughter as before until the unit's departure and then killed her."
  

• "In the half year of battle about the only things I learned are rape and burglary."
  

  America had not yet entered the war, and the secret orders were an eff ort to avoid unfavorable criticism at home and abroad.
  

  Agnes Newton Keith, an American who spent World War II in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on Borneo and later wrote Three Came Home, a spunky narrative of her adventures, was the victim of an attempted rape in her detention camp, and of retalia tory violence when she tried to report it. Mrs. Keith was of the opinion that her Japanese guards were under orders not to molest their Western detainees. Yet early one morning as she sat on the
  

  

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  steps of her barracks, a prison guard approached and threw her a pack of cigarettes.
  

  The guard hesitated, giggled, and . . . then bent quickly over me, ran his two hands roughly down my breasts, over my thighs, and forced them violently up between my legs. The gesture so astounded me that I was paralyzed. I could think of nothing but, Well, it's for tunate I have on slacks.
  

  What followed then was unpleasant, a kind of unpleasantness that a woman resents more than any other, and which hurts her as much psychologically as physically. The soldier was strong and rough and crude and nasty, and he enjoyed humiliating me; his ideas of pleasure were new ones to me; had they been familiar I still could not have liked them.
  

  In the ensuing scuffie Mrs. Keith managed to kick her assailant in the stomach. "He stumbled backwards down the stairs, and there hesitated as to what to do: whether to kiss, or to kill, or to pull up his pants and go." By this time several other women in the barracks had rallied to her cries and the thwarted guard "picked up his fallen rifle
  .
  and went sourly down the path."
  

  The indomitable Agnes Keith reported this attempted rape to the prison-camp authorities, who rewarded her with several frac tured ribs and a dislocated shoulder for her "lies."
  

  Concentrati9n-camp rape and institutionalized camp brothels in which women were held against their will for the pleasure of the soldiery were a most sinister aspect of the apuse of women in World War II, since acceptance of continuous rape without pro test was held out as a possible chance for survival. According to a document in the Vatican archives, as early as March, 1942, the papal envoy in Bratislava, Archbishop Giuseppe Burzio, informed Pope Pius XII that the Nazis were taking young Jewish women from their families to make them prostitutes for German soldiers on the eastern front and were preparing for the total deportation of all other Jews.
  

  House of Do1Is, the nightmare novel by Ka-Tzetnik, describes a day's routine in a nameless forcible brothel in which Jewish females under threat of death prepared their cots for the precise arrival at
  2 P.M.
  of the German soldiers. The daily routine was bitterly called Enjoyment Duty and the soldiers, when finished,
  

  64
  I
  AGAINST OUR WILL
  

  were, expected, to file reports on the performance of their Dolls. Three
  .
  negative reports meant death. Ka-Tzetnik
  135633
  was the
  

  ,
  Auschwitz camp number of the pseudonymous author, and despite his use of the novel form-some things are still too horrible for nonfiction-there is not much reason to doubt that the House of Dolls existed.
  

  Dr. Alina Brewda, a Jewish woman from the Warsaw ghetto who was permitted to practice medicine at Auschwitz, devoted a chapter
  .
  in her wartime memoirs to an Auschwitz brothel of Aryan women prisoners, some of whom she covertly treated and aborted. A deposition taken by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the
  

  U.S.S.R. gave testiinony concerning a concentration camp in Tulchin, Rumania, "under the rule of the infamous Petekau who asked each night for two Jewish virgins."
  A
  New York Times front page account in
  1944
  of the liberation of Vught, a Nazi concentra
  

  tion camp in Holland, reported, "Violation of young Jewish women .by prison wardens was a common occurrence." A German brothel in the captured city of Smolensk "into which hundreds of [Russian] women and girls were driven" was mentioned at the Nuremberg tribunal. Similarly it was entered into evidence at the Tokyo tribunal that during the Japanese occupation of the Chinese
  

  '·
  city of Kweilin, in Kwangsi Province, "They recruited women labor on the pretext
  . ·
  of establishing factories; they forced the women thus recruited into prostitution with the Japanese troops."
  

  I would like to say with conviction that a noticeable difference in attitude and behavior toward women existed on the part of the armies of liberation as opposed to the armies of conques and subjugation in World War II, and that the weight of evidence presented at Nuremberg and Tokyo condusively proves it. Patterns of German and Japanese aggression clearly included overt expres sion of contempt for women as part of an overall philosophy of the
  

  • master
    ·
    race, as well as a most pragmatic means of terror. Rape fit