MovieChat Forums > Nanjing! Nanjing! (2009) Discussion > 'Comfort' Women

'Comfort' Women

posted 13 years ago by SkillyWiggler89
7 replies | jump to latest

Comfort for whom? ... not the women. I knew already about the comfort women, but this film's display of their actual treatment and how they became comfort women makes my heart literally ache for them even more. That scene where the handful of comfort women who died were being thrown in the cart killed me. What is wrong with our race? And by "race", I mean humanity, because armies did this to people way before 1938 Japan and still happens today.

I appreciate this film's display of showing the world an aspect of war that is way too often left out of movies or other media featuring the war; perhaps this is the reason that these rapes still go on, because we as a whole rarely acknowledge them.

[–] timlin-4 12 years ago

Which war movie does not take the time to entertain us with some rapes? For shame: should be banned!

[–] joegerardi-1 12 years ago

Note: This reply if factual, and somewhat graphic. These atrocities have all been proven, so if you're squeamish, you might want to skip reading this.

Except this really happened. Approximately 80,000 females were raped and killed And I use the word "females" because "women" doesn't apply: the Japanese raped 6-month old babies, 5-year little girls, teenagers, women, 85-90 year old women. You think of an age, the Japanese soldiers raped them. One of their favorite pastimes was raping pregnant women and then bayoneting them in the abdomen. (The bayonets were 24 inches long.) The Japanese went through the streets pulling any female they wanted out of their houses and raped them. Dozens of men would rape the same little 6-year old girl over and over until they raped her to death. This was after they sliced her open her so they could "fit." When they were finished with the females, they would (and this is not for the squeamish, so skip to the next paragraph if you're easily sickened by real mutilations) "insert" split bamboo poles in them (you don't really need to use your imagination to figure out what I mean) and hammer them in until the person died.

This was a black time for atrocities. Babies thrown up into the air and caught on bayonets; if the little infants had the unfortunate luck to live, they were thrown from one bayonet through the air to another, to another until they were dead; the ditch of 10,000 corpses is wrongly named: there were over 12,000 corpses in it. Gasoline was poured on people whose arms and legs were bound and they were set afire; tied, they were pushed into the Yangtze so the soldiers could watch them drown.

Best estimates are that over 200,000 were killed. In a war that claimed over 20,000,000, that might not seem like much, but that many were killed in a period of only weeks. Not years, not months, but weeks. 6 weeks or so. 42 days. That's about four thousand eight hundred people each day.

So the next time you want to make a flippant remark, think before you type. How were 80,000 raped elderly women, women, girls, little girls, and babies - some of them infants - part of that war?

And I haven't even brought up the men that were raped...

..Joe

[–] pizza_cheese 11 years ago

There are pictures, proving such atrocities.

This also happened in other Japanese occupied countries.

[–] murad23 9 years ago

Which war movie does not take the time to entertain us with some rapes? For shame: should be banned!

Have you thought that the idea that you find rape entertaining might point to a serious mental illness on your part?

As far as showing this it is high time that rape as a major element of war be known.

In world war two the Japanese and soviet armies commit rape at unprecedented levels. with the soviets it was official policy, with the Japanese it was official and systematized.

[–] GrumpyHedgehog 7 years ago

I love how you conveniently omitted the Germans from your list, when their atrocities against POWs and civilians in Eastern Europe were on par with the Japanese. Compared to Axis powers, transgressions committed by the Soviets (who were on a spree of bloody vengeance following years of being subjected to much the same treatment you saw in this film) pale in comparison.

And, no, rape was not the official policy in the Red Army, quite the opposite. Rape, looting, and other crimes against civilian populations was officially punishable by death, with over a thousand recorded cases of field executions. Granted, with Kremlin hundreds of miles away, no effective law enforcement, and soldiers all too willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by a few degenerates, of course horrible things happened. Frequently. Inexcusably frequently.

But to call it "systematic" is simply factually incorrect at best and jaded guilt redirection at worst. For the latter point, there is a reason all this hoopla about Soviet war crimes began only recently, right around the time when the last survivors of the Holocaust and the Japanese invasion have started to die off. Without their first-hand accounts serving as a chilling reminder, it has become all too easy for new generations to either ignore their enormous national guilt (like Japan) or attempt to shift it onto the people that by all accounts could have killed them to the last man but chose not to.

[–] lawman800 10 years ago

More accurately, this happened in EVERY country that Japan occupied. This even happened in territories, such as Hong Kong, where British women were also raped by the Japanese, or any of the southern pacific areas where Australian or other women were captured. The Japanese were indiscriminate in their raping... and yes, they raped boys and men and whatever else they could rape when they felt like it. There are enough accounts of POW's in the jungles being raped by Japanese soldiers in the Pacific theatre in their POW camps. I don't even know how you would describe or comprehend that kind of act, which seemed so widespread that it was almost a norm in the Imperial Japanese Army.

[–] straydog12 8 years ago

Quite true.

For ex. in Indonesia.
when the Japanese invaded us using "Older brother of the race" as pretext.
The women are kidnapped and force to serve as comfort women. This included the Dutch women (colonized Indonesia for 350 years).

During my grandma time, she told me that the women in the village would dress as man, smearing black ashes to body, and didn't took a bath or even pretend to have leprosy . They need to make themselves as dirty as possible, so the Japanese would lose interest or stay away. She said if the women were capture, there is no way you can see her again. She will be consider dead.