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Alternet.org said in a report:

Examples are not hard to find. Before and during WWII, the Japanese enslaved as many as 200,000 "comfort" women, and after the defeat of the Japanese, the United States continued to use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves.

The report refers to this dead link.

Did US forces use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves after the WWII?

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    Relevant articles on Wikipedia: Recreation and Amusement Association and Rape during the occupation of Japan. Related Skeptics question: Was sexually transmitted disease rampant amongst troops occupying Japan?
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 9:15
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    @Andrew Grimm: Re "Recreation and Amusement Association" and similar, how does working as a prostitute equate to being a "sex slave"?
    – jamesqf
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 19:46
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    @jamesqf The wikipedia article points out that while apparently most recruited women consented, in some instances women were forced into prostitution or not allowed to leave.
    – Cubic
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 19:54
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    @jamesqf - even if all of the women were "willingly" working in the sex industry, I think it's safe to say that many (though not all) women enter the sex trade because they have no other options for employment. It's definitely a murky area if a woman feels compelled to sell her body to feed herself or her family. It's a poorly regulated area even today, and I think sex-workers would be much better off if it were legalized and brought out of the underground.
    – Johnny
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 22:08
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    @Johnny: At one point in my life I was a migrant farm worker, because that was the best employment option available to me. Did that make me a slave? Cubic: And if the Japanese people running the "Recreation Association" force some of their workers into their jobs, is that down to the Americans? If so, are you a slaver because your Apple product has components made by companies whose employment practices might not withstand scrutiny?
    – jamesqf
    Commented Dec 28, 2016 at 2:15

1 Answer 1

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Did the US forces use tens of thousands of Japanese women? Yes. The New York Times article Fearing G.I. Occupiers, Japan Urgesd Women Into Brothels indicates the number of Japanese women involved were in the tens of thousands:

Internal documents of the front organization, the Recreation and Amusement Association, show that 55,000 women served in it. The figure includes some office workers, but the great majority worked as prostitutes.

Were those women slaves? There are allegations of some women being forced:

In a few cases, the authorities may have forced Japanese women to work in the brothels. One Japanese book asserts that female factory workers in the city of Kawasaki were trucked to a brothel for Americans and given a speech by a man who said he was from the Interior Ministry.

"You should be proud to be given this mission," he reportedly told the women, who had been told only that they would work in the tourism business. When one woman tried to escape, she is said to have been beaten and her right eye gouged out.

In another case, a women's corps affiliated with the army in Saitama Prefecture is said to have received an order on Sept. 9, 1945, dispatching the members to four brothels in Tokyo. The order, from the Interior Ministry, reportedly said: "You should bear the unbearable and be a shield for all Japanese women."

The sentence quoted is the only sentence in the article that mentions sex involving US forces and Japanese women. This makes it difficult to know exactly what the article is alleging or not alleging.

As the Alternet article doesn't explicitly allege that individual clients knew that the women were sex slaves, or that the US government knew the women were sex slaves, I won't investigate whether there was US complicity in the enslavement.

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  • "the Alternet article doesn't explicitly allege that individual clients knew that the women were sex slaves, or that the US government knew the women were sex slaves". How, then, is this an answer to "Did US forces use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves after the WWII?"
    – RonJohn
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 15:27
  • @RonJohn by examining whether or not they were, actually, sex slaves.
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 20:15

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