Buried history of sexual torture under now-defunct law in Japan recalled a century on
Kan Harada, 74, a former Kyoto Prefectural Assembly member from Kyoto's Nakagyo Ward, recalls the day when his mother, Toshiko Yamada, shared her painful past with a writer visiting their home.
"They stripped her naked and pressed a cigarette against her lower body," Harada said with a detached tone. "What terrible humiliation it was."
Harada was in high school at the time and hearing his mother's account for the first time, he was shocked. He was unable to ask her the details of what happened before she passed away in 1998 at the age of 87.
Yamada was born in 1911 in the western Japan city of Tottori. After graduating from a local girls' high school, she moved to Tokyo, where she worked for a doctor. Her experiences there changed her life.
Discrimination and a labor movement
The doctor Yamada worked for would shun poor patients, refusing even to issue death certificates necessary for burial to laborers without money. Witnessing such discrimination based on people's financial status, even after death, Yamada quit her job and began working for the Musansha Shimbun, a newspaper affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party. She also worked in small factories, and became involved in movements to support laborers.
The Peace Preservation Law broadly targeted communists and those involved in labor movements. In 1928, an amendment upgraded the maximum sentence under the law to death. Senji Yamamoto, a House of Representatives member from the Labor-Farmer Party who opposed this amendment was assassinated by a right-wing extremist. Many laborers attended his funeral, and police apprehended participants en masse.
Yamada was among those taken in by police, and she was apprehended repeatedly after this on the grounds of violating the same law, and tortured. According to her autobiography "Nagai Tabiji" (A long journey), she was detained for over a month at a police station in Yokohama. Yamada refused to give her name or the names of her friends, and the Special Higher Police responded by striking her with bamboo swords and hitting her legs with an iron ball in a bag. She was stripped naked with her hands handcuffed behind her back, and a cigarette was pressed into her lower body. She was eventually sentenced to prison for five years.
Focusing on women's and antinuclear movements
After her release in 1937, Yamada married a man who had supported her through letters during her imprisonment, and the couple moved to Manchuria (now northeast China). After escaping attacks by Soviet soldiers and facing hardship, they returned to Japan, and settled in Gunma Prefecture after World War II. Yamada went on to dedicate herself to local women's movements and the antinuclear movement.
"I think my mother was great for continuing to stand with vulnerable workers and never wavering in her beliefs, despite enduring terrible sexual violence and torture," says Harada. He followed in her footsteps, joining a textile company in Kyoto and eventually taking part in a labor dispute. After effectively being dismissed from the company, he engaged in activities with a local shopping district association. Following his tenure as a prefectural assembly member, he became the chairperson of the Kyoto prefectural headquarters of an alliance seeking state redress for victims of the Peace Preservation Law. He has continued to call for the government to apologize to victims of oppression and compensate them.
In recent years, Harada has been concerned about the introduction of legal system changes that could potentially lead to thought control, like the Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets and the establishment of the crime of conspiracy (officially the preparation of acts of terrorism and other organized crimes).
"Depending on how those in power think, there is a risk it could lead to the kind of oppression we saw in the past. If we remain silent, we might once again face a dangerous era," he said.
'Erotic terror' buried in history
The kind of sexual torture Yamada endured was not an exception. "Prejudices against the Communist Party and labor unions, combined with misogyny, led to many women being humiliated," says 78-year-old Kimie Oishi of the Osaka Prefecture city of Sakai, who serves as vice chairperson of the central headquarters of the alliance seeking state compensation. "The sexual torture of women under the Peace Preservation Law was absolutely vile, and was described as 'Erotic Terror.' People could not even speak of it to their families, and it has long been buried in history," she said.
According to the alliance, there are women who have conveyed accounts of the torture to succeeding generations. One victim, Chiyoko Ito, a social activist from Nagano Prefecture, was subjected severe torture and died at 24 from causes related to mental illness. Her life has been depicted in numerous biographies and films. Takako Nakamoto, a proletarian writer from Yamaguchi Prefecture, wrote about being stripped naked, having a broom thrust into her, and being choked. Another woman from the Tokyo island of Hajijojima left a testimony saying she was stripped naked and molested, and tortured until she lost hearing in her left ear.
Oishi notes that many women refused to turn from communism even when they were tortured in prison. "They probably were able to endure the torture because they believed that militarism would eventually end and a democratic society would certainly come. I want people to learn more about the history of such women's suffering," she says.
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