Slavery in Japan

The practice of slavery in Japan developed only after the establishment of Yamato period (3rd Century) till the end of Sengoku period. This is the only period of time that Japan ever officially had a slavery system. However, slaves were secretly held amongst a few minors until Edo Period.

Early slavery

The export of a slave from Japan is recorded in 3rd century Chinese historical record, but it is unclear what system was involved, and whether this was a common practice at that time. These slaves were called Seikō (生口) (lit. "living mouth"). The export of slaves from Japan ceased, in part because of Japanese separation from the Sinocentrism.

In the 8th century, slaves were called Nuhi (奴婢) and laws were issued under Ritsuryousei (律令制). These slaves tended farms and worked around houses. Information on the slave population is sketchy, but the proportion of slaves are estimated to be around 5% of the population.

Slavery persisted into the Sengoku period (1467-1615) even though the attitude that slavery was anachronistic seems to have become widespread among elites.^[1] In 1590, slavery was officially banned under Toyotomi Hideyoshi; but forms of contract and indentured labor persisted alongside the period penal codes' forced labor. Somewhat later, the Edo period penal laws prescribed "non-free labor" for the immediate family of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō (Tokugawa House Laws), but the practice never became common. The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes promulgated between 1597 and 1696.^[2]

World War II

In the first half of the Shōwa era, as the Empire of Japan annexed Asian countries, from the late 19th century onwards, archaic institutions including slavery were abolished in those countries. However, during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, the Japanese military used millions of civilians and prisoners of war as forced labor, on projects such as the Burma Railway.

According to a joint study by historians including Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo and Mark Peattie, more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Kōa-in (East Asia Development Board) for forced labour.^[3] According to the Japanese military's own record, nearly 25% of 140,000 Allied POWs died while interned in Japanese prison camps where they were forced to work (U.S. POWs died at a rate of 37%).^[4][5] More than 100,000 civilians and POWs died in the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway.^[6] The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha (Japanese: "manual laborer"), were forced to work by the Japanese military.^[7] About 270,000 of these Japanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning that there was a death rate of 80%. (For further details, see Japanese war crimes.)^[8]

According to the Korean historians, Approximately 670,000 Koreans, were conscripted into labor from 1944 to 1945 by the National Mobilization Law.^[9] About 670,000 of them were taken to Japan, where about 60,000 died between 1939 and 1945 due mostly to exhaustion or poor working conditions.^[10] Many of those taken to Karafuto Prefecture (modern-day Sakhalin) were trapped there at the end of the war, stripped of their nationality and denied repatriation by Japan; they became known as the Sakhalin Koreans.^[11] The total deaths of Korean forced laborers in Korea and Manchuria for those years is estimated to be between 270,000 and 810,000.^[12]

According to the United States House of Representatives House Resolution 121, As many as 200,000 "comfort women" ^[13] mostly from Korea and China, and some other countries such as the Philippines, Taiwan, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Netherlands,^[14] and Australia^[15] were forced into sexual slavery during World War II to satisfy Japanese Imperial Army and Navy members. While apologies have been handed out by the Japanese government and government politicians including the Asian Women's fund which grants donated financial compensations to former comfort women,^[16] the Japanese government has also worked to downplay its use of comfort women in recent times claiming that all compensations for its war conduct were resolved with post war treaties such as the Treaty of San Francisco, with an example including asking the mayor of Palisades Park, New Jersey to take down a memorial in memory of the women.^[17]

See also

• History of slavery in Asia

References

1. ↑ Thomas Nelson, "Slavery in Medieval Japan," Monumenta Nipponica 2004 59(4): 463-492
2. ↑ Lewis, James Bryant. (2003). Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan, p. 31-32.
3. ↑ Zhifen Ju, "Japan's Atrocities of Conscripting and Abusing North China Draftees after the Outbreak of the Pacific War", Joint study of the Sino-Japanese war, 2002, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/sino-japanese/minutes_2002.htm
4. ↑ How Japanese companies built fortunes on American POWs
5. ↑ Japanese Atrocities in the Philippines
6. ↑ links for research, Allied POWs under the Japanese
7. ↑ Library of Congress, 1992, "Indonesia: World War II and the Struggle For Independence, 1942-50; The Japanese Occupation, 1942-45" Access date: February 9, 2007.
8. ↑ Christopher Reed: Japan's Dirty Secret, One Million Korean Slaves
9. ↑ brackman,87,253n "according to Korean historians. of 670,000 brought to Japan."Data on Japanese Democide of WWII, Lines 118-123
10. ↑ Statistics of Democide
11. ↑ Lankov, Andrei (2006-01-05). "Stateless in Sakhalin". The Korea Times. Retrieved 2006-11-26. 
12. ↑ Rummel, R. J. (1999). Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1990. Lit Verlag. ISBN 3-8258-4010-7.  Available online: "Statistics of Democide: Chapter 3 - Statistics Of Japanese Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources". Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War. Retrieved 2006-03-01. 
13. ↑ Congress backs off of wartime Japan rebuke
14. ↑ Comfort Women Were 'Raped': U.S. Ambassador to Japan
15. ↑ Abe ignores evidence, say Australia's 'comfort women'
16. ↑ Japan’s ‘Atonement’ to Former Sex Slaves Stirs Anger
17. ↑ Forgotten Faces: Japan's comfort women

• http://www.iiclo.or.jp/100books/1946/htm/050main.htm (Japanese)

Further reading

• Nelson, Thomas. "Slavery in Medieval Japan," Monumenta Nipponica 2004 59(4): 463-492