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Paper short abstract

This paper asks what factors contributed to the proliferation of sexual violence by Japanese soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War. It particularly studies what role military justice and the practices of military lawyers played in its containment, or why they failed to do so.

Paper long abstract

Japanese Legal Officers (hōmu-kan) ran the Legal Departments of the various armies and fleets that went to war during the Asia-Pacific War. They conducted the courts-martial and military commissions that tried Japanese soldiers as well as POWs and civilians, respectively. While ostensibly upholding the rule of law, their remit was first and foremost to protect the interests of the army, enforce discipline among soldiers and intimidate the civilian population into cooperating with the army. Thus, “military necessity” was an overriding factor that determined which crimes were prosecuted and which were simply ignored.

Sexual violence was rampant during the campaigns of the Japanese army and navy in the various theatres of the Asia-Pacific War. Whether the military leadership sought to contain it, and under what circumstances, was very much dictated by the circumstances of the war and by this so-called “military necessity”. Courts-martial played here an important role which, however, is little understood until now, due to the lack of sources until recently and the resulting dearth in research about Japanese military justice during the war.

This paper focuses on sexual violence as a particular common occurrence to demonstrate through the judgements of courts-martial, what factors and circumstances contributed to its proliferation or relative containment. However, only a fraction of cases of sexual violence made it into court. The paper thus also consults autobiographic sources of individual lawyers and reflects on the circumstances in which they worked in order to better understand which cases were prosecuted and why – more often – they were dropped.

Apart from better understanding the proliferation of sexual violence during the war, this paper thus also offers a concrete insight into the daily workings of the Japanese military justice system and the habitus of the people that ran it in the different theatres of the Asia-Pacific War.