Japanese women really suffered during the American occupation. In Western media it's acknowledged what happened to Korean women under Japanese occupation, but we in the western hemisphere don't acknowledge what atrocities the Allied male servicemen committed.
extract
An Associated Press review of historical documents and records — some never before translated into English — shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war.
Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to U.S. troops until the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down.
The documents show the brothels were rushed into operation as American forces poured into Japan beginning in August 1945.
“Sadly, we police had to set up sexual comfort stations for the occupation troops,” recounts the official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police Department, whose jurisdiction is just northeast of Tokyo. “The strategy was, through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect regular women and girls.”
The orders from the Ministry of the Interior came on Aug. 18, 1945, one day before a Japanese delegation flew to the Philippines to negotiate the terms of their country’s surrender and occupation.
The Ibaraki police immediately set to work. The only suitable facility was a dormitory for single police officers, which they quickly converted into a brothel. Bedding from the navy was brought in, along with 20 comfort women. The brothel opened for business Sept. 20.
“As expected, after it opened it was elbow to elbow,” the history says. “The comfort women ... had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just yesterday were the enemy, and because of differences in language and race, there were a great deal of apprehensions at first. But they were paid highly, and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully.”
Had "some resistance". Doesn't that delicate phrasing send chills down your spine? These women were not willing.
extract continues
Natsue Takita, a 19-year-old Komachien worker whose relatives had been killed in the war, responded to an ad seeking an office worker. She was told the only positions available were for comfort women and was persuaded to accept the offer.
According to Kaburagi’s memoirs, published in Japanese after the occupation ended in 1952, Takita jumped in front of a train a few days after the brothel started operations.“The worst victims ... were the women who, with no previous experience, answered the ads calling for ‘Women of the New Japan,”’ he wrote.
By the end of 1945, about 350,000 U.S. troops were occupying Japan. At its peak, Kaburagi wrote, the RAA employed 70,000 prostitutes to serve them. Although there are suspicions, there is not clear evidence non-Japanese comfort women were imported to Japan as part of the program.
source
You might say this is all ancient history, but once you normalise the abuse and rape of women, your workplace culture continues to see it as normal without very strong efforts to assert the contrary. In 1995, nearly 40 years after "Gen MacArthur shut the brothels down", four US servicemen abducted and raped a 12 year old schoolgirl. 1995 OKINAWA rape incident
At the ensuing press conference, U.S. Navy Admiral Richard C. Macke made his place in history by commenting, "I think it was absolutely stupid. I have said several times: for the price they paid to rent the car [used in the crime], they could have had a girl [prostitute]."
Doesn't that show you how sex buying remained normalised for male US servicemen in Japan? When the US military hierarchy turned a blind eye to troops using the brothels in the 40s, they set a tone. To quote another US officer whose name I have forgotten, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.