Chinese Comfort Women (11 page)

This report was written immediately after Chinese Nationalist forces retook Tongcheng from the Japanese, when intense battles were still occurring in the region. It provides a clear picture of how the Japanese imperial forces blatantly coerced local people into submitting women to military rape centres – a heinous crime made possible due to the absolute power of the Japanese military during the occupation. It is worth noting that the comfort station described in this report was in Hubei, the same province in which the Japanese military physician mentioned above described in his diary his medical examination of Chinese comfort women.

These cases, in which Chinese men were involved in drafting local women for the military comfort facilities, expose the roles the local Chinese played in the implementation of the comfort women system. As seen above, the collaboration between the local men and the occupiers took place under varied conditions.
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While Qiao Hongnian actively helped to set up the comfort stations and continued to participate in their operations, in other cases local leaders and government officials were clearly coerced by the Japanese military to draft women. Although their actions in forcing women to be military sex slaves cannot be justified by the pressure produced by the occupying power, given the widespread killing and rape carried out by the Japanese forces in the occupied areas, it is obvious that refusal to follow their orders would have put the safety of all local residents at risk. In other words, even though Chinese collaborators were responsible for their part in the crime, the ultimate responsibility lies with the Japanese military.

Besides kidnapping them through the use of armed forces and drafting them through the cooperation of local collaborators, the Japanese military also used deceit to procure Chinese comfort women. The military sent its own agents and/or civilian procurers to recruit young women through false job offers for positions such as maid, nurse, or nanny. Once the women signed up, they were forcibly taken to military comfort stations. The experience of Yuan Zhulin, one of the twelve survivors whose narrative is presented in this book, exemplifies this approach to obtaining comfort women. She was looking for a job in Wuhan in the spring of 1940 when a female procurer told her that cleaning women were wanted in another city, so Yuan and a group of other girls travelled with this woman down the Yangtze River. As soon as they came ashore, Yuan and the other girls were taken to a comfort station by armed Japanese soldiers and held there to be military comfort women. Lei Guiying, another survivor whose experience is detailed in this book, was led to believe that she had been hired by a Japanese couple to be their housemaid. However, when she had just turned thirteen and started menstruating, she was raped and detained in the comfort station run by that couple. In Japan’s colony Taiwan, recruitment involved both deception and coercion. According to the research a women’s NGO conducted on forty-eight comfort women who were drafted from Taiwan, the majority “were forced to become comfort women after having been recruited on the pretext of joining the youth corps or working as nurses.”
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Similar to what occurred in Japan and its colonies, in Mainland China deceptive procurement was carried out on a very large scale and was accompanied by extreme violence. Local investigators report that, in the spring of 1942, members of the Japanese military, pretending to be representatives of a Hong Kong company, publicly recruited young women in occupied cities such as Guangzhou and Hong Kong. They rounded up over three hundred young women, many of whom were college and high school students; the youngest were only seventeen years old. These women were then sent to Shilu Comfort Station in Changjiang County, Hainan Island, and detained there by soldiers. Within four years, more than two hundred of these women had been beaten or abused to death.
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In Hainan, the Japanese army ordered the formation of Battle Field Rear Service Teams. The military told local people that women were needed to do laundry and to clean for Japanese troops as well as to help care for injured soldiers. The Battle Field Rear Service Teams recruited women not only from the local areas but also from large cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou as well as from other countries, including Korea and the Philippines. Women who were deceived into joining the teams ended
up in comfort stations. Some performed hard work for the Japanese troops during the day and serviced them as comfort women at night.
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In the occupied territories the Japanese military’s deceptive procurement tactics often amounted to nothing more than violent abductions. According to a 6 March 1938 newspaper report in
Shenbao
, Japanese troops in Shanghai drove vehicles around the streets and offered women rides. When women got into the cars, they would be driven to the military camps and forced to be sex slaves. The article reported that three female students took such an “unlicensed taxi” after a movie, when it was raining: “They did not know this was a trap set by the Japanese soldiers. The students were taken by that car to the other side of the Suzhou River and were never seen again.”
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In big cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and Tianjin, the Japanese army forced a considerable number of Chinese prostitutes to be comfort women. A document entitled “Investigation Record of the Enemy’s Atrocities” (Diren zuixing diaochabiao), prepared by the Tianjin Local Court in May 1946, records a case in which the Tianjin Japanese Garrison Headquarters forcibly drafted eighty Chinese prostitutes from Tianjin to be military comfort women. According to the investigation, during April and May 1944, the Tianjin Japanese Garrison Headquarters ordered the Police Bureau of the puppet government of Tianjin to draft 150 prostitutes to service the Japanese troops in Henan Province. A section chief of the Police Bureau then ordered the Tianjin City Entertainment Business Association (Lehu lianhehui or Lehu gonghui) to collect the women. Zhou Qian, the secretary of the association, begged the section chief to consider an exemption, explaining that the prostitutes had to support their families; if they were drafted, their families would lose their means of livelihood. However, the chief scolded him and ordered him to gather the women at the police hospital for a medical examination by the following day. When Zhou informed the members of the association of the order, prostitutes either escaped or hid, and the city’s brothels were shut. The Garrison Headquarters and the Police Bureau then sent police to draft prostitutes by force. They rounded up fifty-two licensed prostitutes, but this was less than half of the number wanted by the Japanese military. In order to meet the Japanese demand, the police captured twenty-eight unlicensed prostitutes. All of these women were first delivered to the Japanese Garrison Headquarters and then sent to Henan by train. They were retained by the Japanese troops for more than two months before being released.
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According to the recollection of a former Japanese military man, as the war spread through China, female Chinese prisoners of war (POWs) also became victims of the military comfort stations. Taguchi Shinkichi, a former soldier
in the 14th Division who was in the northern China battle zone from September 1942 to December 1945, described their situation as follows:

During the war there was no prison for female POWs at all, so where were they [Chinese female POWs] taken? I heard they were sent to be comfort women. However, those who were suspected of being spies and those who had received training in the Eighth Route Army were not put into ordinary comfort stations for they might escape or get in touch with agents of the Eighth Route Army,
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which would be very dangerous [to our troops]. Then, where were they sent? They were all sent to the frontlines in northern and central China, to the two or three thousand strongholds where small detachments were stationed. The conditions in these areas were extremely harsh and [Japanese and Korean] comfort women were usually unavailable there. A stronghold was typically enclosed by walls and surrounded by blockhouses. Each blockhouse was garrisoned by a platoon. The female POWs were imprisoned in such strongholds. They were put in rooms made of adobe, separate from the blockhouse, because they were considered dangerous … Supply of condoms to the frontline detachment was scant, so many of these women who were raped by soldiers without condoms became pregnant. The pregnant women were continually raped as long as they were usable. When they were no longer usable they were then taken out of the strongholds and tied to standing timbers so new soldiers could practice using their bayonets. They were stabbed to death and buried together with their unborn babies. No one knew which soldiers were the babies’ fathers. Tens of thousands of Chinese women were buried secretly like this at the thousands of strongholds during the fifteen-year war. I think the number was really uncountable.
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Although Taguchi’s account is based on hearsay and is difficult to verify, the fact that this kind of information circulated among Japanese soldiers reveals their view of, and attitude toward, Chinese comfort women and POWs. In fact, what Taguchi describes is in accordance with other reports of what happened to pregnant Chinese comfort women and female POWs during the war.
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The killing of pregnant Chinese comfort women by Japanese soldiers has been reported from other regions,
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and Wan Aihua’s experience, presented in
Part 2
, recounts how female resistance movement members were tortured by being made into military sex slaves.

Subjected to exceptionally cruel forms of torture in battle zone comfort stations, Chinese comfort women suffered an extremely high death rate. In fact, during Japan’s aggressive war, Japanese military officers openly permitted the raping and then the killing of Chinese women. Okamoto Kenzō, a former
Japanese military man who witnessed the Nanjing Massacre, recalled that the higher military officers instructed them to kill rape victims by beating rather than by using a bayonet or gun in order to avoid leaving incriminating evidence.
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With this kind of authorization, abusing and killing comfort women, particularly women of Japan’s enemy nations, became common occurrences. Fu Heji, a researcher on the Committee of Hainan Cultural and Historical Data reports that, on the Sixteenth Day of the Sixth Lunar Month,
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in 1941, the Japanese army killed fifty Chinese comfort women near the Tayang Bridge at Boao, Hainan, because they had resisted being raped.
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Researchers in northern China also report that, in the early winter of 1941, Japanese troops raped forty women in Lengquan Village, Pingshan County, Hebei Province, and killed them all by slicing open their abdomens.
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Although the Japanese military authorities claimed that the purpose of the comfort women system was to prevent rape and the spread of venereal disease, its basic nature was no different than the military officers’ instructions to soldiers cited above: both sanctioned murder in order to conceal repeated acts of sexual violence against women.

3 Different Types of Military “Comfort Stations” in China

From the early 1930s to the end of the Second World War, Japanese military comfort stations were established over a vast part of Asia, including Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, the Philippines, British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina, Burma, New Britain Island, New Guinea, Sakhalin Island, Truk Island, and Japan.
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Practically all the large Japanese military units had formalized or semi-formalized comfort stations attached to them; even small platoon- or squad-size units set up temporary comfort stations. Some well-established comfort stations were in operation for over ten years, while temporary ones existed only for a couple of weeks or days. The majority of these were situated in Mainland China, where the Japanese invasion lasted for fifteen years. Chinese women were drafted into all sorts of comfort stations, with the temporary ones focusing almost exclusively on local Chinese women. These transient frontline comfort stations not only significantly expanded the scope of victimization but also subjected women to exceptionally brutal treatment because they were often situated in extremely harsh surroundings and were completely unregulated.

Since the 1990s, thousands of comfort station sites have been located by researchers in China, from the northeastern border in Heilongjiang to Yunnan and Hainan Island in the south (see
Figure 3
). If the small temporary comfort stations set up in military strongholds and blockhouses are included in the count, the number of comfort stations in China increases to tens of thousands.
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In the remote northern province of Heilongjiang, for example, Chinese investigators have confirmed comfort station sites in seventeen cities and towns: Haerbin, Qiqihaer, Mudanjiang, Jiamusi, Dongning, Hutou, Dong’an, Wenchun, Fujin, Sunwu, Acheng, Fuzigou, Boli, Suifenhe, Manzhouli, Jixi, and Mishan. In Dongning County alone the Japanese army set up over forty stations that were staffed by more than one thousand comfort women.
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There is no doubt that the implementation of the military comfort women system on such a vast scale could only have been possible with the direct involvement of the Japanese military and the Japanese government. Yet, due
to Japan’s restrictions on access to relevant documentation, information regarding the organization and the operation of these comfort stations continues to be difficult to obtain.
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Based on the limited number of official Japanese documents uncovered thus far, researchers are able to demonstrate that “the Japanese government and military were fully and systematically involved in planning, establishing, and operating the comfort women system. Japanese officials involved were Home Ministry personnel, including prefectural governors and the police at all ranks; Foreign Ministry officials; and the governors-general of Korea and Taiwan.”
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As Yuki Tanaka outlines, the senior staff officers of the imperial forces gave orders to establish comfort stations, and staff officers of the subordinate units made concrete plans and carried them out. In general, the staff section of each troop was in charge of matters related to comfort women.
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