Chinese Comfort Women (12 page)

Figure 3
Survivor Huang Youliang (on right) showing the site of Tengqiao “Comfort Station” on Hainan Island, where she was enslaved in 1941 as a “comfort woman.”

The Japanese troops had various names for the comfort stations in China. Besides the commonly used “comfort station,” some were given names such as: “The Imperial Military Guest House” (Huangjun zhaodaisuo, Ji’nan City, Shandong Province), “Lotus Corps” (Furong-dui, Zhuxian, Henan Province), “Entertainment Facility” (Xingle-suo, Hongkou District, Shanghai City), “Comfort Camp” (Weian-ying, Shanxi Province), “Soldiers’ Paradise”
(Junzhong leyuan, Huangliu Airport, Hainan Island), “Manchurian Military Prostitutes House” (Guandong wuji-guan, Zhenjiang City, Jiangsu Province), “Military Officers’ Club” (Junguan julebu, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province), “Society of the Friends of the Army” (Junzhiyou-she, Shanghai), “Happy House” (Kuaile-fang, Baoting County, Hainan Island), “Japan-China Friendship House” (Ri-Zhi qinshan-guan, Confucius Temple, Nanjing City), “Comforting Beauty” (Weian li, Hainan Island), “Japan-China House” (Ri-Zhi guan, Anqing City, Anhui), “Military Personnel Club” (Junren julebu, Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province), “Comfort Women Delegation” (Weian-tuan, Deng County, Henan Province), and so on.
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These names, like the term “comfort station,” express the attitude of those establishing them: they were concerned only with the pleasure of the imperial military men and cared nothing for the suffering of the victimized women.

The comfort stations were usually established on expropriated Chinese property. In October 1938, for example, the commissariat headquarters of the Japanese occupation army at Hankou ordered the construction team to secure a location that could accommodate about three hundred comfort women. The construction team searched for suitable buildings and selected an area in Jiqingli in which sixty-eight two-story buildings were clustered together. This place was surrounded by a fence and conveniently located, so it was made into a huge military comfort station.
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Another example of the large-scale confiscation of civilian properties for the purpose of setting up comfort stations occurred in the Wanchai District in Hong Kong. On 20 February 1942, soon after its occupation of Hong Kong, the Japanese army formed its own military government headed by General Isogai Rensuke. This military government ordered the establishment of comfort stations, with Lieutenant-Governor Hirano Shigeru in charge. A piece of land about eight-hundred metres long on the northern coast of the populous Wanchai District was chosen as one of the locations. The residents were ordered to move out of the area within three days, although many had no place else to go. The military government then sent armed soldiers to force the residents out, giving them no time to collect their belongings. Soon thereafter, a gigantic comfort station opened, with hundreds of rooms that, day and night, were crowded with Japanese troops.
⁹

Occasionally, the Japanese forces built comfort stations from scratch, as was the case with the “Yangjiazhai Entertainment Centre” (Yangjiazhai yulesuo). This station became widely known because Asō Tetsuo, a gynecologist and probationary medical officer at the Commissariat Hospital of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, photographed it and mentioned it in his book.
¹⁰
Although known as Yangjiazhai comfort station, this facility was in
fact not located in Yangjiazhai. Su Zhiliang’s 1994 field investigation verified that this comfort station had been located in a small village called Dong-Shenjiazhai about one hundred metres north of Yangjiazhai.
¹¹
Local residents Shi Liuliu, Gu Zhangfu, Shen Fugen, Shen Yuexian, Xu Xiaomei, and Shen Xiaomei recalled that the Japanese army occupied Dong-Shenjiazhai after the Battle of Shanghai broke out in August 1937. Before the Japanese troops came, many houses in the village had been destroyed by Japanese air strikes, and most of the villagers had fled. The Japanese soldiers drove the remaining villagers, those who had been unable to flee, to the western end of the village and created a huge military barracks in the northern end. In the winter of the same year, the soldiers tore down the remains of the destroyed houses on the east side of the village, where they then constructed a dozen wooden houses. Each of the houses had about ten rooms and each room was about ten square metres in size. The troops used these houses as a comfort station, which the local people referred to as “Japanese Brothel” (
Dongyang tangzi
). When the photograph Asō had taken of the Yanjiazhai comfort station was shown to Shi Liuliu and the other eyewitnesses, they confirmed that the houses in the picture were the same as those they had seen built in
Dong-Shenjiazhai. At the time, the Japanese army also constructed a road from Yangjiazhai to Dong-Shenjiazhai. The Japanese soldiers likely mistook the name “Dong-Shenjiazhai” for “Yangjiazhai.”
¹²

Figure 4
Yuan Zhulin revisiting the old temple where the Japanese army kept her in 1940 as a military “comfort woman.”

Thus, the Japanese imperial forces turned different kinds of Chinese properties – including schools, residential houses, public bathing houses, hotels, warehouses, banks, village cottages, cave-houses, and even temples and churches – into comfort stations (see
Figure 4
). Sometimes they simply used a space in the military blockhouse as a comfort facility, as is described in several cases discussed in this book. The numerous comfort stations in China can be roughly divided into the following four types, according to who set them up and who was responsible for their oversight.
¹³

The first type of comfort station was set up and run directly by Japanese military forces. This type includes comfort facilities of varying sizes and forms and can be further divided into (1) formal comfort stations run by large military units, (2) mobile (or temporary) comfort stations used to serve troops during major battles or military operations, and (3) improvised comfort stations set up by small troop units wherever they happened to be stationed. Formal comfort stations established by large military units, such as an army or a division, were often attached to supply bases in big cities and staffed by dozens or even hundreds of comfort women, including both locally drafted Chinese women and women drafted from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. One example of this type is the “Yangjiazhai Entertainment Centre,” where Asō Tetsuo conducted medical examinations on eighty Korean and twenty Japanese women immediately before it opened on 2 January 1938.
¹⁴

Some of the comfort stations run directly by the military operated out of a vehicle, such as a train or carriage, that travelled from place to place. These mobile comfort stations were used in areas where there were not enough comfort women available or where it was difficult to set up a fixed comfort station. Reportedly, the Guandong Army ran comfort trains periodically between 1933 and 1940.
¹⁵
Some comfort stations that had fixed locations also periodically transported comfort women to strongholds and blockhouses near the frontlines. The comfort stations in Nada City, Hainan Island, for example, sent about a dozen comfort women to troops stationed in remote areas every month. These comfort women were forced to service about fifty soldiers a day, even during their menstrual period. Many of them contracted venereal diseases or died as a result of torture.
¹⁶

Among the comfort facilities directly run by the Japanese military, the impromptu comfort stations set up by small units made up by far the largest number. These makeshift comfort stations were randomly set up in military
barracks and strongholds, local people’s homes, temples, or any place convenient to the garrisoned soldiers. The conditions in these comfort stations were unspeakable, and the women confined there were mostly drafted from local areas. The troops sometimes used a military tent or a hastily built shed as a comfort facility. As is seen in the survivors’ accounts in this book, some of these stations lacked doors or even walls between the rooms, so curtains were hung to create separate spaces; if a bed were unavailable, the comfort women were raped on the earthen floor. Many of these women were tortured to death, committed suicide, or were killed after being repeatedly raped. According to one of the documented cases, after the Japanese army occupied Fuyang County, Zhejiang Province, on 24 December 1937, the troops set up a comfort station at the City God Temple (Chenghuang-miao) and detained many local women to be their sex slaves. Nine of the women were soon raped to death, and during the Japanese occupation 90 percent of the houses in the town were burned and over twelve hundred residents were killed.
¹⁷
A 1939 written report from the chief of the Liyang City Police Bureau states that, after the Japanese army captured Liyang, Jiangsu Province, on 25 February 1938, the soldiers abducted Mrs. Wu, Mrs. Jiang, and other three local women, taking them to their barracks and detaining them, naked, in an empty room, thus making a temporary comfort station. Within a month the women detained there increased to fifty. Many of these women were killed by being forced to endure multiple gang-rapes; those who did not die were drowned in the river.
¹⁸

The second type of comfort station was managed by overseas Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese brothel proprietors, under the supervision of military authorities, for the exclusive use of military personnel and employees. Military units played an important role in giving permission to open the brothels, providing facilities, overseeing hygienic conditions, and enforcing regulations. The proprietors, closely associated with military officers, collected profits from running these military brothels. This kind of comfort station usually operated in the vicinity of a military barracks. For example, in the autumn of 1940, immediately after the Japanese army occupied Yichang, three brothels run by Japanese and Korean brothel proprietors for military use opened near where the troops were stationed.
¹⁹
As is seen in the accounts given by Lei Guiying and Yuan Zhulin (see
Part 2
), the comfort stations run by civilian proprietors were under tight military control and clearly differed from ordinary brothels.

The third type of comfort station made use of pre-existing “entertainment” facilities approved by military authorities for the use of its personnel. Once
a facility was designated for the use of military personnel, military authorities would send officers or policemen to inspect and/or oversee the management of the brothel, provide condoms, and send staff to conduct medical examinations of the comfort women. This type of comfort station was open to both Japanese military personnel and civilian users but gave the troops absolute priority. They were mostly found in major cities, such as Shanghai, Wuhan, and Beiping. Dayi Saloon in Shanghai, for example, had been a brothel for overseas Japanese patrons and was owned by a Japanese couple. After 1931, it was designated as a comfort station for use by the Japanese navy. At its peak it occupied three buildings, which still exist today at 125 Dong-Baoxing Road (see
Figure 5
).