Chinese Comfort Women (2 page)

This volume is informed by and built on a huge number of studies regarding the “comfort women” issue: to all the authors of the publications listed in the bibliography of this book we are indebted and we offer our thanks. We express heartfelt appreciation to attorney Kang Jian, legal counsel for three of the four Chinese “comfort women’” lawsuits, who spent much time answering our questions and providing consultations. We thank Professor Emeritus Utsumi Aiko of Keisen University and Osaka University of Economics and Law; Professor Emeritus Ishida Yoneko of Okayama University; and Eriko Ikeda, head of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, for their invaluable help and advice pertaining to our research on the “comfort women” issue in Japan. We extend our deep thanks to the following individuals, who generously take time out of their busy schedules to read this manuscript at different stages and who provided invaluable comments: to Professor Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert of Vassar College for her warm support and advice throughout the writing of the book; to Professor Seungsook Moon and Professor Katherine Hite of Vassar College for sharing their expertise on gender politics, social movements, and memory studies and for contributing extremely constructive suggestions; to Professor Jin Jiang of East China Normal University for facilitating this collaborative project and providing constructive suggestions; to Professor Karen L. Thornber of Harvard University for her insightful comments and enthusiastic support; to Dr. Lingling Sun of the Institute of Japanese Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, for carefully reading and rereading the early draft of the manuscript and for checking the discussion of legal issues concerning Chinese “comfort women’s” lawsuits; to Ken Arimitsu, coordinator of the International Solidarity Council Demanding Settlement of Japan’s Past, for
his consultations and helpful information; to Professor John Joseph Ahern and Professor Bryan W. Van Norden of Vassar College for their insights and encouragement; to Ms. Ning Gu, senior research fellow at the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Dr. Wei Li, director of the Institute of Japanese Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, for reading and commenting on the manuscript; to Dr. Susan Jinxia Sun of AkzoNobel, for her unfailing support and incisive comments; and to Professor Fubing Su and Professor Yu Zhou of Vassar College for their particularly stimulating conversations on Chinese “comfort women” and for their helpful suggestions. We also thank Professor Jonathan Chenette, Dean of Faculty of Vassar College, for his suggestion regarding the foreword, and Professor Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, Professor Diane Harriford of Vassar College, and Yan Wang of Bridgewater Associates for reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript. The comments and suggestions of the publisher’s anonymous readers led to a greatly improved manuscript, and we are deeply grateful.

Our special thanks to Linda Wood, administrative assistant to the Department of Computer Science at Vassar College, for tirelessly checking manuscript drafts and offering warm support throughout the entire writing process. Many thanks also to journalist Fang Yuqiang of Xinmin News for allowing us to take a picture of the 1937 Japanese map, which has the Dayi (Daiichi, in Japanese) “comfort station” in Shanghai clearly marked, and to postdoctoral researcher Wu Junfan at the Shanghai Normal University, who produced an early version of the map of the “comfort station” locations where the twelve women whose stories are related in this volume were enslaved. And we thank Mr. Steven Cavallo; Mr. James Rotundo; and Mr. Jason Kim of Palisades Park, New Jersey, for providing information about the “comfort women” monument in their borough.

The publication of this book owes an immense amount to the professional help of Emily Andrew, senior acquisitions editor; Megan Brand, editor; and Joanne Richardson, copy editor; at UBC Press.

This study was supported by the Emily Abbey Fund and a Class of 2005 gift fund from Vassar College, and the field research was partly funded by Shanghai Normal University. The publication of this book is supported by the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund), the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Susan Turner Fund granted by Vassar College. To these fund donors and institutions we express sincere gratitude.

Last, but not least, we thank our families. Their long-lasting, unconditional support strengthened us as we engaged in research and completed this important project.

Foreword

Liu Mianhuan’s parents had several children before she was born but none of them survived, so little Mianhuan, as the only child, was the very life of the family. However, before turning sixteen, Liu Mianhuan was abducted, before her mother’s eyes, into the Imperial Japanese Army’s stronghold, where she was kept captive and became one of the soldiers’ “comfort women.” More than half a century later, the traumatic experience was still too painful to speak about. When recounting that horror Liu Mianhuan cried
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I grew up in Yangquan Village, Yu County of the Shanxi Province. My family was not very rich, but we didn’t have any financial worries either. We lived a comfortable life before the war started.

In the year I was to turn sixteen, a unit of Japanese troops came and surrounded our village. It was springtime when the tender leaves of willows and elm trees were delicious. The weather was good, so my father went to the fields for farm work after breakfast. My mother and I were sitting at home when we heard a man shout: “Go to a meeting! Go to a meeting!” Later I learned that this man was the Japanese troops’ interpreter. The soldiers drove all the villagers to the meeting place where there were haystacks and, after forcing everyone to squat down, they began to pick girls out of the crowd. A Japanese military man who was about thirty years old stopped in front of me and stared at my face. I heard the local collaborators call him “Duizhang” [commanding officer]. The Duizhang said something to the interpreter, who then turned to me, saying: “You look very pretty.” They then pulled me out. The soldiers trussed me up tightly and forced me and two other girls to go with them. My mother cried her heart out and tried to stop them, but she was pushed aside. I refused to go and struggled. The soldiers beat me fiercely. Their heavy beating severely injured my left shoulder, and even to this day I still have trouble moving it.

We walked for about three or four hours under the soldiers’ guard to the Japanese military stronghold in Jingui Village, where we were confined in cave dwellings. Several military men raped me that day. They hurt me so
much, and I was so scared that I wished I could find a hole in the ground to hide myself. From that day on, the Japanese troops raped me every day. Each day at least five or six men would come, and the Duizhang usually came at night. At that time I was not sixteen yet and hadn’t had menstruation. The torture made my private parts infected and my entire body swollen. The pain in my lower body was excruciating to the point that I could neither sit nor stand. Since I could not walk, when I needed to go to the latrine I had to crawl on the ground. What a living hell!

The Japanese troops had local people send me a bowl of corn porridge twice a day. They also had the local collaborators guard the door of the cave dwelling where I was detained so that I could not escape. But given my health at the time I wouldn’t have been able to run away even if there was no guard. I wanted to die but that would have saddened my parents, so I told myself not to die but to endure.

A person who was my relative lived in Jingui Village. Upon hearing about my detention, he rushed to Yangquan Village to tell my parents. In order to raise money to ransom me my father sold the entire flock of our sheep, which had been my family’s source of livelihood, for one hundred silver dollars. He brought the money to the Japanese troops in Jingui Village. My father later told me that he knelt down to kowtow, begging the Japanese officers to let his daughter go home, but the officers wouldn’t pay attention to him. Then he begged the interpreter to explain that as soon as my illness was cured he would send me back. By that time I had been confined in the military stronghold for over forty days and became very sick. Perhaps the Japanese troops concluded that I was too weak to service the soldiers, they eventually took the money and released me.

I could not stop wailing when I saw my father. I could not move, so my father placed me on the back of a donkey and carried me home. Although I returned home the fear of the Japanese soldiers’ assault haunted us every day, so my father made a cellar and hid me in it. Sure enough, the Japanese soldiers came again a few months later. I barely escaped the second abduction by hiding in the cellar.

Liu Mianhuan’s hometown in Yu County was occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army from 1938 to 1945. Located at the border region between the Japanese occupied area and the bases of the Chinese resistance forces, Yu County was devastated by the occupation army’s frequent mop-up operations during the war, and a large number of local women became the victims of the troops’ sexual violence. Liu Mianhuan’s constant fear of military assault was finally lifted when the war ended, but the trauma and poverty resulting
from it continued, causing her pain for the rest of her life. Liu Mianhuan died on 12 April 2012.

Liu Mianhuan was one of many Chinese women forced to become sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army during Japan’s invasion of China, but for decades the socio-political environment kept them silent, and their sufferings were excluded from the heroic postwar narratives of their nation-state. Only in the past two decades, inspired by the “comfort women” redress movements in South Korea and Japan and supported by Chinese citizens, researchers, and legal specialists, have these Chinese survivors begun to tell their stories. Being nationals of Imperial Japan’s major enemy, Chinese “comfort women” were ruthlessly brutalized in the military “comfort facilities,” and their stories reveal the most appalling aspects of Imperial Japan’s system of military sexual slavery. Yet, until recently, their stories, told only in Chinese, have been largely unknown to the rest of the world.

Since former “comfort women” from different countries broke their silence to tell their stories in the early 1990s, attempts to erase these stories from public memory have never ceased. Recently, two delegations of Japanese officials attempted to remove a small “comfort women” monument from the United States – an incident that drew international attention. The monument, a brass plaque on a block of stone, was dedicated in 2010 at Palisades Park, New Jersey. The dedication reads:

In memory of the more than 200,000 women and girls who were abducted by the armed forces of the government of imperial Japan, 1930’s-1945.

Known as “comfort women,” they endured human rights violations that no peoples should leave unrecognized. Let us never forget the horrors of crimes against humanity.

According to its designer, Steven Cavallo, he began his work on “comfort women” in 2008 when he held a solo exhibit that displayed scenes depicting the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps, homeless Vietnam veterans, and “comfort women.” People of diverse cultural backgrounds contributed to the erection of the monument, including a Japanese artist. On 6 May 2012, four Japanese Diet members visited Palisades Park and asked the local administration to remove the monument, asserting: “There is no truth (to the claim that) the army organized the abduction.”
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The request was firmly rejected by Mayor James Rotundo and Deputy Mayor Jason Kim, but soon after that a petition was created on the White House’s official website, launching a campaign for signatures to ask the Obama administration to “remove the monument and not to support any international harassment related to this issue
against the people of Japan.”
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The campaign resulted in over twenty-eight thousand signatures within a month. Reportedly, the massive number of signatures came mostly from Japan, and the petition was advertised in Japan on the websites of Japanese activists and lawmakers, including two Diet members who were part of the delegation that visited New Jersey.
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This international controversy concerning the commemoration of “comfort women” underscores the power of memory and the importance of having their stories told. Seventy years after the event, people in Japan and the world are still struggling with what happened to “comfort women” during the Asian War. For many of us who were born after the war, the sufferings of “comfort women” are remote and hard to believe; it often seems to be easier to set them aside or, at the very least, to assign them to the past. However, suffering of such magnitude should not, and cannot, be dismissed. What we choose to recognize and to remember from the past not only affects our present but also shapes our future.

The point of telling the stories of “comfort women” is not to disgrace the people of Japan, any more than the point of commemorating the victims of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb is to disgrace the people of Germany and the United States. Rather, it is to facilitate mutual understanding between Japanese people and their Asian neighbours. Dismissing the sufferings of individual lives in the name of national honour is not only wrong but also dangerous: it is a ploy that nation-states have used, and continue to use, to drag people into war, to deprive them of their basic rights, and to abuse them. To those who genuinely hope to resolve the problems associated with Imperial Japan’s wartime “comfort women” and to come to terms with the trauma of the past, it is essential to transcend the posturing of the nation-state and to recognize that the suffering wrought by war is a violation of human life. Only by recognizing the sufferings of “comfort women” can we begin to understand the reality of the wartime “comfort stations” and the nature of the military “comfort women” system. As Diana Lary, Stephen MacKinnon, Timothy Brook, and others show in their studies of the history of China’s Resistance War, in order to truly understand what happened in the past, it is necessary to recognize the fact that suffering is history’s main subject, not just its byproduct.
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