Chinese Comfort Women (28 page)

Every day I walked fifteen kilometres through the mountains to the school. I left home before dawn and came back in the evening. It was thirty kilometres roundtrip, but the hardship did not stop me. I studied really hard; I wanted to be a good student as my mother expected. I received very good grades and was the only female student who got into the county high school. Later I graduated from the normal school and became a teacher. I was so happy that I could help my mother then. My mum is a great mother. She raised us four children and took good care of my grandfather after my father died. My
grandfather was a hot-tempered man. Although my uncle treated him very well, he could not get along with him, so my grandfather came to live with us. He often got angry with us, too. Once he flew into a temper and broke the door. When my grandfather became angry, he would move his bedding to the mountain and sleep under a cliff. My mother would fix meals for him and we would take them to him in the mountains. My mother said we could not return home without my grandfather, so my sister and I would kneel in front of my grandpa and beg him to go home with us. My mother took very good care of my grandfather in his old age.

My mother wants justice. I hope she is able to fulfill her wish in her remaining years. [Gao Yulan turned to Li Lianchun and urged her to speak: “Mum, tell them what you said at home last time. Don’t be afraid.” Li Lianchun grasped Chen Lifei’s hand and began to speak again.]

My son died a month ago. He had esophageal cancer. He was only thirty-six … I am so sad … Too many sad things in my life … Now I am getting too old and these sad things are fading away from me … There are a lot of things I want to say, but it’s so hard to talk about … I’ve suffered my entire life, and I have been poor my whole life, but I have one thing that is priceless to me. That is my body, my dignity. My body is the most valuable thing to me. The damage to it cannot be compensated for with money, no matter how much money they pay. I am not seeking money, and I am not trying to get revenge. I just want to see justice done.

Li Lianchun died due to illness in January 2004. She was unable to realize her wish to see justice done during her lifetime. In July 2005, Li Lianchun’s grandson Aji passed the Guizhou University entrance examination. Chen Lifei and Su Zhiliang sponsored him for high school as well as college, paying his school expenses. Her granddaughter Adan’s education was paid for by one of the documentary film production team members from the Shanghai Television Station
.

(Interviewed by Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei in 2001)

The twelve survivors’ accounts reveal the appalling nature of the military comfort women system. It was with remarkable courage and strength that these women survived, both during the war and in the postwar era, and continued their struggle to seek justice. The following pages situate the Chinese comfort women’s postwar struggles within the larger context of the international redress movement.

PART 3
The Postwar Struggles

8 Wounds That Do Not Heal

The Second World War ended in 1945. However, for the women who suffered in the comfort stations, the end of the war failed to bring justice, even though the information about imperial Japan’s military comfort women was available. At the time of Japan’s surrender, the Allied forces took many comfort women into custody as POWs; photographs of Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian comfort women captured by the Allied forces are preserved in the Public Record Office in London, the US National Archives, and the Australian War Memorial.
¹
In addition, the prosecutors representing China, the Netherlands, and France prepared documents relating to the Japanese commission of military sexual slavery and presented them to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE).
²
Nevertheless, the tribunal did not specifically identify the military comfort women system as one of the common war crimes committed by the Japanese forces,
³
although the judges recognized some individual cases. One such case, presented by a Chinese prosecutor, is mentioned in the tribunal judgment: “During the period of Japanese occupation of Kweilin, they [the Japanese forces] committed all kinds of atrocities such as rape and plunder. They recruited women’s labour on the pretext of establishing factories. They forced the women thus recruited into prostitution with Japanese troops.”
⁴
However, after having recognized that forced prostitution constituted a war atrocity, the tribunal stopped short of unequivocally ruling that the leaders of the Japanese military and government were responsible for the perpetration of the military comfort women system.
⁵

Why did the IMTFE fail to pursue this further? Researchers have offered various explanations. One suggests that this failure is a result of racial prejudice since most of the victims of this enforced sexual slavery were not white women.
⁶
The IMTFE has been criticized as “fundamentally a white man’s tribunal.”
⁷
John Dower notes that, although the countries invaded and occupied by Japan were all Asian and an enormous number of Asian people died and were victimized as a result, only one of the nine justices of the initially envisioned tribunal was Asian. That one justice was the representative of China. Justices from India and the Philippines were added after agitation
from their respective countries. Other Asian people who suffered as a result of the Japanese invasion and colonization, including those in Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaya, and Burma, had no representatives of their own.
⁸
Dower sees the issue of “white men’s justice” as also a factor in “the localized trials of ‘B/C’ Class war criminals, which, with the exception of China and the Philippines were conducted by the European and American powers and focused primarily on crimes involving Caucasian prisoners.”
⁹
In these B Class and C Class war crimes tribunals, among the defendants about three-quarters were accused of crimes against prisoners;
¹⁰
there were only two exceptional cases in which Japanese military personnel were prosecuted for enforced prostitution. One of these prosecuted cases involved Dutch women who were forced to work in Japanese military brothels in Indonesia,
¹¹
and the other involved women from Guam, but that case was conducted in conjunction with a Japanese affront to the American national flag.
¹²

Another explanation for the IMTFE’s failure to follow up is the fact that patriarchal views of gender are deeply rooted in military forces of all nations, and they foster a general insensitivity to women’s rights.
¹³
The behaviour of some Allied and American occupation troops toward the comfort women they encountered is considered indicative of this attitude. A large number of Japanese and Taiwanese nurses, as well as comfort women, were reportedly raped by Allied soldiers at the end of the war.
¹⁴
Furthermore, after the war, the Japanese government created comfort women facilities for the occupation forces.
¹⁵
Tokyo Keizai University professor Takemae Eiji writes that, on 18 August 1945, three days after Japan accepted the Potsdam Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender, Japan’s Security Bureau of the Ministry of Home Affairs “instructed law enforcement agencies across the nation to set up ‘special comfort establishments,’ later renamed Recreation and Amusement Associations,” “to protect the daughters of the well-born and middle classes by having lower-class women satisfy the sexual appetites of battle-weary GIs.”
¹⁶
Indeed, evidence for the operation of such comfort facilities can be found in newspaper advertisements at the time. On 3 September 1945, for example,
Yomiuri Shimbun
carried the Association of Special Comfort Facilities’ (
Tokusho ian shisetsu kyōkai
) Urgent Ad (
Kyūkoku
) to recruit “special women employees.”
¹⁷
If the leaders of the Allied forces gave tacit consent to the idea that women were obligated to offer sexual services to men who fought in the war, or considered it acceptable for soldiers of the occupying forces to rape the women of the occupied nation, then it is not surprising that the victimization of comfort women was ignored.

Recent studies of the IMTFE offer other explanations of why the comfort women issue was largely ignored. Yuma Totani examines the prosecutorial
strategies of the IMTFE and points out that, because the prosecutors representing the victimized nations failed to introduce sufficient court exhibits, the tribunal judges concluded that the prosecution did not meet the burden of proof for establishing the responsibility of Japanese state leaders for perpetrating the comfort women system.
¹⁸
Totani demonstrates that, in making their case about Japanese war crimes, the Allied prosecutors relied on the strategy of substantiating the recurrence of atrocities by demonstrating common patterns throughout the war. This is because, due largely to “the Japanese government’s coordinated effort in the last days of the war to destroy military records,”
¹⁹
they had great difficulty providing conclusive evidence of the personal culpability of individual defendants. This prosecutorial strategy ultimately produced mixed results as each prosecution team had its own priorities and ways of presenting evidence. The Chinese team, for example, treated the Nanjing Massacre as the representative case and took great care to document it in full; however, for war crimes in other parts of China, it only introduced a small selection to show the widespread nature of Japanese atrocities. Consequently, although the Chinese team attempted to introduce various exhibits concerning the Japanese commission of rape, organized sexual enslavement, and other forms of sexual violence, it fell short of presenting enough corroborative evidence to establish the responsibility of the wartime Japanese leaders for the sexual crimes committed by the Japanese troops.
²⁰

In studying the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, Nicola Henry finds that, in both trials, “rape did not fit the dominant discourse of post-conflict justice, nor did it conform to the political will of the victors.”
²¹
She suggests that, in the eyes of the prosecutors, the systemic sexual enslavement of the comfort women may not have been “political enough” to warrant serious attention at these proceedings. And, “[b]ecause victory in warfare is an overly masculinized concept, victor’s justice is also marked by the absence of gender justice.” Therefore, at both trials, when rape was mentioned it was often to highlight the heroism of one side as opposed to the barbarity of the other, and victims – as individuals – were overlooked. Henry sees this as a form of “legal amnesia” rooted both in political factors and in the patriarchal (and hence gendered) nature of legal discourse.
²²

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was adjourned in November 1948. As the tribunal proceedings were coming to a close, Chinese Communist forces were winning battles in the civil war and the military control of the Nationalist government was deteriorating. Western politicians, worrying about the communist takeover of China, concentrated on their Cold War strategy, which required the help of their former enemies, including Japan. Due to the postwar military and political situations, Jiang Jieshi’s (also
known as Chiang Kai-shek) government had difficulty carrying out thorough investigations of war crimes not only on matters related to sexual violence but also in general. Reportedly, the Nationalist government of China constituted thirteen military tribunals in China from 1946 to 1949 to try Japanese war criminals as well as their Chinese collaborators; a total of 504 of the 883 accused and tried were convicted, and “rape” and “forcing women to become prostitutes” were among the crimes.
²³
Yet the number brought to trial for sexual crimes was very small compared to the vast scope of victimization, and the tribunals did not attempt to establish the responsibility of the Japanese state and military leaders for perpetrating the military comfort women system. In 1956, the newly established People’s Republic of China held two special military tribunals in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, and in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, to bring Japanese war crime suspects to trial. Emphasizing reformation through education, the tribunals were generally lenient.
²⁴
The Taiyuan Tribunal, for example, sentenced only nine Japanese war criminals, and none of them was given the death penalty; the tribunal did not prosecute the other 120 suspects, even though their crimes had been confirmed.
²⁵
The declassified trial documents show that three of the nine convicted war criminals had committed rape and that, among those who were not prosecuted, forty-three had confessed that they had committed rape, gang-rape, and/or had abducted Chinese women and forced them into military comfort stations during the war; some admitted that they had committed sexual violence dozens of times, some as many as seventy.
²⁶

Consequently, issues surrounding comfort women remain unacknowledged, justice has not been served, and the resulting lack of compensation has left the survivors suffering severe hardship (see
Figure 20
). Recent investigations reveal that living conditions for surviving Chinese comfort women are substandard and unacceptable. In Yu County, Shanxi Province, for example, all identified survivors are poor and struggling. The Yu County Seat was occupied by the 14th Infantry Battalion of the 4th Independent Mixed Brigade, North China Area 1st Army, in early 1938, and in subsequent years the region was repeatedly devastated by the Japanese army’s Operation Destroy All (
jinmetsu
). Uchida Tomoyuki’s investigation reports that 275 villages in the county had been burned to the ground by 1943;
²⁷
the total population of the county was reduced from 215,000 in 1936 to 146,000 in 1946;
²⁸
hundreds of local women became sex slaves to the Japanese army; and their families were exploited, being rendered financially destitute after being forced to pay huge ransoms. In one example of the latter, Nan Erpu’s father sold the family’s land to raise the money demanded for her ransom after she had been raped and taken to a military stronghold in Hedong Village in the spring of
1942. However, the Japanese troops refused to release her even after the money was paid. Nan was forced to service a Japanese captain for a year and a half. She attempted escape but was recaptured and brought to a blockhouse on nearby Yangma Mountain, where she was gang-raped by a group of soldiers every night for two months. Finally, she was able to run away when the Japanese troops left the stronghold to engage in a mop-up operation. Outraged, the Japanese soldiers tortured her little brother and burned their house. Nan Erpu was unable to return home until the Japanese army retreated from the area in 1945. Having had to sell all their property, her family fell into abject poverty.
²⁹