Chinese Comfort Women (3 page)

It is in the hope of facilitating a fuller understanding of the sufferings of the hundreds of thousands of women whose lives were ravaged by military sexual violence that this book records the stories of Chinese “comfort women” and tells how their agony is remembered by people in Mainland China, one of the major theatres of the Second World War.

Chinese Comfort Women

Introduction

This is the first English-language monograph to record the memories of Chinese women who were detained by the Japanese military at “comfort stations” during Japan’s invasion of China.
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Across Asia, from the early 1930s to 1945, Japanese imperial forces coerced hundreds of thousands of women, to whom they referred as “comfort women,” into military “comfort stations” and subjected them to repeated rapes. The term “comfort women” is an English translation of the Japanese euphemism
ianfu
. Given the striking contrast between the dictionary meaning of the word “comfort” and the horrific torture to which these women were subjected in the Japanese military “comfort women” system, “comfort women” and “comfort station” are clearly inappropriate terms. Yet, since the 1990s, these terms, on which decades of international debate, historical research, and legal discourses are mounded, have become widely recognized as referring specifically to the victims and institutions of the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery. For this reason, we use these terms, hereafter, in the interest of readability, omitting the quotation marks.

Information about comfort women appeared sporadically in memoirs, novels, artwork, magazine articles, film, and a few monographs after Japan’s defeat,
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but only with the rise of the comfort women’s redress movement in the early 1990s did the issue receive worldwide attention and become a highly politicized international debate.
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This movement, initiated by South Korean and Japanese scholars and women’s groups engaging in feminist and gender issues and internationalized by the support and participation of transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs), researchers, legal specialists, and an upsurge of media attention, created a public sphere in which comfort station survivors were able to come forward and share their wartime memories.

English Publications of the Survivors’ Narratives

In 1991, seventy-four-year-old South Korean survivor Kim Hak-sun (1924-97) stepped forward to testify as a former comfort woman. Since then, an
increasing number of comfort station survivors have come forward to speak about their wartime experiences. The survivors’ narratives provide first-hand accounts of the reality of the Japanese military comfort stations and are essential to our understanding of the comfort women issue. Over the past two decades researchers in different countries have made tremendous efforts to record and to publish the survivors’ personal narratives and to make them available in English for an international community. Among the comfort women’s personal stories published in English, two autobiographical books by former comfort women have been widely read:
50 Years of Silence
(1994) by Jan Ruff-O’Herne, a Dutch descendant born in the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and
Comfort Woman: Slave of Destiny
(1996) by Maria Rosa Henson, a Filipina. Both reveal in compelling detail the anguish of being detained as the sex slaves of Japanese troops during the Asia-Pacific War. Around the same period the accounts of Korean and Filipina victims were published in the mission report of the International Commission of Jurists in
Comfort Women: An Unfinished Ordeal
(1994),
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just before three influential UN investigative reports characterized the comfort women system as military sexual slavery.
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The intolerable abuse of comfort women revealed by these investigative reports made a huge impact on the world. In 1995, a collection of nineteen personal stories from former South Korean comfort women, originally published in Korean by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and the Research Association on the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, was translated into English and published in Keith Howard’s edited volume,
True Stories of Korean Comfort Women
. The first collection of its kind to be translated into English, this volume offers the collective voices of a group of Korean comfort women who powerfully challenge the official war stories of the nation-states. Since the mid-1990s, more books written in English have offered testimonial accounts by former comfort women, notably Chungmoo Choi’s edited volume,
The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex
(
positions: east asia cultures critique
5/1 [special issue]); Dae-sil Kim-Gibson’s
Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women
, a volume accompanying her award-winning documentary film, which includes thirty-six minutes of testimonies from former Korean comfort women;
Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military
, a collection of translated interviews conducted by the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues and edited by Sangmie Choi Schellstede; and
War Crimes on Asian Women: Military Sexual Slavery by Japan during World War II – The Case of the Filipino Comfort Women
, edited by Nelia Sancho and published by Asian Women Human Rights Council.
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At the same time, excerpts of the survivors’ accounts have been
included in scholarly monographs and trade books.
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The comfort women’s personal narratives and the scholarly effort to integrate them into international discourse played a vital role in exposing the true nature of the Japanese military comfort women system and the transnational struggle for “memory change.”
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They not only fundamentally subverted the existing social, political, and patriarchal narratives justifying the objectification of women and the link between war and sexual violence but also moved people of the world to care about the comfort women issue and the principle of humanity it involves.

As more and more comfort station survivors’ narratives entered the international discourse, the voices of Chinese victims were noticeably lacking. As seen above, the major oral history projects in English have taken testimonial accounts mostly from comfort women who had been drafted from Japan’s colonies and the Pacific Islands. Although some scholarly and journalistic works also include excerpts of survivors’ personal accounts, few are from Chinese women. This situation seriously impeded a full understanding of this complicated issue.

Key Debates

One of the key debates about the comfort women phenomenon concerns whether the Japanese military forced women into the comfort stations. When South Korean victims first stepped up to testify, the Japanese government denied any Japanese military involvement in forcing women into comfort stations. It held this position until history professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki unearthed Japan’s official war documents in 1992. Since then, progressive scholars and legal experts in Japan have played an important role in supporting the comfort women redress movement. In 2007, based on nearly two decades of research, the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility (JWRC), which is affiliated with most of the Japanese researchers who are working on Japan’s war responsibilities, issued the “Appeal on the Issue of Japan’s Military Comfort Women.” The appeal reiterates, “the former Japanese Army and Navy created the comfort women system to serve their own needs; the military decided when, where, and how ‘comfort stations’ were to be established and implemented these decisions, providing buildings, setting regulations and fees, and controlling the management of comfort stations; and the military was well aware of the various methods used to bring women to comfort stations and of the circumstances these women were forced to endure.” It concludes: “While licensed prostitution in Japan may be called a de facto system of sexual slavery, the Japanese military comfort women system was literal sexual slavery in a far more thorough and overt form.”
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Outside Japan, scholars, legal specialists, and human rights advocates from different countries have also treated Japan’s wartime comfort women system as forced prostitution and military sexual slavery.
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Until recent years, however, Japanese officials continued to insist that there is no documentary evidence to prove direct government or army involvement in taking females by force to frontline brothels.
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Outside government circles, conservative writers and neo-nationalist activists argue that comfort women were professional prostitutes working in warzone brothels run by private agencies and that neither the state nor the military forced them to be there.
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In discussing sexual violence in armed conflicts, Nicola Henry points out that “the establishment of comfort stations across Asia and the label of ‘military prostitutes’ had the effect of morally reconstructing the reprehensible act of sexual enslavement into complicit victim participation and collaboration,” creating a persistent judicial obstacle to women seeking justice in both domestic and international jurisdictions.
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Indeed, the diverse ways in which comfort women were recruited, and their varied experiences in the comfort stations, have not only been used by Japanese rightists and conservatives to deny military sexual slavery but have also led some sympathetic scholars to question whether or not the comfort women system can be characterized in this way. In her recent book, C. Sarah Soh, for example, disagrees with the “sweeping characterization offered by progressive Japanese historians, such as ‘officially recognized sexual violence’ and ‘a systematic and comprehensive structure of military sexual slavery.’”
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Highlighting the diverse ways Korean and Japanese comfort women were recruited and their varied experiences in the comfort stations, she considers it to be “partisan prejudice” to define comfort stations as “rape centers.”
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Soh’s book contributes to the ongoing discussion on the subject by locating the comfort women’s tragedy not only in the context of Japan’s aggressive war but also in the broader social, historical, and cultural contexts that have sustained “gendered structural violence” against women.
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However, as indicated by its title, it does not discuss the experiences of comfort women drafted from occupied countries,
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especially China, whereas recent research in China suggests that Chinese women accounted for about half of the estimated total of 400,000 victims of the military comfort women system.
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Untold Stories

Chinese comfort women, the majority of whom were abducted and detained by Japanese troops in warzones and occupied areas, suffered extremely brutal treatment coupled with a high mortality rate. In many ways, this was due to the widespread belief among Japanese troops that the vicious treatment of
enemy nationals was an expected and acceptable part of the war effort. Many Chinese comfort women died as a direct result of abuse or untreated illness; others were brutally killed as punishment for attempting to escape, as amusement for the Japanese soldiers, or simply to destroy the evidence of crimes committed by the military. Unlike the comfort women drafted from Japan and its colonies, who occasionally figure in Japan’s wartime documents, those Chinese comfort women kidnapped randomly by Japanese troops are rarely mentioned. In addition, the Japanese military’s deliberate destruction of relevant documents at the end of the Second World War,
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along with the lack of a thorough investigation on the part of the Chinese government and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) immediately after the war, also increased the difficulty of current investigations into Chinese comfort women. Since the end of the war, socio-political oppression has kept the few survivors silent. The small number of Chinese women who survived the comfort stations were often regarded by the authorities and citizens of their own country as immoral women who had served the nation’s enemy. Some were subjected to criminal investigations and suffered further persecution under various political movements such as the notorious “Cultural Revolution.” The strong influence of the Confucian tradition in Chinese society also contributed to the long silence of former comfort women. Confucian social conventions demand that, at all costs, a female remain a virgin until marriage, even if that means risking her life; hence, a survivor of rape was deemed impure and was regarded as a disgrace to her family. Even today, although the socio-political environment has changed tremendously in China and the former comfort women’s struggle for redress has evolved (having begun in Korea and Japan) into an international movement, many of the Chinese comfort station survivors are reluctant to admit to having been raped by Japanese troops. Among those who have stepped forward to testify, some are still hesitant to have their stories published.

In postwar China the plight of former comfort women is not the only wartime tale of suffering that, until recently, has remained untold. Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon note that, although China’s War of Resistance during the first half of the twentieth century was the worst period of warfare in the country’s history, and that it resulted in immense destruction and loss of life, in China there is “a reticence verging on denial when it comes to discussing the slaughter,” and “Chinese press coverage of Japanese atrocities was consistently low key on both sides of the Taiwan straits.”
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They observed: “The Guomindang (GMD)[Nationalist Party] government on Taiwan has found it difficult to deal with the events that occurred in the process of its own defeat by the Japanese” and “the Communist Party is vulnerable to
comparisons: the examination of suffering caused by the Japanese might lead to an examination of the self-inflicted suffering of the Cultural Revolution.”
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Because various socio-political factors combined to keep the victims silent for a long period of time after the Second World War, the comfort women’s individual memories were excluded from the nation-state’s heroic postwar narrative.