Chinese Comfort Women (31 page)

The individual victims to whom Tong Zeng refers include more than just comfort women. The memorandum enumerates many Japanese atrocities committed in China, including the Nanjing Massacre, military sexual slavery, the killing and torture of POWs, forced labour, biological and chemical warfare, indiscriminate aerial bombing, and the selling of opium and illegal drugs. It urges the Japanese government to take responsibility and to compensate the Chinese victims who suffered as a result of Japanese war crimes, and it suggests that the Chinese government take steps to support its citizens’ pursuit of redress. Tong’s memorandum represented the opinions of many Chinese legal experts and scholars who specialized in Sino-Japanese relationships at the time, and it had a huge impact in China.

After the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1980s, Chinese intellectuals whose voices had long been suppressed began to assert individual human rights and citizens’ rights. Riding this current, Li Guping and others questioned the government’s 1972 decision to abandon its right to claim war reparations from Japan.
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The re-examination of the war compensation issue was also a reaction to the Japanese neo-nationalist denial of Imperial Japan’s war atrocities. On 18 August 1987, Li Guping, then a young employee of Dongfeng Automobile Company, sent “A Citizen’s Open Letter to the National People’s Congress Regarding the Compensation Issues of Japan’s Aggressive War in China” (Yige putong gongmin jiu Riben qin-Hua zhanzheng peichang wenti gei Quanguo renmin daibiao dahui de yifeng gongkaixin), in which he stresses that, as, after the signing of the Sino-Japanese Joint Communiqué, Japanese
government officials and right-wing activists continued to whitewash the history of Japan’s aggressive war, taking measures to redress the damages of the Japanese invasion could effectively counter such denials and place the Sino-Japanese relationship on a more solid foundation.
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The open letters of Li Guping, Tong Zeng, and others in the late 1980s and early 1990s sparked a vigorous response from Chinese citizens. Thousands of war victims wrote to Tong Zeng when the media reported his article, and many of them went to talk to him in person.
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After the publication of Tong’s memorandum, the members of the National People’s Congress (NPC) drafted ten proposals to address the issue when the congress was in session in 1991. In the following year, two NPC members – Wang Lusheng, a China National Democratic Construction Association member from Guizhou Province, and Wang Gong, a lawyer from Anhui Province – again raised the issue for discussion by the NPC.
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At the same time, Shen Panwen, a chemistry professor at Nankai Univerisity, made a proposal at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) to allow individual war victims and NGOs to file claims for compensation from the Government of Japan.
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There was no report about whether or not these proposals resulted in any resolution, but the inclusion of the issue in the NPC and CPPCC agendas indicated the impact of the issue on China’s political centre at the time.

What, then, was said about Japan’s responsibility for war compensation in the Sino-Japanese Joint Communiqué? Article 5 of the Joint Communiqué, signed in 1972 by the governments of both China and Japan, states: “The Government of the People’s Republic of China declares that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the Japanese peoples, it renounces its demand for war reparation from Japan.”
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The wording of the article does not waive the rights of individual victims to file compensation claims. The Chinese government never officially interpreted this article as allowing lawsuits against Japan; however, since the rise of the redress movement in Asian countries, government officials have openly criticized Japan’s denial of its responsibilities for war crimes. In a 1992 statement, the Chinese ambassador to Japan, Zhang Zhenya, called the comfort women system “a shameful atrocity committed by the Japanese militarists” and stated: “It is reported that Chinese women were among the victims. We are paying close attention to the matter and hope further investigation will be done to reveal the truth.”
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On 7 March 1995, Minister of Foreign Affairs Qian Qisen stated that the Joint Communiqué waived only the Chinese government’s right to claim reparations against the Japanese government, not those of private Chinese citizens. For this reason, he said, the Chinese government would not prohibit
individual citizens from filing claims for redress.
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The Chinese government, however, provided no substantive support to these individual victims.

Action seeking redress for comfort station survivors began as a grassroots movement in China in the late 1980s. In 1982, Zhang Shuangbing, a schoolteacher in Yu County, Shanxi Province, came to know a surviving Chinese comfort woman. As he was returning from a school trip in the fall, Zhang was struck by the sight of a solitary old woman, who, with great difficulty, was harvesting millet. Zhang helped her with the farm work and later learned that this woman, Hou Dong’e, had been held in a Japanese stronghold and raped during the Japanese occupation of Yu County. About a decade later, in a newspaper, Zhang Shuangbing read Tong Zeng’s article concerning the right of Chinese war victims to claim compensation, and he immediately brought this news to Hou Dong’e. At first Hou did not want to speak of her experience as a sex slave; however, Zhang Shuangbing’s wife joined the conversation and was able to persuade her. Hou Dong’e finally broke her silence and cried for a long time. The miseries she revealed far exceeded anything Zhuang Shuangbing could have imagined.
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Hou Dong’e was one of many Chinese women in the area who had been forced to become a sex slave for the Imperial Japanese Army. From that point on, Zhang Shuangbing, Li Guiming (a native of Zhenxi Village, Yu County), and other local volunteers worked to confirm the identities of local surviving comfort women and to support them. On 7 July 1992, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Lugouqiao Incident, which marked the beginning of Japan’s full-fledged invasion of China, Hou Dong’e and three other survivors sent a written document to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. The document stated the facts of their devastating experience as sex slaves for the Japanese army during the war and demanded an official apology and monetary compensation from the Japanese government. This was the first time that former Chinese comfort women voiced their demand for redress. In December 1992, the International Public Hearing Concerning the Post-War Compensation of Japan was held in Tokyo.
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With the support of Chinese researchers, local volunteers, and Lin Boyao (a member of an activist group representing expatriate Chinese in Japan), Wan Aihua and other Chinese survivors spoke at this hearing. The meeting between Chinese survivors and activists in Japan hastened the formation of transnational support groups for the Shanxi comfort women’s redress movement.
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In southern China, research on Chinese comfort women survivors also began in the early 1990s. On Hainan Island, where Japan established its strategic bases during the Asia-Pacific War, a well-trained history scholar, Fu Heji, who was the deputy of the Hainan Province Historical Records Bureau,
coordinated a provincewide investigation. The investigation engaged both historians and officials such as Su Guangming from the local People’s Political Consultative Committee and volunteers such as Chen Houzhi from the Baoting Farm. Their research located sixty-two former comfort station sites on the island and found the largest group of survivors in China.
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Zhang Yingyong, of the Baoting County Local History Bureau in Hainan Province, began his research on comfort women in the area in 1992, when he was working on local history regarding the Japanese invasion. He visited a number of villages and towns on foot and by bicycle, and he helped to identify twenty-three surviving comfort women, including Chen Jinyu, who later participated in the Hainan comfort women’s lawsuit against the Japanese government.
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About the same time, Chinese intellectuals and volunteers from all walks of life joined the movement. Sponsored by a Hong Kong businessman, Jiang Hao and a group of volunteers began a nationwide investigation of former Chinese comfort women. This resulted in the 1993 publication of the first book on Chinese comfort women,
Zhaoshi: Zhongguo weianfu
(Exposé: Chinese comfort women). In 1993, based on her independent investigation, journalist Li Xiuping published a monograph entitled
Shiwan weianfu
(One hundred thousand comfort women). Subsequently, a large number of studies and findings relating to Chinese comfort women have been published, including: Su Shi’s research on how the Japanese military drafted Chinese women to comfort stations; Gao Xingzu’s investigation of the sexual violence perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing and the establishment of the comfort women system; Guan Ning’s discussion of the relationship between the comfort women issue and its impact on Japan’s relationship with the international community; and He Ji’s collection of archival documents.
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Field investigations of the sites of former comfort stations were conducted both in big cities and in rural areas of the provinces. Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, whose research contributed crucially to this book, were among the first to conduct investigations into the comfort stations in China.

Despite the massive scale of the comfort women system, documenting these crimes has been very difficult. This is because the Japanese military destroyed its records at the end of the Second World War, and many records were also lost during the chaos of China’s civil war immediately thereafter. Moreover, most of the Chinese comfort women died in the comfort stations or as the result of the torture, and those who survived have been silenced. It often took many visits before researchers were able to succeed in helping a survivor to find her voice. In addition, Chinese authorities did not encourage this research, leaving investigators on their own, without government support. Lack of funding has been a common plight among Chinese researchers
and activists, most of whom have been volunteering their time and providing their own funding. Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei paid for many of their research trips with their own savings, especially during the initial years. Attorney Kang Jian, who, together with Japanese lawyers, has represented surviving comfort women from Mainland China in three of four lawsuits, made sixteen trips to Shanxi Province and six trips to Hainan in order to investigate their cases. And she has devoted countless hours to their lawsuits free of charge. In spite of all the obstacles, field investigations led by university researchers, legal experts, and local historians have produced first-hand evidence of the scope of the Japanese military’s comfort women system in China.

10 Litigation on the Part of Chinese Survivors

In the Chinese survivors’ redress movement Japanese public intellectuals, legal experts, and citizen groups played a vital supporting role. In May 1994, invited by the Institute of Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Japan Democratic Lawyers’ Association sent a judicial research delegation to China. During their trip the Japanese lawyers saw for themselves the Chinese people’s anger regarding the Japanese government’s denial of Japan’s war crimes.
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Attorney Onodera Toshitaka, secretary-general of the association, visited China again in July 1994 to meet victims of Japanese war crimes. He was shocked by Chinese victims’ testimonies describing the brutal atrocities committed by the Japanese military while carrying out operations that involved “burning all, killing all, and looting all.”
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From that point on, Onodera and progressive Japanese lawyers committed themselves to supporting the lawsuits of Chinese war victims.

After a year of preparation, the Japanese Legal Team for Chinese War Victims’ Compensation Claims (Chūgokujin sensō higai baishō seikyū jiken bengodan) was formed in August 1995. The legal team was headed by Oyama Hiroshi, Onodera Toshitaka served as the secretary-general, and Watanabe Shōgo was in charge of administrative matters. Surviving Chinese comfort women’s lawsuits were included among the cases they planned to represent, and Attorney Ōmori Noriko headed this special team. Attorneys from different parts of Japan joined the cause, and Japanese citizens rallied various support groups behind them. In addition to devoting a tremendous amount of time to working on the cases of the Chinese victims, these Japanese attorneys also contributed immensely to funding the investigations, and they even paid plaintiffs’ travel expenses so that they could appear in court in Japan. The Chinese media reported that, in order to finance the Chinese plaintiffs’ legal pursuits, Onodera Toshitaka took out huge loans.
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Oyama Hiroshi also spent many of his personal funds to help pay for the Chinese victims’ lawsuits.
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According to Kang Jian, who has worked closely with the Japanese legal team since 1995, during the first ten years of the litigation process, Japanese attorneys and citizens’ support groups financed almost all
the investigations as well as the travel and legal expenses of Chinese war victims. The litigation brought forward by the Chinese comfort women would have been impossible without their generous support. After August 2005, the All China Lawyers Association and the China Legal Aid Foundation set up a special fund for the Chinese victims of Japanese war crimes in order to support the Chinese litigators.
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