Chinese Comfort Women (4 page)

New Research in China

Inspired by the redress movement for comfort women initiated in Korea and Japan, research on the comfort woman issue emerged in China in the early 1990s as a grassroots movement. Since then, independent researchers and activists have carried out investigations. Earlier, most Korean and Japanese researchers, basing their work on documents that had been unearthed and testimonies supplied by comfort station survivors, had estimated that the Japanese military had detained between thirty thousand and 200,000 women during the war.
²²
The early estimations, however, do not reflect the large number of Chinese comfort women. Recent findings by Zhiliang Su and Chinese researchers suggest that, from the Japanese army’s occupation of the Manchurian area in northeastern China in 1931 to Japan’s defeat in 1945, approximately 400,000 women were forced to become military comfort women and that at least half of them were Chinese.
²³

Since the mid-1990s, testimonies by former Chinese comfort women as well as a large number of studies have been published in Chinese; however, beyond a few reports included in Japanese publications, little has been made available to non-Chinese-speaking audiences. The unavailability of information about Chinese comfort women is a serious problem in the current study of the comfort women issue. Because Chinese women comprised one of the largest ethnic groups among comfort women, and because they, as Japan’s enemy nationals, received unimaginably brutal treatment in the hierarchically structured military comfort women system, an accurate explication of the scope and nature of that system cannot be achieved without a thorough examination of their experiences.

The Contribution of this Book

Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves
intends to help fill the aforementioned information gap by providing a set of personal accounts of former Chinese comfort women and by introducing Chinese research findings to the international community. The comfort station survivors’ personal narratives and the connection between the proliferation of comfort stations and the progression of Japan’s aggressive war in China
clearly show the militaristic nature of the comfort women system and the Japanese military’s direct involvement in kidnapping, sexually exploiting, and enslaving women. While Japanese military leaders maintained that the purpose of setting up the comfort stations was to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers, the systematic implementation of the comfort facilities for the soldiers’ sexual comfort, and the use of hundreds of thousands of women as the means of conveying that comfort, in fact institutionalized mass rape. The twelve women whose experiences are related here were all forced to become military comfort women when Japanese forces occupied their hometowns. These women are from different regions of China, from northern Shanxi Province to southernmost Hainan Island, from metropolitan Shanghai to a mountain village in Yunnan Province, thus indicating the vast scope of victimization. Without doubt, their narratives, corroborated by both regional wartime history and the testimonies of local witnesses, reveal that the comfort women system was a form of military sexual slavery and, as such, a war crime.

The experiences of Chinese comfort women reveal, unquestionably, the Japanese military’s use of violence in drafting comfort women. How the women were brought into the comfort stations has been debated since the 1990s. Two important factors have underpinned this long-lasting debate: on one hand, there has been a lack of information about the mass abduction of comfort women in regions occupied by Japanese forces during the war. On the other hand, the Japanese military frequently hid its recruitment methods not only from people in colonized regions but also from people in Japan. In drafting comfort women from Japan and its colonies, Korea and Taiwan, the most common recruitment methods involved false job offers to daughters of poor families and/or the militaristic brainwashing of schoolgirls and young women. The real nature of the “job” was hidden from the victims until they were tricked into entering the comfort stations, at which time they were raped. During the drafting process in these regions, Japanese military personnel often stayed behind the scenes, using brothel proprietors or labour brokers to draft the women. Although such deception was also used in occupied areas, most drafting operations in these regions were much more blatant. The following testimony, given to the IMTFE by John Magee, an American priest of the Episcopal Church who lived in Nanjing between 1912 and 1940, describes how a Chinese girl was abducted and detained as a sex slave by Japanese soldiers in the vicinity of Nanjing.

I took this girl to the hospital at some time in February 1938. I talked to her then at length and then saw her many times after that. She was from the city of Wufu, about sixty miles [about 96.5 km] from Nanjing. Japanese soldiers came to her home – her father was a shop-keeper – accused her brother of being a soldier, and killed him. The girl said her brother was not a soldier. They killed her brother’s wife because she resisted rape; they killed her older sister because she resisted rape. In the meantime her old father and mother were kneeling before them, and they killed them, all of these people being killed with a bayonet. The girl fainted. They carried her to some barracks of some kind where they kept her for two months. The first month she was raped repeatedly, daily. They had taken her clothes away from her and locked her in a room. After that she became so diseased, they were afraid of her, and she was sick there for a whole month.
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The brutalization of Chinese civilians described in this testimony was widespread during the war,
²⁵
and it is consistent with the cases recorded by Su Zhiliang, director of the Research Center for Chinese “Comfort Women” at Shanghai Normal University. Su records the cases of 102 comfort women who were drafted from Mainland China. Of these, eighty-seven women were kidnapped directly by Japanese troops when their hometowns were occupied; ten were abducted by local Chinese collaborators following the orders of the occupation army; three were first deceived by civilian recruiters with false job offers and then detained in military comfort stations; and two had been prostitutes before the war and were forced to become military comfort women when the Imperial Japanese Army turned their brothels into comfort stations.
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In order to present an objective view of how Chinese women were forced into comfort stations, this book includes two cases of deception among the twelve survivor narratives. As seen in these two cases (presented in
Part 2
) and other cases (presented in
Part 1
), although Japanese military personnel employed deception to round up women in China, this was inevitably accompanied by violence. The vast majority of Chinese comfort women were kidnapped, and, during their abductions, many witnessed the torture or murder of close family members (as John Magee describes above). Japanese military officers both permitted and ordered soldiers to carry out this violence, and they also participated in it directly. Raping and kidnapping became so common that soldiers considered abusing Chinese women to be a sport – one of the few “rewards” of their harsh military life. For example, in his recollection, entitled “Dog,” Tomishima Kenji, a former corporal and squad leader in the 59th Division, 54th Brigade, 110th Battalion of the Imperial Japanese Army, related how, on 8 December 1943, his unit made a young girl crawl naked for their entertainment and made a group of local women their “comfort delegation” in a small coastal village near Bohai Bay in China. That day was
Japan’s Imperial Edict Day, which celebrated the Emperor’s declaration of war against the United States and Great Britain two years earlier.
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The experiences of Chinese comfort women highlight the criminal nature of the military comfort stations and the comfort women system instituted as part of Japan’s war effort. In assessing the nature of the comfort women system, earlier researchers have classified varying types of military comfort facilities into different categories, according to who operated the facility, length of operation, or “organizational motives.”
²⁸
Yoshimi Yoshiaki groups the comfort stations into three categories according to who operated them: (1) those operated by the Japanese military for the exclusive use of military personnel and employees; (2) those run by civilians, but under strict military control, for the exclusive use of military personnel and employees; and (3) those designated by the military as comfort stations that privileged military personnel but that were also open for civilian use.
²⁹
Yuki Tanaka, on the other hand, categorizes the comfort stations in terms of the length of their operation, grouping them as: (1) “permanent” comfort stations established in major cities; (2) “semi-permanent” stations affiliated with large military units; and (3) “temporary” stations created by small troop units in battle zones.
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Although employing different categorizations, both Yoshimi and Tanaka characterize the comfort women system as military sexual slavery. In her recent book, C. Sarah Soh, intending to “better explain the nature of the comfort system,” categorizes the military comfort facilities according to “the motives behind running, supporting, and/or patronizing the facilities.”
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Her three different categories are: (1) the “concessionary”
ianjo
[comfort station] or “commercial houses of assignation and prostitution run by civilian concessionaires to make money”; (2) the “paramilitary”
ianjo
run by the paternalistic military as not-for-profit recreational facilities “to control the troops through regulated access to sex”; and (3) the “criminal”
ianjo
that “came into being primarily as an outcome of sex crimes committed by individual troops against local women.”
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Soh suggests that “the criminal category of comfort stations appears to have emerged primarily during the final years and months of the war” after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
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She contends that definitions of comfort stations and the comfort women system as, for example, rape centres and military sexual slavery “do not offer an accurate view of the comfort system: they simplistically conflate the diverse categories of
ianjo
… into one.”
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The complexity of Japanese military comfort facilities does indeed defy any simplistic categorizations, and Soh’s attention to the varying motives behind the operation of the comfort stations sheds new light on the intricacy of the phenomenon. Although the organizational motive of her last category, the
“criminal”
ianjo
, appears murky, the varying motives of the comfort station operators can certainly be used as a set of criteria to describe different types of comfort stations. However, when this set of criteria is used to assess the overall nature of the military comfort women system, more complete analytical data are required, and the following statistical questions need to be asked: Did the “concessionary” comfort stations comprise a significant number among the Japanese military comfort facilities? Was the organizational motive claimed by the operators of the “paramilitary” comfort stations consistent with their actual effect? Were sexual crimes limited only to the makeshift comfort facilities set up by the individual troops and soldiers in the battlefield? Was there sufficient evidence to support the observation that “criminal” comfort stations emerged primarily during the last years of the war? The experiences of Chinese comfort women are indispensible in answering these questions.

In China, local records indicate that, as early as 1932, when Japanese military authorities implemented the first naval comfort stations in China’s major port city, Shanghai, and set up army comfort stations in occupied Manchuria, Japanese troops in northeast China had already kidnapped local women and forced them to become sex slaves. In these cases the soldiers abducted local women, brought them to military barracks, or detained them in civilian homes.
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The number of these kinds of makeshift comfort stations increased rapidly after the Nanjing Massacre, and, throughout the war, they existed in tandem with officially authorized military comfort stations. The larger Japanese military units commonly set up comfort facilities where the troops were located; however, in addition to this, even a platoon or a squadron would often set up its own comfort facility. Among the twelve Chinese survivors presented in this book, eight were enslaved in this type of improvised comfort facility, which could be a military blockhouse, a barracks, a mountain cave, a small inn seized by the occupation army, a shed made of metal sheets, or the victim’s own house. The time of their abduction and enslavement ran from early 1938, immediately after the Nanjing Massacre, to 1944, a year before Japan’s surrender. As Zhu Qiaomei relates in the second part of this book, four women in her family were forced to become sex slaves when the Japanese army occupied her hometown on Chongming Island near Shanghai in the spring of 1938. They were not confined to a regular comfort station but, instead, were forced to serve as comfort women in their own homes. Further to this, they were also called to the military blockhouse. This situation was common for Chinese comfort women in occupied areas, but it was uncommon for comfort women drafted from other countries.

The Chinese survivors’ narratives also reveal that, while the most brutal crimes often occurred in these impromptu frontline comfort facilities, the sexual abuse and torture of comfort women were common occurrences in the “regulated” comfort stations affiliated with the larger military units or run by civilian proprietors in occupied urban areas. Lei Guiying was nine years old in the year of the Nanjing Massacre (1937) when she witnessed Japanese soldiers raping, kidnapping, and killing local women in the Jiangning District of Nanjing, then China’s capital (see
Part 2
). She was hired to be a housemaid by a Japanese business couple in the Town of Tangshan, but as soon as she turned thirteen and started menstruating, her employers forced her to become a comfort woman in the military brothel they were operating. What Lei Guiying experienced in this civilian-run military brothel is clearly criminal: she was beaten and stabbed with a bayonet by Japanese soldiers (leaving her leg permanently damaged) when she resisted rape and abuse.