Chinese Comfort Women (5 page)

Lei Guiying’s case is far from isolated. The investigations conducted since 1993 by Su Zhiliang, Chen Lifei, and their research team in twenty-two provinces and cities indicate the vast scope of victimization that occurred at military comfort stations in China. In Shanghai alone 164 former comfort station sites have been located, and this does not include those that are known to have existed but whose exact locations can no longer be concretely verified due to postwar urban development.
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On the remote southern island of Hainan, researchers found sixty-two former military comfort stations.
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Chinese comfort women confined in these stations suffered unspeakably cruel conditions. They were given the minimum amount of food necessary to keep them alive and were subjected to continual sexual violence. Those who resisted being raped were beaten or killed, and those who attempted to escape could be punished with anything from torture to decapitation (this could include not only the woman but also her family members).
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Confined under these slavish conditions, most Chinese comfort women received no monetary payment; instead, their families were often forced to pay a large sum to the Japanese troops in an attempt to ransom them. The fact that monetary payment was given to some of the comfort women has fueled speculation over whether the comfort stations should be considered commercial brothels and the comfort women professional prostitutes. However, it must be emphasized that, although some comfort women received money when they were recruited and/or were given a percentage of the service fees in the comfort stations, most of them were deprived of their freedom and were continually forced to provide sexual services to the military once they were taken to these stations. Despite a certain disparity in the recruitment
and treatment of comfort women, the coercive nature of the comfort system as a whole is undeniable. The Japanese military’s explicit discrimination toward the comfort women of different ethnic groups and its especially brutal treatment of the women of enemy countries clearly indicates that the military comfort women system constitutes a war crime: it was implemented for militarist war-related purposes and was made possible precisely because of the context provided by the war. The motives behind the implementation of the military comfort women system, according to military leaders, had to do with preventing the rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease by ensuring that soldiers had regular and regulated access to sex. The effect of the system, however, was quite contrary to its alleged “purpose.” As an officially authorized institution it not only failed to prevent rape and the spread of venereal disease but also normalized and fostered massive sexual violence both inside and outside the comfort stations. In addition, the procurement of comfort women entailed kidnapping, human trafficking, and enslavement on an extremely large scale.

The accounts of Chinese comfort women presented in this book expose the multiple social, political, and cultural forces that played a part in their life-long suffering. Indeed, their plight must be considered not only in the context of the war but also in the contexts of history and culture. As Sarah Soh points out, “the abuse and maltreatment of daughters and wives in the patriarchal system, with its long-standing masculinist sexual culture, contributed as much as did the colonial political economy to the ready commodification of these women’s sex labor.”
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In order to provide a fuller perspective, this book includes the prewar reminiscences of the twelve survivors (e.g., being sold by one’s impoverished parents to another family to be a child-bride or running away from an abusive marriage) as well as postwar descriptions of their being persecuted for having allowed themselves to be defiled and/or for having served the nation’s enemy. These individual narratives show that the women’s lives are defined by more than their involuntary experiences in the military comfort stations; their hardship before the war and their continued suffering and struggle for justice after the war teach us equally important lessons concerning the fundamentals of (in)humanity. While revealing the many factors that have played a role in the comfort women’s prolonged sufferings, these survivor narratives leave no doubt that the military comfort women system amounted to sexual slavery.

Structure

Chinese Comfort Women
consists of three parts.
Part 1
provides the historical background of the narratives. It traces the establishment of the military
comfort women system in Mainland China from the early stage of Japan’s aggression in Manchuria and Shanghai (1932) to its rapid expansion after the Nanjing Massacre (1937) to Japan’s defeat (1945), revealing the close correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan’s war of aggression. In recounting how the War of Resistance (also known as the Second Sino-Japanese War and, in China, as the Anti-Japanese War) and the Japanese military comfort stations are remembered by the Chinese people,
Part 1
brings to light aspects of the comfort women system that have not been fully exposed in the existing literature, such as the Imperial Japanese Army’s mass abduction of local women, the enlistment of local collaborators to set up comfort facilities, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by the small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, the ransoms that victims’ families were forced to pay to the occupation troops, and the extraordinarily large number of Chinese comfort women.
Part 2
, which opens with a description of the interview method, presents the narratives of twelve comfort station survivors, grouped by geographical area and told in chronological order. A brief local wartime history precedes each woman’s story, with short annotations being provided where needed. The accounts chosen are wide-ranging in terms of geographical location (of both home and comfort station), experience, age at abduction, and length of enslavement. The sexual enslavement and torture described here and in
Part 1
are extremely vicious: readers need to be prepared.

Part 3 documents the survivors’ postwar lives and the movement to support the former comfort women’s redress in China. It shows how, after surviving the brutality of the Japanese occupation and the comfort women system, survivors were then subjected to discrimination, ostracism, and poverty due to the prejudices of their fellow countrypeople and the political exigencies of the time. This section also offers a summary of the major legal debates and events concerning Chinese comfort women’s lawsuits and transnational support for the Chinese survivors, particularly from Japanese people. It shows how the suffering and stories of the comfort women, whether Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or another nationality, resonate with women and men all over the world.

Source Materials

The survivors’ narratives in
Part 2
were recorded in Chinese by Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei over a ten-year period. The founding members of the Research Center for Chinese “Comfort Women” at Shanghai Normal University, Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei have, since the early 1990s, played a leading role in
the research of comfort women in China and, with the help of local researchers, have documented the life experiences of over one hundred comfort women. The twelve women whose accounts are presented here were selected as representatives of different geographical areas, time periods, and varying methods of procurement. Recognizing that, due to wartime trauma, old age, and poor education, the survivors’ remembrances of their horrific experiences over sixty years ago may contain lacunae, Su and Chen made multiple research trips to visit the sites where the women were abducted and enslaved, checked regional historical records, and gathered supporting evidence from local people. While memories do have limitations and inconsistencies, the historical accuracy of the wartime victimization of these women is verifiable, and their narratives, taken together, provide an authentic picture of the reality of Imperial Japanese Military comfort stations.

The Chinese comfort women’s narratives presented in
Part 2
are translated into English by Peipei Qiu, who also provides the historical context in
Part 1
and describes the postwar condition of the survivors’ lives in
Part 3
. The writing of
Part 1
and
Part 3
is based on a large number of primary sources that, to this point, have only been available in Chinese, and it also draws on a wide range of contemporary scholarship. The historical outline of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-45) in
Part 1
and
Part 2
is based on Chinese, Japanese, and English scholarship, particularly the recent publications that brought together the perspectives of Japanese, Chinese, and Western scholars, such as
China at War: Regions of China, 1937-1945
(Stanford University Press, 2007) and
The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945
(Stanford University Press, 2011). The discussion of the establishment and expansion of the Japanese military comfort women system in
Part 1
refers both to wartime documents and to source materials compiled after the war. The Japanese military and official documents made available in Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s compiled volume
Jūgun ianfu shiryōshū
(Documents on military comfort women) (Ōtsuki shoten, 1992) and
Seifu chōsa “jūgun ianfu” kankei shiryō shūsei
(Governmental investigations: Documents concerning the military “comfort women”), compiled by Josei no tame no Ajia heiwa kokumin kikin (known as the Asian Women’s Fund), 1997-98, provided essential information on the Japanese military structure and its role in the establishment of comfort stations. Chinese research from the past two decades (see below) supplied the physical, documentary, and testimonial evidence of the organized sexual violence of the Japanese imperial forces. In order to provide a more objective and layered description of the proliferation of the Japanese military comfort women system,
Part 1
cites both the eyewitness accounts of Chinese civilians and
military men published during the war and the diaries and writings of Japanese military men. Reports and diaries of foreign nationals who witnessed the war atrocities in China are used to provide additional observations and details. As well, the existing studies on Japanese military sexual violence and the comfort women system provided immense help to this project in piecing together the historical context.

In describing Chinese comfort women’s experiences,
Part 1
and
Part 3
introduce a large number of historical sources and research findings published in China during the past two decades. Along with the rise of the redress movement in the late 1980s, China saw an outpouring of publications on the atrocities committed by the Japanese imperial forces during the war. These publications, often referred to as
baoxinglu
(reports of atrocities), appeared in television documentaries, films, media reports, online materials, oral histories, novels, memoirs, history books, and so on. Several underlying factors can be observed in this outpouring of
baoxinglu:
the reaction to the neo-nationalist denial of Japan’s imperialist violence; the need to preserve the eyewitness memories of the war; the eruption of the long suppressed sufferings of individual victims; the revival of the compilation of regional and local history (
difangzhi
) after the Cultural Revolution; and the inspiration taken from the international redress movement. Amid this outpouring of memories of the war, investigations into Imperial Japan’s war atrocities were carried out both nationally and locally, producing large book series and collections as well as monographs and articles. Japanese military sexual slavery, which was largely neglected by the war crimes trials at the close of the Asia-Pacific War, is now given special attention.

Selecting from this staggering body of work, this volume draws on the newly released archival documents concerning Japanese military sexual slavery, such as the interrogation records of captured Japanese military men and their Chinese collaborators.
Part I
of this book also introduces investigative reports based on field research, historical documents, and eyewitness testimonies, such as those undertaken by the national and local committees of cultural and historical data associated with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC),
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the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and its provincial academies, university researchers, and local historians.
Qin Hua Rijun baoxing zonglu
(Collection of recorded cases of the atrocities committed by the Japanese forces during Japan’s invasion of China), for example, is a collection of reports based on a nationwide investigation conducted from May 1991 to November 1994. The committees of cultural and historical data associated with the CPPCC coordinated the investigation in twenty-six provinces and autonomous administrative regions that had been occupied
or invaded by Japanese imperial forces, including Beijing and Tianjin. The collection contains 2,272 investigative reports and eighty-three historical photographs and images, in which Japanese military sexual violence and slavery are exposed in all twenty-six provinces and regions. Another source material introduced in this volume,
Riben qinlüe Huabei zuixing dangan: Xingbaoli
(Documented war crimes during Japan’s invasion of north China: Sexual violence), is a special volume in a ten-volume series focusing on Japanese military sexual violence and slavery. It is compiled by China’s Central Archive (Zhongyang danganguan), the Second National Archive of Historical Documents (Zhongguo di’er lishi danganguan), and the Hebei Province Academy of Social Sciences. It reproduces the relevant archival documents preserved in the Central Archive, Hebei Province Archive, Beijing City Archive, Tianjin City Archive, Qingdao City Archive, and Shanxi Province Archive, and it also brings together the Chinese survivors’ legal testimonies and documentary materials, as well as investigative reports from other Chinese sources.