Chinese Comfort Women (6 page)

One of the important features of the current movement to re-examine war atrocities in China is that it started as a grassroots movement and has been carried out by local researchers.
Tietixiade xingfeng xueyu: Rijun qin-Qiong baoxing shilu
(Bloody crimes of the occupation rule: Records of the atrocities committed by the Japanese military in Hainan) and its sequel, both of which are cited in this volume, exemplify such locally initiated research projects. From 1993 to 1995 historians and researchers from all six cities and thirteen counties on Hainan Island engaged in investigating the crimes committed by the Japanese military during its six-year occupation. Located in the South China Sea, Hainan Island was made into a major Japanese military base, and a large number of Japanese troops were stationed there during the war. The investigations reveal that, in addition to killing, burning, looting, torturing, and forcing local people to work on military construction sites, the occupying forces built many comfort stations, of which sixty-two are confirmed. The investigators also found a large group of comfort station survivors. Huang Youliang, Chen Yabian, and Lin Yajin, whose narratives are recorded in
Part 2
, are among the survivors who came forth to tell their wartime experiences, with the help of local researchers. The investigation produced three volumes with 242 reports of atrocities, including first-hand accounts of the military comfort stations by the survivors and local people who were drafted to work there as labourers.

Beside these concerted investigative projects, in-depth case studies and thematic analyses of the Japanese military comfort women system have been
conducted by university researchers and independent scholars, some of whom have written pioneering articles that have been collected in
Taotian zuinie: Erzhan shiqi de Rijun weianfu zhidu
(Monstrous atrocities: The Japanese military comfort women system during the Second World War). As our bibliography shows, the delineation of Chinese comfort women’s experiences in
Chinese Comfort Women
is built on a substantial number of Chinese findings. For the readers’ reference,
Part 1
and
Part 3
provide detailed information on all materials used. The cases of Chinese comfort women mentioned in this book all include the victim’s identity, the time and location of her victimization, and the source of our information.

In addition to Chinese research findings,
Parts 1
and 3 frequently cite Japanese scholarship and research reports, such as those by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Hayashi Hirofumi, Senda Kakō, Kasahara Tokushi, Hora Tomio, Ishida Yoneko, Uchida Tomoyuki, Tanaka Toshiyuki, Utsumi Aiko, Nishino Rumiko, Kim Il-myon, Kawada Fumiko, Suzuki Yūko, Ueno Chizuko, Ikeda Eriko, Yamashita Akiko, Hirabayashi Hisae, Matsuoka Tamaki, and the researchers at the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility. These parts also draw on the investigatons of Japanese legal specialists, including those by Totsuka Etsurô, Ōmori Noriko, Onodera Toshitaka, Takagi Ken’ichi, and the lawyers of the Japanese Legal Team for Chinese War Victims’ Compensation Claims (Chūgokujin sensō higai baishō seikyū jiken bengodan). Their research not only provides important information on Chinese comfort women but also inspired the writing of this book. In order to facilitate further studies, the postwar lives of Chinese survivors and their struggle for justice is outlined in
Part 3
. Therein the contemporary scholarship on Japanese war crimes trials and the Allied occupation of Japan, as well as Korean, Japanese, and Western studies of Japan’s war responsibilities and the comfort women redress movement, were of enormous help in supplying the intricate historical, political, and legal contexts within which the Chinese comfort women’s struggles took place.

Unless otherwise noted, translations of the Chinese and Japanese texts used in this volume are provided by Peipei Qiu. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names are given according to East Asian practice: family name appears first, followed by given name. Exception is made for those writers who have followed the Western practice of placing their given name first in their own Western language publications. The Pinyin system is used for the transliteration of Chinese terms and proper nouns, except for the names of individuals from Taiwan, for which the Wade-Giles system is used. The modified Hepburn system of Romanization is used for Japanese terms and names. Transliteration
of Korean names follows that of the publications from which the names are cited.

When asked why he chose to spend years of his career and much of his personal savings representing Chinese war victims, Japanese attorney Oyama Hiroshi, who led the Japanese Legal Team for Chinese War Victims’ Compensation Claims, replied: “I want to be responsible for history. Whether Chinese or Japanese, we all must take responsibility for history.”
⁴¹
More than sixty years have passed since the end of Japan’s war of aggression in Asia and the Pacific region, but the wounds of that war remain in the hearts, minds, and bodies of victimized men and women, and in the collective and individual memories of all nations involved. Healing and reconciliation begin by taking responsibility for history. Until the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of comfort women are properly written into history, our collective memory and understanding of the past is incomplete. This book constitutes a small step toward taking responsibility for that history, and it is dedicated to those who have suffered, to those who continue to suffer, and to those who have cared about them.

PART 1
The War Remembered

1 Japan’s Aggressive War and the Military “Comfort Women” System

The Second World War is remembered by most countries in the world as taking place between 1939 and 1945, but for Chinese people the war was much longer. It is known as the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Asia-Pacific War, or (in China) the Resistance War, and it began in 1931, with Japan’s occupation of Manchuria.

Japan had pursued expansion on the Asian continent during the late 1880s,
¹
and, by the early 1930s, it realized its political and economic encroachment in Manchuria through the operation of the semi-official Japanese corporation known as the South Manchuria Railway Company.
²
On the night of 18 September 1931, a group of Japanese military officers staged an incident involving an explosion on the tracks of the railway owned by the South Manchurian Railway Company near today’s Shenyang City in northeastern China and accused Chinese dissident forces of having caused it. Using this incident as a pretext, the Japanese Guandong (Kwantung) Army attacked the cities along the South Manchuria Railway. Two years of careful planning enabled the Guandong Army to rapidly expand its operations, and it quickly overran most of Manchuria.
³
The 18 September incident (also known as the Mukden Incident, or the Manchurian Incident) is generally considered to be the prelude to the Second World War in the Asian theatre. Within a few months Japanese troops occupied the major urban centres of the region, and the Chinese forces led by Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang, 1901-2001) withdrew to south of the Great Wall.
⁴

In January 1932, the Japanese army provoked another armed conflict with Chinese forces in Shanghai. This incident was also plotted by the Guandong Army, both to increase its influence in southeastern China and to divert the world’s attention while it established the puppet state of Manzhouguo.
⁵
To distract international attention from Manchuria, the Japanese Special Service organ in Shanghai stirred up anti-Japanese protests in that city, and, as the disturbance escalated, in January 1932 the commander of Japanese naval forces called out the Naval Landing Force, joined by vigilante elements from the local Japanese community, to “maintain order.”
⁶
These forces encountered
fierce Chinese resistance, forcing them to call for reinforcements in the form of two army divisions. Intense fighting continued in the following two months. The Chinese 19th Route Army and 5th Army fought on without reinforcements and were eventually forced to withdraw.
⁷
The League of Nations called for a ceasefire and compelled the Japanese forces to negotiate. The ceasefire agreement established a demilitarized zone and prohibited China from stationing troops on its own land around Shanghai, Suzhou, and Kunshan, while permitting some Japanese Naval Landing units to remain in Shanghai.
⁸

Japanese troops’ sexual violence against, and enslavement of, Chinese women began soon after the escalation of Japan’s aggression in China. The first formal comfort station is known to have been established in Shanghai in 1932, but Japanese forces also kidnapped local women to be their sex slaves in northern China around the same time. As the war progressed, comfort stations appeared wherever troops appeared. A case documented in
Qin-Hua Rijun baoxing zonglu
(Collection of investigative records of the atrocities committed by the Japanese forces during Japan’s invasion of China), a nationwide investigation led by the Committee of Cultural and Historical Data of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and published in 1995, records that, in the winter of 1932, a unit of the 16th Brigade, 8th Division, of the Guandong Army occupied the Chaoyang-si area of Beipiao County in northeastern China. The soldiers immediately kidnapped “good-looking” local women and kept them in the military barracks as sex slaves.
⁹
At the same time, the troops continued to assault women in the nearby villages. Reportedly, over one thousand local women were raped in their own homes; not even pregnant women, young girls, or elderly women were spared.
¹⁰
Within the same region, in the autumn of 1935, more than a hundred Japanese soldiers attacked the Dahei-shan area in Beipiao, where the Chinese resistance force was active. Carrying machine-guns, the troops drove the villagers into a large yard, dragged all the women out of the crowd, and raped them in the presence of their family members. Several soldiers ripped off the clothes of a woman who was six months pregnant and tied her on a table in the yard. They took photographs of her while violating her, then cut her abdomen open and plucked the foetus out with a bayonet.
¹¹

The violence perpetrated by Japanese troops described here is so brutal that it is difficult to comprehend. Yet similar incidents were reported frequently during the war.
¹²
In searching for explanations of the Japanese military men’s atrocious behaviour, scholars have considered various factors, such as battlefield psychology, sexual starvation, and the lack of effective discipline. While all these factors might have played a part in causing the brutality, they cannot fully explain why it was so widespread among Japanese soldiers
who, presumably, were not born evil. In analyzing the different atrocities perpetrated by Japanese troops on the bodies of Chinese men and women, Timothy Brook offers the following:

Men of fighting age were shot or conscripted for labor because they were, or stood in for, the soldiers of the nation. Women of childbearing age were raped or forced into prostitution because they were, or stood in for, the body of the nation. So rape was widely performed as a gesture of conquest, but not simply as a release for male sexual starvation; it was an act of humiliation. Japanese soldiers performed this act on the bodies of Chinese women, but the target of the humiliation was Chinese men: it was proof of their impotence in all ways.
¹³

Brook’s analysis helps explain not only why atrocious behaviour was so widespread among Japanese forces during the war but also why the sufferings of Chinese comfort women were excluded from the heroic narrative of the nation-state after the war. Indeed, the Japanese military men’s particularly brutal violence against Chinese women was an act performed for the war and made possible by the war. This “gesture of conquest” was acted out as soon as the imperial army made its first conquests in northeastern China and, as is seen in the following pages, lasted throughout the entire Second Sino-Japanese War.

While soldiers on the battlefields assaulted local Chinese women and made them sex slaves in their barracks in northeastern China,
¹⁴
more formal military comfort stations began to emerge in big cities. Evidence shows that Japan’s navy first set up military comfort stations in Shanghai during the Shanghai War (the first major battle of the Resistance War) in 1932.
¹⁵
Shanghai had been a regular Japanese navy base since the end of the Qing Dynasty, and Japanese brothels appeared in the city as early as the 1880s. By 1882, the number of Japanese prostitutes in Shanghai had already reached eight hundred.
¹⁶
For the sake of appearances, the Japanese Foreign Ministry cooperated with the Chinese government’s effort to ban prostitution and repatriated nearly six hundred Japanese prostitutes from Shanghai during 1884 and 1885.
¹⁷
However, this effort failed to put an end to the Japanese brothels. The number of Japanese prostitutes in Shanghai swelled again, and, in the summer of 1907, licensed Japanese
kashizashiki
(a type of brothel) began to operate in Shanghai.
¹⁸
The
kashizashiki
provided the infrastructure from which the Japanese navy established its first comfort stations in 1932. A document produced by the Japanese Consulate General in Shanghai, “The Current State of the Supervision of the Unlicensed Prostitute in the Concession and the State and
Supervision of Japanese Special Women in Shanghai during 1938,” contains a detailed description of the beginning of the military comfort women system. It indicates that the
kashizashiki
run by the Japanese began to operate in Shanghai in July 1907 and employed B-type “entertainers” (prostitutes) in Japan’s licensed brothel system. In June 1929, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau ordered the abolition of all licensed Chinese brothels in districts under its jurisdiction and also demanded that Japanese brothels shut down their business in districts under Chinese jurisdiction. At the same time, the Shanghai Branch of the Japanese Women’s Association for Rectifying Public Morals (
Fujin kyōfūkai Shanhai shibu
) strongly opposed the licensed prostitution system and petitioned the Japanese Foreign Ministry to address this social concern. Accordingly, that year, the Japanese Consulate General created the “restaurant barmaid” (
ryōtei shakufu
) system as an expeditious way of replacing the abolished licensed brothels. However, with the rapid increase of Japanese military personnel in the region due to the Shanghai Incident in 1932, the navy established comfort facilities (in the form of
kashizashiki
) for the troops, and these continued to operate up until the outbreak of full-scale warfare in 1937. Some of the proprietors temporarily went back to Japan. However, from November 1937 the number of
kashizashiki
in China kept increasing, along with the number of Japanese nationals. By the end of December, there were eleven such
kashizashiki
, of which seven were naval comfort stations, and 191 barmaids (171 Japanese women and twenty Korean women) – seventy-three more than in the preceding year. The four general
kashizashiki
were mostly for overseas Japanese; the seven naval comfort stations were for the exclusive use of navy officers and soldiers. Medical specialists gave the comfort women a physical examination once a week in the presence of an officer from the navy’s land battle unit and a police officer from the Consulate General. In addition, there were three hundred temporary comfort women in the army’s comfort stations within the jurisdiction of the Japanese Consulate General.
¹⁹