Chinese Comfort Women (8 page)

Instead of taking serious measures to punish sexual crimes, Japanese military leaders expanded the comfort station system. Two days before the occupation of Nanjing, the Japanese Central China Area Army ordered the
establishment of comfort stations.
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On 18 December 1937, Major Yamazaki Masao, a staff officer of the 10th Army under the command of the Central China Area Army, indicated in his diary that, when he arrived at Huzhou, a prefecture adjacent to Nanjing, Lieutenant-Colonel Terada had set up a recreation facility and had had the military police round up local women. There were seven women in the facility at the time, but the military police were planning to recruit one hundred.
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Wartime Chinese records confirm that, around the time of the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese army had already begun the mass enslavement of Chinese women in comfort facilities. Jiang Gonggu, a Chinese military physician of the Nanjing defence force who remained in the city during the massacre, wrote that, after the fall of Nanjing, the Japanese troops kidnapped and gang-raped women in daylight, even abducting them from the International Safety Zone at Jinling College to be their sex slaves.
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The same situation was also recorded in the depositions submitted to the IMTFE. The deposition of Mrs. Shui Fang Tsen, the director of dormitories at Jinling College, states that the Japanese soldiers would enter the grounds of the safety zone on the pretext of looking for soldiers when they were in fact looking for girls. According to her, a typical incident occurred on the night of 17 December 1937, when a group of Japanese soldiers forcibly entered the college and carried off eleven young women. Nine of these women made their way back, “horribly raped and abused”; the other two were never heard from again.
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In addition to the military’s direct abduction of local women, the Japanese army also used local collaborators to gather women. In Nanjing, Qiao Hongnian was one such collaborator, and he helped the Japanese army set up more than one comfort station.
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Documents preserved in the Nanjing Archives show that, in mid-December 1937, Ōnishi, Head of the Secret Service and staff officer of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, ordered local collaborators to round up one hundred women for the purpose of establishing comfort stations. Under Qiao’s supervision, they took three hundred women from the refugee camp at the Women’s College; from among these women, one hundred were selected and presented to Ōnishi. Qiao also helped to prepare two facilities, one at Fuhou-gang and the other at Tieguan-xiang. The comfort stations officially opened on 22 December, with Ōnishi as the head and Qiao Hongnian as his assistant. They were staffed by about two hundred people, including: three ticket clerks (two of whom were Japanese), four bookkeepers, maids, servants, and a large number of comfort women. Thirty attractive young women were assigned to Fuhou-gang for the exclusive use of the military officers, who were charged three yen in military currency
per hour and ten yen per night. The rest of the women were sent to Tieguanxiang to service the soldiers, who were charged two yen per hour and had no overnight option.
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The Japanese army covered the initial operating expenses of the comfort stations; later, they were run on ticket revenue and Ōnishi pocketed the surplus.
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Between December 1937 and April 1938, Qiao Hongnian followed the orders of the Japanese army and helped set up three other comfort stations.
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During the rapid expansion of the comfort women system in China after the Nanjing Massacre, it appears to have been common practice for comfort stations to be directly managed by an army officer who would use Chinese collaborators to draft local women. A similar process was used in smaller cities. According to the recollection of Sugino Shigeru, who served as a member of the Committee on Establishing Military Comfort Stations, on 18 December 1937 a military comfort station was set up shortly after the medical unit of the 3rd Division entered Yangzhou, a city northeast of Nanjing. Sugino and other committee members, accompanied by the local Association for Maintaining Order, rounded up forty-seven Chinese women for the comfort station.
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Around the same time, two comfort stations were set up in Changzhou east of Nanjing. According to the report of Manba Shitomi, commander of the 2nd Independent Heavy Artillery Siege Battalion: “One [of the comfort stations] was managed by the commissariat and the other by a unit under the direct control of the army headquarters. Each unit was allocated about one hour to use the comfort station on a specified day under the supervision of the commanding officer. Military physicians conducted hygiene checks [of the comfort women] in advance.”
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Clearly, the abduction of Chinese women and their confinement in comfort stations was already very common at the commencement of full-scale warfare between China and Japan.

Parallel to the enslavement of local Chinese women, the Japanese military intensified the trafficking of Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese women to the Chinese mainland, starting in early 1938. Research suggests that Japan’s increased mobilization of women in its colonies and homeland was partly due to security concerns: military leaders worried not only that the abduction of local women might spur more rebellions in the occupied regions but also that Chinese comfort women might pass military information to Chinese forces. The majority of the comfort women shipped to China from overseas were Korean,
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although a large number of women from Japan and Taiwan were also drafted during this period, and, as the war in the Asia-Pacific theatre progressed, women from other countries were forced to become comfort
women as well.
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Asō Tetsuo, at the time a military physician in the Commissariat Hospital of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, wrote about the situation in his memoir. On 2 January 1938, Asō examined about one hundred women for sexually transmitted diseases at the Yangjiazhai military comfort station in Shanghai. According to his recollection, about 80 percent of the women were Korean and the rest were Japanese.
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Unlike the Chinese comfort women, who were primarily kidnapped in the war zones or occupied areas and were rarely mentioned in Japan’s official documents, Korean and Japanese comfort women were considered overseas subjects of Imperial Japan, and, for this reason, the Japanese Foreign Ministry occasionally kept records of their numbers. The extant documents of the Japanese consulates in central and eastern China recorded more than one thousand Japanese and Korean comfort women in the cities of Shanghai, Jiujiang, Hangzhou, Zhenjiang, Hankou, Xiamen, Wuhu, and Nanchang between 1938 and 1939.
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In northern China, the Japanese consulates’ records did not list comfort stations as a separate category; consequently, the statistics on comfort women in that area are not available. However, the “Table of Statistics on the Japanese Population by Occupations,” compiled by the Japanese Police Department in northern China on 1 July 1939, records that, in the area, there were 8,931 “
geisha
, prostitutes, and barmaids,” which, as Yoshimi suggests, must have included a large number of comfort women.
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As in other regions, in southern China the number of comfort women increased rapidly when fighting spread there. The “Wartime Ten-Day Report,” put out by the headquarters of the 21st Army in Guangzhou in April 1939, recorded about 850 comfort women under its direct control and an additional 150 drafted from the hometown of each unit.
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The report also indicated that these numbers pertain only to areas in which the military police were stationed and that additional comfort stations, such as those established in Sanshui, Jiujiang, Guanyao, Zengcheng, Shilong, and other places, were not included. In fact, on 15 April 1939, the chief of the medical section of the 21st Army reported at his meeting with the Medical Bureau of the Ministry of War that his army imported one comfort woman for every one hundred soldiers, bringing the number of comfort women to between fourteen hundred and sixteen hundred.
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These numbers, though incomplete, give us an idea of the rapid increase in the number of Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese comfort women in China at the time. However, these figures include neither local Chinese comfort women nor small comfort stations under the direct control of particular army units. Field investigations in China since the 1990s reveal that the total number of military comfort facilities and comfort women was much larger
than estimates based on Japanese wartime documents suggest. In Shanghai alone the sites of 164 comfort stations have been confirmed, yet evidence indicates that even this number is far too low. The Hongkou and Zhabei districts of Shanghai, for instance, are known to have had a large number of comfort stations. In 1940, an “association of comfort stations” was established in the districts and “Provisional Regulations on Comfort Stations” (Guanli weiansuo linshi guiyue) were issued to enhance their management.
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However, due to municipal development over the years, some comfort station sites in the area have been difficult to locate and, hence, are excluded from the statistics pertaining to verified comfort stations.
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During the Japanese occupation, under the auspices of the Shanghai Special City Police Bureau, the Hongkou District Association of Comfort Stations kept records of the number of comfort stations in the district. See
Table 1
for the report for 1940.
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Table 1
“Comfort stations” in Hongkou District, Shanghai, in 1940

In addition to the known comfort stations, there seem to have been many comfort facilities under direct military control that were kept secret from the public. A newspaper report in
Dagongbao
on 27 February 1938 reveals that Mr. Lu, a pastor of a small church in Kunshan near Shanghai, happened to see one such military comfort station. In late 1937, after the Battle of Shanghai, Lu went to Shanghai, where he had Japanese acquaintances. A Japanese military officer took him to an “entertainment facility” (
xingle-suo
) located on the Bei-Sichuan Road, Hongkou District. Japanese soldiers stood guard at the entrance of a three-story building that, formerly, had been a bank. When Lu entered with his Japanese friend, he was shocked to see naked Chinese women lying on the floors throughout the building. These women, ranging in age from teenagers to thirty-year-olds, spoke different local dialects. Several Japanese soldiers were walking through the rooms selecting
women. These women would be severely beaten by guards if they resisted. Deeply upset, Lu started to leave, but suddenly a young woman stood up and cried for help. Lu recognized this woman as Mrs. Wang, his next-door neighbour. He knew it would be dangerous to show any sympathy toward her, but as a devoted Christian he could not bear to see her beaten by the Japanese soldiers. He begged the Japanese officer who had taken him there to let this young woman go, saying that she was his relative. The Japanese officer believed him and let Lu lead her out. According to Mrs. Wang, she, along with other women, had been kidnapped when the Japanese troops seized Kunshan in mid-November. They had been trucked to Hongkou District in Shanghai and put into this comfort station, where several hundred women were imprisoned and repeatedly raped each day. Some of the women went on a hunger strike and died, but the Japanese military immediately brought in new women to replace them.
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This report is in accordance with historical knowledge and the experiences described by other Chinese comfort station survivors. Although it is known that Japanese military comfort facilities were set up in Shanghai beginning in 1932, this particular comfort station and its hundreds of victims are not mentioned in any official Japanese document. If Lu had not seen it by chance and revealed its existence via a newspaper, it would have remained hidden from the world. This comfort station did not exist in isolation. The mass abduction and enslavement of Chinese women occurred in many cities once the war became full-blown, and it was soon happening in all the regions in which Japanese troops were stationed. Mr. Tan, a local resident who fled from Nanjing on 20 May 1938, reported that, by May 1938, less than half a year after the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese army had established seventeen military comfort stations in that city.
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At the same time, the troops abducted large numbers of Chinese women and set up comfort stations in the adjacent cities of Nantong, Suzhou, Wuxi, Zhenjiang, Yangzhou, Changzhou, Rugao, Xuzhou, and Hangzhou.
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