Chinese Comfort Women (35 page)

Despite all the difficulties, support for the survivors from NGO groups kept increasing in China. In 2006, the All China Lawyers Association and the China Legal Aid Foundation launched the Committee for the Investigation of the Victimization of Former Chinese “Comfort Women” (Zhongguo yuan “weianfu” shouhai shishi diaocha weiyuanhui). To date, the committee has published three reports of its investigations.
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Its new-found documentary
evidence includes the confessions of fifty-seven captured Japanese military officers, police officers, and government officials concerning their direct involvement in setting up comfort stations and kidnapping, detaining, and raping Chinese women in such facilities in Anhui, Hubei, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Shandong, Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang.
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The committee’s investigations also reveal that, after Japan’s surrender in 1945, one Japanese unit left behind in Shanxi and renamed the “6th Security Brigade” (Baoan diliu dadui), affiliated with Yan Xishan’s Nationalist force, continued perpetrating the comfort women system. This brigade notified Japanese soldiers still remaining in the area that they had established a comfort station in Taiyuan, Shanxi.
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During the Japanese invasion an extremely large number of Japanese troops were stationed in China, but thus far very few of the former Japanese servicemen have come forward to speak about the imperial army’s comfort women system. The records of the confessions of Japanese war criminals often focus on killing, while sexual violence and slavery are mentioned only in passing. As the investigation progresses in China, researchers hope to unearth more confessions pertaining to military sexual slavery.

At the same time, grassroots-initiated memorials became important sites for the commemoration of comfort women. After the 1998 establishment of the Museum of Sexual Slavery by Japanese Military in South Korea, the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) opened in Tokyo in the summer of 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The museum was initiated by the late Matsui Yayori, the former chairperson of Violence Against Women in War – Network Japan (VAWW-NET Japan), and supported by Japanese citizens. Since its opening the museum has regularly held exhibitions and symposiums on the comfort women system and wartime sexual violence committed by the Japanese military. One of the latest exhibitions it co-sponsored with Japanese and Chinese NGOs – Panel Exhibition: Japanese Military Sexual Violence (
Nihongun seibōryoku paneruten
) – has been touring China. The executive committee of the panel exhibition, led by Ikeda Eriko (head of WAM), comprises Japanese citizen groups, scholars, and legal specialists. Since November 2009, five panel exhibitions have been held in Wuxiang, Beijing, Xi’an, Guangzhou, and Nanjing in China. The personal panels portraying the Chinese victims had a powerful impact on audiences and were reported by major Chinese media networks.

On 5 July 2007, which marks the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of China’s Resistance War against Japan, the Chinese “Comfort Women” Archives opened at Shanghai Normal University. The archives, founded by history professor Su Zhiliang, preserve former Chinese comfort women’s
testimonials, research findings, video recordings, and historical relics from former comfort station sites. In the past decades, Su and Chinese researchers have been calling for the preservation of historical evidence of Japanese military comfort stations by establishing museums at their former sites, but this proposal has encountered difficulties. On 2 September 2010, after years of joint efforts by local people, researchers, and administration, China’s first such museum, the Japanese Military Comfort Women System Atrocities Museum, opened at Dongjia-gou, Longling County, Yunnan Province. The museum was established at the Dong Family Compound (
Dongjia dayuan
), which was seized by the Japanese army and turned into a comfort station during the Japanese occupation of Longling, from 1942 to 1944. The houses were left unoccupied after the Japanese troops withdrew. In 2005, the Dong family donated the compound to the local government and, at the request of local researcher Chen Zuliang and the Baoshan Committee of the China Zhi Gong Party,
¹⁷
it was designated a historic site. Longling Cultural Relics Bureau restored the dilapidated buildings with government funding and established the museum to commemorate the victims.
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Longling was an important fortress on the vital wartime supply line in China. According to the West Yunnan NGO Research Association for the Unresolved Issues of the Anti-Japanese War (Dianxi kang-Ri zhanzheng yiliu wenti minjian yanjiuhui), the Imperial Japanese Army’s 56th Division occupied Longling County on 4 May 1942 and, within two weeks, set up a military comfort station at Zhen’an-jie Street. Reportedly, the first comfort station had four Burmese comfort women, and fighting among the soldiers took place frequently for the opportunity to use it. So, before the end of May, troops transported about a hundred comfort women from Taiwan and set up two more comfort stations at the Duan Clan Ancestor Temple and the Jesuit church in Longling County. Soon after that, the occupation army organized a puppet association for maintaining order and instructed it to submit six hundred local women to “comfort the Emperor’s army.” However, the association was unable to comply with this order because most local women had fled into the mountains to escape the invading troops. Japanese soldiers then went on mop-up missions in the surrounding mountains. They first raped the captured women and then detained them, setting up more comfort stations in sites such as the Dong Family Compound of Dongjia-gou, Long-shanka, Baita, Pingjia, and Lameng. Besides local women, local people also saw Japanese and Korean women confined in these comfort stations.
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The comfort station at the Dong Family Compound was in operation for two years, until the Chinese Expeditionary Army defeated the Japanese army at Longling on 3 November 1944 after five months of bloody fighting. What
happened to the comfort women in this station when the Japanese forces withdrew remains unknown, although there have been reports that, in nearby Lameng Township and Tengchong County, Japanese troops forced Korean comfort women to take mercuric chloride, while they shot and killed Chinese comfort women.
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During the restoration of the buildings at the Dong Family Compound museum workers unearthed a large number of relics of the former comfort station, including Japanese medicine bottles, women’s sandals, a toothbrush made in Japan, combs, lipsticks, pens, and a leather wallet embossed with Japanese words indicating that it was an award given by the “Military Government of the Great Manchuria Imperial State” (Dai Manshū teikoku gunseibu). Who had used and left these things in the comfort station? What happened to them during the war? The answers to these questions are forever buried in the dust of history, but the relics and the museum stand as a vivid reminder of the individual lives of the women who were raped, enslaved, tortured, and murdered.

Twenty years after the comfort station survivors broke their silence, museums and memorials commemorating the history of comfort women continue to proliferate. On 5 May 2012, the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum opened in Seoul, and memorials, artwork, and websites memorializing the comfort women spread from Korea, Japan, and China to other countries in the world. In its introduction WAM writes: “The Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace is a place where the reality of war crimes is recorded and kept for posterity. We come here to remember historical facts about ‘comfort women,’ and to listen to their stories. And we raise our voices and say, ‘Never Again, anywhere in the world.’”
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Despite the Japanese government’s denial, the comfort women’s stories have become part of the emerging transnational memory of the Second World War.

Epilogue

The two-story greyish buildings at Lane 125, Dong-Baoxing Road, Shanghai, don’t attract any attention from passersby today, but to local residents they are important historic locations: eighty years ago these buildings housed Japan’s first military comfort station, “Daiichi Saloon” (
Dayi shalong
in Chinese). Entering the compound one sees decrepit walls and stairways, where traces of a fire, which occurred in the 1990s and burned a flight of wooden stairs, are still visible. Rubble and trash lie scattered in the yard. The former dance hall, consisting of over fifty square metres on the right side of the ground floor, has been turned into small rooms. The passage connecting the three buildings is now a space with a shared kitchen and three small bathrooms. Only a few Japanese-style movable doors and wooden carvings of Japanese landscapes left in some of the rooms tell people of the buildings’ wartime past.

Daiichi Saloon is one of the 164 sites of Japan’s military comfort stations found in Shanghai in recent years. At most of those sites the buildings had been demolished during the urban development after the war, and the existing ones have atrophied due to lack of maintenance. The buildings of Daiichi Saloon were made into residential houses soon after Japan’s defeat in 1945; currently about seventy families live here.
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In order to preserve this historic site, Su Zhiliang and other Chinese researchers have appealed to the government to convert it into a museum, like those at the sites of Hiroshima and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Local authorities have agreed to the idea but claim to be stifled by lack of funds. Scholars from Europe and Japan who have visited the place have also suggested that a memorial museum be set up here to record the crimes of the Japanese army, but thus far nothing has been done. Funding such a project is certainly not easy since repairing the buildings would be expensive, as would relocating the current residents. However, researchers believe that it is not beyond the government’s ability, given the nation’s rapid economic growth in the past two decades. The real obstacle seems to be political concerns. According to
Global Times
, a press officer for
the cultural department of Hongkou District said that, due to the sensitive nature of the matter, the museum would not be built in the near future.
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The situation concerning the museum at the Daiichi Saloon site is a microcosm of the socio-political memoryscape surrounding the comfort women issue in China: while, at the grassroots level, researchers and activists are struggling to commemorate the traumatic experiences of hundreds of thousands of military comfort women, authorities are held hostage to state politics and so avoid dealing with the issue. However, avoidance cannot heal the wounds of the past: on the contrary, it creates a void in social memory and leaves a space in which amnesia and narrow, nationalistic understandings of history take root and grow. True healing and reconciliation begin with the formation of a transnational memory of the traumas of the past.

One of the political concerns implied by the “sensitive nature of the issue” seems to be that the museum, by memorializing the traumas of the past, may harm the current diplomatic relationship between China and Japan. However, as demonstrated by the narratives of the Chinese survivors presented in this book, the stories of the comfort women are not simply about hatred and revenge. These women, whose very bodies were taken as war supplies, were tortured and exploited by the Japanese imperial forces. Then, when the war ended, they were discarded as shamed and useless by members of their own patriarchal society. Indeed, in China many of them were ignored, treated as collaborators with the enemy, or otherwise persecuted. Yet what the survivors remember and recount is not only suffering and anger but also humanity – no matter how little they themselves have received. We see in the stories that Wan Aihua, though gang-raped multiple times and nearly beaten to death by Japanese troops, never forgot the army interpreter who saved her from an officer’s sword and the local people who helped her. “I didn’t know if the interpreter was Japanese,” Wan Aihua emphasized, “but I believe there were kind people in the Japanese troops, just as there are today, when many Japanese people support our fight for justice.” We also hear Yuan Zhulin speak of her grateful feelings toward a Japanese officer. Yuan lost everything during the Japanese occupation: her first marriage was destroyed as the battle zone kept the couple apart; her father starved to death and her mother was driven away from her hometown; her only daughter died while she, Yuan, was detained in the military comfort station; and her body was violated and damaged, resulting in her inability to have a child. Despite all the sufferings the Japanese army inflicted on her, Yuan Zhulin recalls Nishiyama, a lower-ranking officer who not only treated her kindly but also helped other local Chinese people during the war. Yuan Zhulin was treated
as “a whore working for the Japanese” in the postwar era and sent to do hard labour for seventeen years. At the time she was interviewed, political conditions in China had changed, but there was little room for the idea of affection between a Chinese comfort woman and a Japanese officer. It was with great courage and from a deep faith in humanity that Yuan Zhulin revealed her fondness for Nishiyama, saying that to this day she believes he was a kind person. The comfort women’s stories teach us that the fundamentals of humanity transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. They force us to think deeply about what led to the atrocious behaviour of the Japanese troops and how to prevent such behaviour from reoccurring.

The wounds the war left on the bodies and hearts of the comfort women were so deep that, more than half a century later, in the 1990s, when Ishida Yoneko and a group of Japanese researchers first interviewed a comfort station survivor in Shanxi Province, she began to shake and to panic as soon as she heard the voice of a Japanese man. Only with the psychological support of local people and female researchers was she able to speak of her wartime experience as a comfort woman.
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This difficulty in recalling the traumas of the past is experienced by all the survivors, and they experience it whenever they are re-interviewed. In order to minimize their distress in retelling their extremely painful wartime experiences, the researchers who collaborated in producing this book worked closely with local researchers in order to provide the survivors with the necessary psychological and physical support during each interview. By the time this book was written, the twelve women had been interviewed a number of times by different researchers, activists, and media reporters; and some of their testimonies had also been collected by legal experts for litigation against the Japanese government. While the interviews and legal investigations helped the women break their silence and provided them with a supportive space in which to recall their traumatic memories, the process also created a narrative structure, beginning with self-identification and ending with a call for justice. This structure may give the impression that the narrators’ understanding of their experiences was influenced by interviewers and/or activists. This impression, whether accurate or not, should not be viewed negatively. Having little education and living in imposed silence for most of their lives, these women needed to be empowered through a larger socio-political discourse in order to overcome their fear, and they also needed a venue in which they could articulate and reframe their narratives. The international redress movement for comfort women provided this discourse and this venue. Yet each individual survivor’s life story, as is evident in this book, is personal and unique.