Chinese Comfort Women (10 page)

The sexual violence and abduction perpetrated on Chinese women by Japanese troops took particularly brutal forms in areas in which Chinese resistance forces were active. This can be seen in the data documented by a survey entitled “Jin Ji Lu Yu bianqu banian kang-Ri zhanzheng zhong renmin zaoshou sunshi diaocha tongji biao” (Statistics based on the investigations of the civilian damages during the eight-year resistance war against Japanese forces at the Jin Ji Lu Yu border region). It was conducted in January 1946 at the border area of Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, and Henan provinces, where the resistance forces, led by the Chinese Communist Party, had established their bases in the late 1930s. During the eight years of Japanese invasion of the area, approximately 363,000 women were raped by Japanese troops and 122,000 of them contracted venereal diseases as a result.
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A report preserved in the Central Archives of China indicates that, during one mop-up operation at the end of 1940, the Imperial Japanese Army raped 4,274 local women at Laizhuo, Hebei Province.
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A record preserved in Hebei Province Archives, “Ba nian lai Riben Faxisi cuihui Taihang-qu renming de gaishu” (A summary of the damages done by the Japanese fascists to the people in Taihang region over the past eight years), reports that Japanese forces in the region frequently raped and kidnapped local women and regularly detained a large number of them as military sex slaves (see
Figure 2
).
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In the Wangxiaoyu stronghold, for instance, soldiers detained over twenty young women who were abducted from the nearby village, including a thirteen-year-old girl whose cries were heard by the local people day and night.
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He Tianyi, a researcher affiliated
with the Hebei Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, reports that, by the end of 1943 in the southern Hebei region alone, the Japanese army had built 1,103 strongholds and that the total number of such strongholds constructed during the war in northern China would, at the least, have exceeded ten thousand. This number, though still incomplete, suggests that the number of Chinese women detained in Japanese military strongholds as sex slaves in northern China alone could have been between 100,000 and 200,000.
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Figure 2
A cave dwelling in Yu County, Shanxi Province used as a “comfort station” by the Japanese troops and the place Wan Aihua was imprisoned in 1943.

The research conducted by Japanese and Korean scholars indicates that larger Japanese military units seemed to have systematically carried out the draft of comfort women rather than relying on apparently random kidnappings. Usually the expeditionary forces would order the rear service staff or adjutants of the army, division, brigade, or regiment to round up women and set up comfort stations. The orders would then be carried out by the commissariat unit, the accounting section, or the military police.
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Yamada Sadamu, former military police warrant officer and the chief of the military police unit in Baoqing, Hubei Province, wrote in his diary that he was asked by the rear service staff of the 116th Division to draft comfort women after Japanese troops entered Baoqing in the fall of 1944. He assigned the task to a sergeant major, who gathered about a dozen women and turned them over to an adjutant.
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The direct involvement of Japanese military officers in establishing comfort stations is also evidenced by their confessions, preserved in Chinese archives. A 1954 interrogation record kept in the Central Archives of China shows that, between 1942 and 1945, under the supervision of Hirose Saburō, senior adjutant of the 59th Division of the Japanese Army, 127 comfort stations were set up at Xintai, Taian, Linqing, Tuxikou, Laiwu, Jinan, Zhangdian, Boshan, Zhoucun, De-xian, and Hedong in Shandong Province. From 1944 to 1945, Hirose Saburō was in charge of the management of the military comfort station named Star Club (Xing julebu in Chinese) in Ji’nan City, Shandong Province, which held about fifty Chinese women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three.
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On his capture, Suzuki Hiraku, lieutenant-general and commander of the 117th Division, confessed that, between 1941 and 1942, when he was the commander of the 27th Infantry Regiment, he ordered the establishment of comfort stations in the Hebei area (where his units were stationed) and detained sixty local women. In 1945, when his troops were stationed in the He’nan area, he ordered comfort stations to be set up near the military barracks and abducted another sixty women to be comfort women.
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In occupied areas in China, the Japanese military commonly used Chinese collaborators to round up local women. This was often accomplished through the cooperation of the local puppet administrations and the local Association for Maintaining Order (Zhian weichi hui), the latter being a local civilian organization under the supervision of the occupation army. Once the Japanese army had occupied a new territory, it would force each local resident to register for a “good citizen ID card.” During this process the military authorities would either pick out young women to send to comfort stations or instruct the local puppet government to do so. Thousands of women were reportedly taken away during the “good citizen ID” registration after the fall of Nanjing to be comfort women for the Japanese military; some were sent to northeastern China to serve the Guandong Army.
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Smaller military units also forced the local administration to help draft comfort women. It was reported that the Japanese detachment in the Xingyujiang stronghold ordered the nearby village head to send two women to the blockhouse each night to “sleep” with the soldiers. The villagers strongly resisted this order. The village head, under pressure to comply, asked the members of the puppet village administration to send the women from their own families first; he set the example by sending his own wife. On hearing this, his wife hanged herself.
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The following order, issued by the Wenshui County Office, Shanxi Province, in 1939, is another documented case. The translation of the document reads as follows:

Order of Wenshui County Office (Chai 1)

The Hejia-xiang Brothel in the county seat was established to protect the county’s residents. Since its establishment, good residents in this county have been safe. However, it has been made clear that recently the brothel does not have enough prostitutes in service – only four available excluding those who are ill. The Imperial Army authority has currently ordered that the number [of the women] be increased within three days. Therefore, in addition to the women submitted by the county from the city, all villages of 300 households or more must submit one woman to be a prostitute. The women selected must be around twenty years old, healthy, and good-looking; they must be sent to the county office as soon as possible for examination. Each of the selected women will be given a one-time payment of one silver dollar and provided with the following monthly benefits by the Association for Maintaining Order: twenty-five kilograms of wheat flour, ten cups of millet, two pints of kerosene, and fifty kilograms of coal.
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In addition, the women may enjoy the gifts from the brothel users. This is an important and urgent matter.
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The Hejia-xiang Brothel was a comfort station for the exclusive use of the Imperial Japanese Army. The document produced by the Wenshui County Office shows that the Wenshui County administration had received an order from the imperial army to draft comfort women for the military brothel. In order to justify forcing local women to be prostitutes, the County Office emphasized the importance of the brothel to the safety of local residents. The document indicates that, if civilians failed to follow the military order, the occupation army would take violent action against them. The document also reveals that the brothel was not a commercial institution; rather, the local Association for Maintaining Order was charged with maintaining its operating costs. Evidence of the Japanese army’s coercion of local administrations to set up and pay for comfort stations has also been found in Tianjin, Shandong, and other areas in northern China.
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When local dignitaries received military orders to draft comfort women, their common excuse for doing so was the safety of local residents. The diary of a military physician affiliated with the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Independent Mountain Artillery Regiment recorded a case that occurred in a village near Dongshi, Hubei Province, on the bank of the Yangtze River. His diary entry for 11 August 1940 describes how the Chinese women drafted from local families received their medical examination for sexually transmitted diseases:
When it was time for her internal exam, the young woman became increasingly embarrassed and would not take off her pants. The interpreter and the head of the Association for Maintaining Order yelled at her and she finally took them off. When I had her lie down on a bed and began a pelvic exam, she frenziedly scratched at my hands. I saw her crying. Later I was told that she cried for a long time after she left the room.

It was the same with the next girl and I felt I wanted to cry as well. This was probably their first experience with this kind of embarrassing examination and, given the purpose of it, it was no surprise that they felt humiliated. They must have come the whole way crying even as the head of the neighbourhood and the head of the Association for Maintaining Order were trying to convince them that this was for the safety of the village.
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Clearly, the young women being examined had been forced by local leaders to be military comfort women. The doctor also wrote in his diary that the battalion commander “consulted with the head of the neighbourhood and the head of the Association for Maintaining Order and asked them to draft women locally,” and that “it was not a coercive request at all; everything was left up to their discretion.”
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However, it is plain that local residents in the occupied areas were in no position to refuse any request from the Japanese military.

In fact, reports of coerced collaboration under the Japanese occupation are numerous. Hu Jiaren of Fuli Township, Hainan Island, witnessed one such case. He reported that, in March 1943, a unit of twenty-five Japanese military men occupied Fuli Township, where Hu Jiaren lived. The occupation troops built two military strongholds and demanded that the nearby villages submit two women to be long-term comfort women for the master sergeant and the sergeant first class, and that they submit another five or six women to be short-term comfort women for the soldiers on a daily basis. The occupation army made it clear that, if any village dared to disobey this order, the residents of the entire village would be killed and their houses burned. Consequently, local women Zheng Ading and Zhuo A’niang were turned in to service the sergeants, and the villages in the township took turns submitting five to six women to the Japanese military stronghold each day, as the army demanded.
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In a report published in
Guangxi funü
(Guangxi women’s journal) in 1941, Wang Bizhen documents another case of the military’s coercing local people to submit women to a military comfort station, this time at Tongcheng, Hubei Province. According to this report, the comfort station at Tongcheng detained both women drafted locally and women from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The women drafted from Japan and its colonies were assigned to service the
military officers, while local Chinese women were assigned to service the soldiers. The report describes the drafting and treatment of the Chinese comfort women as follows:

Most of the women who are used as the “comforting objects” [
weianpin
] in this comfort station are drafted by force from the local area by the Association for Maintaining Order. These women are allowed to go home after being enslaved in the comfort station for a certain time, but they must have at least five warrantors to guarantee that they would be sent back [to the station].
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If a released woman is not sent back three days after the due date, all the warrantors and their family members would be buried alive and the members of the Association for Maintaining Order would also be punished.

During the days in service a comfort woman is raped by some sixty soldiers. She is forced to smile when being raped and if she shows the slightest unwillingness she would be ripped naked and whipped ruthlessly, and she would not be permitted to go home for three weeks.
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