Chinese Comfort Women (15 page)

Similar vicious crimes were committed by Japanese troops in the comfort facilities, whether the women were confined in urban comfort stations or in remote rural ones. Among the many Chinese women who were abused to death in the comfort stations was one, surnamed Li, who was held in the Wuhuyi Comfort Station in today’s Wuyuan Township, Yueyang County, Hunan Province. The Wuhuyi Comfort Station was under the direct control of a battalion of the 11th Army, and the expenses associated with its operation were foisted on local residents.
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When it opened in October 1939 the station held fourteen comfort women. So far from preventing rape it provided the setting for murder: reportedly, a squad leader and a company commander both desired Li’s services as a comfort woman. The squad leader vented his rage on Li. He ripped off her clothes, pushed her to the ground, poured a bucket of cold water through her nose and mouth, stomped repeatedly on her abdomen, and then let a military dog maul her to death.
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Comfort women drafted from Japan’s colonies were also treated brutally. Local witnesses reported that, when Zhaojian-yuan Comfort Station opened at Nada City, Hainan Island, twenty-one women between the ages of sixteen and eighteen were drafted. Most were from the local area but there were also a few from Taiwan. During the first ten days of the opening of this comfort station, over three thousand Japanese military men visited it. Continually raped, sixteen-year-old Ajiao from Taiwan passed out due to excessive bleeding caused by this form of sexual torture. She was given an injection to stop the bleeding and, only thirty minutes later, was again forced to service the troops.
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Surviving daily life in a comfort station meant overcoming all kinds of extreme hardship, including confinement, lack of food and clothing, sexual abuse, torture, surveillance, and the sight of other women dying. The despair of some survivors was so profound that they turned to drug addiction and/or suicide. In
Part 2
, twelve survivors provide detailed descriptions of the conditions in various comfort stations, but here we offer a brief summary.

Room

A comfort woman was typically confined in a small room not much larger than the size of a bed. A former orderly in the 110th Field Artillery Regiment described what he saw around February 1941 in the comfort station in Shijiazhuang in China. The conditions he describes may be considered typical: “When you opened the door, there was only a small space with a cramped dirt floor. Since the comfort women lived in there, their possessions and furniture were all crowded into the space. A strange smell permeated the narrow rooms.”
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In the temporary comfort stations near frontlines, even beds were often unavailable, so the comfort women were forced to sleep and service the troops on the dirt floor.

Food

Typically, comfort women were barely kept alive in the stations, receiving only minimal food. At the Shimenzi Comfort Station in Heilongjiang Province, for example, the comfort women were given a small amount of sorghum with frozen radishes boiled in salt water in the winter, and sorghum with green onions and salt water in the summer.
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At the Shilu Comfort Station on Hainan Island, a handful of rice or a few pieces of yam were the daily fare of the comfort women.
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The women whose interviews appear in this book confirm that they were starved while being forced to service the soldiers. In the more crowded stations, women often had no time to eat between servicing men.

Clothing

Explicit racial discrimination was reflected in what comfort women were forced to wear. According to survivors’ testimonies, Japanese comfort women typically wore Japanese robes and were allowed to acquire clothing and cosmetics, although in many cases their cost was added to their debts.
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Korean comfort women, considered subjects of the Japanese Empire, were often given Japanese robes or uniforms by the military. On important Japanese holidays, they were required to dress up for the entertainment of the soldiers. Although a small number of Chinese comfort women recall that they were forced to wear Japanese robes, most were not given any clothes; instead, they wore only the clothing in which they had been abducted, even after it had turned to rags. Worse yet were the conditions in crowded stations that served a large number of troops: here, the women were forced to remain naked since they were constantly raped.

Medical Conditions

The excessive sexual abuse made many women ill, and sexually transmitted diseases reached epidemic levels in the comfort stations. Whether or not they contracted venereal disease, all twelve survivors (see
Part 2
) said that, due to sexual abuse, their lower bodies became swollen and extremely painful soon after they were taken into the comfort stations, and none of them received medical treatment. Although military authorities decreed that, in order to control disease, comfort women were to be given medical examinations, this was done mainly to protect the men. Medical examination and treatment were often unavailable at frontline comfort facilities, and many comfort women who were too ill to service the men were left untreated, abandoned, or killed. In 1942, not atypically, three Chinese comfort women who were infected with venereal disease at Zhaojiayuan Comfort Station in Hainan were buried alive within the first month of its operation.
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Sexual Slavery and Torture

Comfort women were deprived of their freedom and forced to unconditionally obey the military men’s orders. If a comfort woman failed to satisfy military personnel, she was severely punished. Testimonies tell of a comfort woman named Ayan who was stabbed in the leg while a Japanese officer continued to rape her as she lost consciousness,
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and of a Xinying woman in Zhaojiayuan Comfort Station who, when she refused to meet a soldier’s demands, was tied to a brick pillar and had hot pepper powder and salt rubbed onto her genitals.
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In addition, Japanese troops tortured comfort women for entertainment. One such case is reported as occurring in a comfort station
in Longling County, Yunnan Province, where Japanese soldiers poked a long radish into the vagina of a comfort woman named Wang Huandi, causing her death.
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Surveillance and Escape

To prevent comfort women from escaping, the stations kept them under strict military surveillance. Chinese women drafted locally were especially closely watched because the Japanese army feared they might have connections with anti-Japanese forces and local people. The regulations of Xinying Comfort Station, Hainan Island, were typical: the comfort women were forbidden to go out, and, if a woman attempted escape, she and her entire family would be decapitated.
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The army set sentries around the stations, and in many cases the Chinese women were not permitted to leave their rooms even to void their bowels. When they needed to be moved from one place to another, they were always guarded by armed soldiers. Despite the strict surveillance and threat of severe punishment, some Chinese women did risk their lives to escape. Many of them were caught and brutally killed, but a small number of them succeeded with the help of their families and local people. The escapes of Li Lianchun and Huang Youliang are two examples (see
Part 2
). Their escape stores demonstrate their amazing strength and agency as well as the courage and compassion of the local people who helped them. However, driven by daily physical and mental torture, some comfort women came to rely on drugs to escape their agony, as is seen in Lei Guiying’s narrative (
Part 2
). Given the strict surveillance of the comfort stations, these illegal drugs were most likely supplied by military personnel or station proprietors. Indeed, evidence of such cases is found in existing military documents.
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Death and Suicide

Brutal abuse and deliberate killings resulted in an extremely high death rate among Chinese comfort women. Of over three hundred young women drafted by the Japanese army and sent to Shilu Iron Mine Comfort Station on Hainan Island, over two hundred were abused to death in under four years, from 1942 to Japan’s surrender in 1945.
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This death rate was not uncommon. Huang Huirong was drafted by the Japanese army from Guangzhou together with twenty-one women and sent to the comfort station at the Huangliu military airport in Hainan; only four of the women were still alive when the Japanese army surrendered in the winter of 1945.
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In addition, driven to despair by excessive suffering, many Chinese comfort women committed suicide. Huang Yuxia, for example, was abducted into the Shilu Comfort Station by the
Japanese army a few days after her wedding. Her husband, Liang Xin, went to the comfort station to look for her only to be beaten to death. In extreme grief and despair Huang Yuxia committed suicide.
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Another case reported from Hainan Island concerns a Li ethnic woman who was confined in the military barracks in Tengqiao City; she was repeatedly gang-raped by Japanese soldiers and committed suicide by biting off her own tongue.
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The particularly atrocious manner in which Japanese soldiers treated Chinese comfort women is even recorded in the Japanese army’s own wartime documents. As one example, in his report entitled “Special Phenomena in the Battlefields and Policies Regarding Them,” prepared in June 1939, First Lieutenant Hayao Torao, a psychiatrist affiliated with the Kōnodai Army Hospital, wrote:

It has been an extremely widespread idea that the soldiers are free to do anything to enemy women, even things that would never be permitted in the homeland, so when they see Chinese girls they act as if possessed. Therefore, those who have been reported are only the unlucky ones; we don’t know exactly how many cases have happened without being reported …

The military authorities assume that to restrain the soldiers’ sexual desires is impossible and set up comfort stations so that the soldiers will not rape Chinese women. However, rapes are committed rather frequently, and the good citizens of China inevitably fear Japanese military men whenever they see them.

Comfort stations have been made official; the commissioned officers were the first to use the stations, and they asked the soldiers to go there as well. Knowing what was going on in the comfort stations, soldiers of conscience laughed scornfully at the military authorities. However, some commissioned officers yelled at those soldiers who would not go to the comfort station, calling them freaks.
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Japanese military leaders claimed that comfort stations were primarily established to prevent the occurrence of rape and sexually transmitted diseases among the Japanese forces, but the comfort women system completely failed to achieve these goals. Okamura Yasuji, one of the military commanders who implemented the comfort station plan, admitted: “Even though such units as the 6th Division march with a corps of comfort women, there is no end to the rapes.”
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At the same time, the number of reported cases of venereal disease among the Japanese forces continued to be high: 11,983 new cases were reported in 1942; 12,557 in 1943; and 12,587 in 1944.
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The real figures would be even larger as there were many unreported cases.

The military comfort women system came to an end with Japan’s defeat in 1945, but the brutality became even more extreme toward the end of the war. Japanese troops were expected to kill themselves rather than to surrender to the enemy. Many soldiers forced comfort women from their homeland or colonies to die with them.
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At the same time, a large number of comfort women were killed in the military’s attempt to destroy evidence of the comfort women system. Xu Guojun, a veteran of the Chinese Expeditionary Army, describes the mass murder of Chinese comfort women in Tengchong, a small town located on the border between China and Burma in Yunnan Province:

We entered the Tengchong County Seat on the morning of September 14, 1944 … In a military comfort station, seventeen bodies of Chinese comfort women and some babies were lying there; all had been stabbed to death by the Japanese troops. One of the dead women held in her arms a baby, whose body was drenched in blood.
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In another report, Pan Shizhi, a newspaper correspondent during the war described how, when the Chinese Expeditionary Army took the last stronghold in Tengchong on 14 September 1944, the Chinese soldiers found a little girl about ten years old in a dugout. She told the soldiers that Japanese troops had forced her to serve water to the twelve comfort women retained by the unit. These comfort women had been held in a bomb shelter, but one morning a Japanese officer entered with a gun and shot them to death, one after the other. The little girl survived because, having fainted from horror, she was thought to be dead.
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In the same article, Pan reports that the Expeditionary Army found another murder site, at which over a dozen women’s bodies, all with their eyes covered, had been laid out near the city wall.