Chinese Comfort Women (36 page)

By its very nature, memory is subjective and temporal, and it can present itself as partial and inconsistent. It is for this reason that the testimonies and memories of former comfort women have often been contested. It is true that, due to old age, wartime trauma, poor education, and the time lapse between the experience and the recounting of the experience, comfort station survivors may not be clear on dates and details surrounding past events. Wan Aihua, for example, due to head injuries suffered when she was beaten by Japanese soldiers, could not remember certain details of her abduction and torture. After her interview Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei spoke to many local people, including Hou Datu, who witnessed Wan Aihua’s abduction, to confirm the information obtained through the interview. All the narratives presented in this book were subjected to such verification. Since the abduction and enslavement of these women were witnessed by local people, their stories are verifiable. As the testimonies of former comfort women have frequently been denied due to the tenuous nature of memory, the Chinese survivors’ narratives constitute a strong voice, and it asks: In the reconstruction of history, whose words count?

The Chinese comfort women’s stories are painful to read, revealing, as they do, the darkest crimes on the spectrum of sexual violence carried out under the aegis of the military comfort women system. As the women’s accounts show, the wanton murder of Chinese women and the brutal mutilation of their bodies was part of the sexual violence that occurred in the comfort stations throughout Japan’s aggressive war in China. These atrocious acts cannot simply be explained by sexual starvation on the part of the troops or lack of discipline. They were politicized acts made possible within the context of war and the violent nature of imperialist conquest. This politicized and militarized mentality dehumanized Japanese military men, enabling them to perceive brutality toward enemy nationals as a necessary part of the war effort and as an expression of their loyalty to the emperor.

The symbolic nature of the bodily damage Japanese troops inflicted on comfort women may be seen in the imperial soldiers’ testimonies. The recollections of Kondō Hajime, a former Japanese military man of the 13th Infantry Battalion of the 4th Independent Mixed Brigade, are a telling example. Kondō was sent to the battlefields in China in 1940, and his unit was stationed at Liao County, Shanxi Province, not far from Yu County, where survivors Yin Yulin and Wan Aihua were detained as military comfort women. Kondō recalled that the new recruits in his troops were trained to kill enemies with a bayonet by tying Chinese people to trees and using them as targets. When he was made to thrust his bayonet into a Chinese man, he did not feel that he was killing a living person. Kondō said this numbness toward killing came
from the education soldiers received from childhood, which taught them that “Chankoro [a derogatory term for Chinese] are worse than pigs.” In addition, the Imperial Japanese Army trained its troops to treat Chinese nationals as non-humans to whom they could do anything they wished.
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Kondō witnessed and reported two revealing incidents of violence. One concerned the commander of his unit, Captain Maekawa, who had a village woman stripped naked and walk with the soldiers during a mopping-up action. The woman, who had been gang-raped by the troops on being captured, was holding a baby in her arms. As the unit was marching on a mountain ridge, a soldier grabbed the baby from the woman and threw the infant off the cliff. Following her baby, the woman threw herself over the cliff as well.
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The other incident concerns Commander Yamamoto of the advance unit, who liked to cut local civilians with his sword. He ordered the soldiers to kill Chinese people by smashing their heads with large rocks. He said: “When killing Chinese people, using a gun would be inexcusable to our emperor. Use a rock instead!”
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These two military commanders’ acts demonstrate how raping and killing were seen as symbolic of imperial conquest and service to Imperial Japan: the body destroyed, tortured, raped, and humiliated was perceived as that of the nation of China. With the women’s bodies transformed into the symbolic site of the enemy nation, their suffering was perceived by the Japanese troops as signifying the victory of the occupiers and the humiliation of the occupied. This political symbolism seriously increased Chinese women’s suffering during the war.
⁷

Tragically, the imperialist symbolism associated with the suffering bodies of Chinese women fuelled a prejudice, parading as nationalism, toward their suffering: their violated bodies were seen by many of their compatriots as signifying China’s shame and the failure of its citizens to defend it. This reaction helps to explain why the suffering of Chinese comfort women was excluded from China’s heroic postwar narrative for a long time. In fact, the few Chinese women who survived the torture of the comfort stations were not only silenced but also often treated, by the authorities and the public alike, as collaborators who served the nation’s enemy.

This nationalistic prejudice combined with patriarchal ideology to demean the sufferings of the comfort women. According to this ideology, women had to be virgins before marriage and chaste thereafter. A woman who died resisting sexual violence was deemed a martyr, while one who survived was deemed shameful. The patriarchal requirement of feminine chastity was further politicized during the war, with the result that a comfort woman who serviced the enemy’s troops, even though forced to do so, was regarded not only as immoral but also as disgracing the nation and her family. During the
Mao era, the nationalistic and patriarchal prejudices against former comfort women were transformed into political persecution when a series of political movements aimed at eradicating all dissidents labelled numerous innocent people “public enemies.” Thus, the women who survived the brutality of the comfort stations were persecuted after the war. As is seen in the survivors’ stories, Chen Yabian and Li Lianchun hid themselves in the mountains to escape harassment; Yuan Zhulin was exiled to do hard labour; and many of the women suffered from explicit or implicit ostracism. The continued suffering of the surviving Chinese comfort women reveals how social and political institutions joined together to prolong their victimization. Their stories teach us that the comfort women issue is not simply a historical matter: they pose a fundamental challenge to those contemporary institutions that have perpetuated their suffering.

The Chinese comfort women’s narratives of their prewar lives expose how women were abused and maltreated by a male-dominated culture that regarded girls as unwanted goods and women as mere tools for producing offspring to ensure the continuation of the family line. As seen in Zhou Fenying’s and Tan Yuhua’s narratives about their mothers, in such a cultural environment a woman’s personal identity was often ignored and her name forgotten; she was referred to either as the daughter of her parents or the wife of her husband. We also see that, in order to survive economic hardship, daughters of poor families were frequently abandoned or sold to be the “child-daughters-in-law” of richer families and that wives were divorced or discriminated against when they lost the ability to produce children. This patriarchal culture contributed to the life-long suffering of these women and made them easy prey for the violence of Japanese troops.

Commonly, rape has been considered a private, individualized experience of bodily violation.
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To the contrary, the experience of the Chinese comfort women is highly politicized, first by Japan’s imperialist war and then by China’s patriarchal ideology and nationalistic politics. This politicization both increased their victimization during the war and prolonged it afterwards, causing a lifetime of suffering. Yet, as is seen in the stories in this book, these women demonstrate remarkable agency, which they sustained through wartime brutality and postwar persecution. Their life stories show that they were not mere sex slaves and victims but also historical actors and heroes. The escape stories of Lei Guiying, Lu Xiuzhen, Wan Aihua, Huang Youliang, and Li Lianchun, each filled with danger and accomplished through the courageous help of local people, portray the strength to resist violence and to overcome hardship. Such agency and strength is also demonstrated in the narratives of their postwar lives, a time when many of them were subjected
to discrimination, ostracism, and poverty due to prejudice and political exigency. As Li Lianchun’s daughter tells us, during the Cultural Revolution the people in a small mountain village all shunned Li Lianchun and her family. Not succumbing to this hardship, Li Lianchun worked in the fields day and night and single-handedly supported all three of her children through their schooling. In a place where many children were not able to complete their elementary education, this was a remarkable achievement. Wan Aihua, whose body was severely deformed by Japanese soldiers, suffered physical pain the rest of her life. Yet, in spite of her own suffering, over the years she offered free massage therapy to those who could not afford medical treatment. The resilience and humanity demonstrated by these women, who continued loving others even though they themselves were abused, is their most important legacy.

When this book was completed, Lei Guiying, Li Lianchun, Lu Xiuzhen, Yin Yulin, Yuan Zhulin, Zhou Fenying, and Zhu Qiaomei had all died. Tan Yuhua’s health has been deteriorating rapidly since 2011, and Wan Aihua has been hospitalized. The other women are also suffering from poor health and the trauma induced by their torture in the comfort stations. Before Li Lianchun died, she said the following words in an interview in 2001:

I’ve suffered my entire life, and I have been poor my whole life, but I have one thing that is priceless to me. That is my body, my dignity. My body is the most valuable thing to me. The damage done to it cannot be compensated for with money, no matter how much money they pay. I am not seeking money, and I am not trying to get revenge. I just want to see justice done.

Poignant words. Indeed, the voices and memories of the former comfort women constitute a legacy that has profound and far-reaching social, political, and cultural implications. When the rape of women is still used as an instrument of armed conflict and the sexual exploitation of women continues to be globally prevalent, the legacy of the comfort women plays an important role in the attempt to attain a more just and humane world. As more and more of the comfort women’s individual memories become part of our collective memory, this legacy will continue to educate us as well as future generations, thus sustaining the transnational endeavour to prevent the occurrence of yet more crimes against humanity.

Notes

Foreword

1
Daisuke Shimizu, “‘Comfort Women’ Still Controversial in Japan, S. Korea,”
Asahi Shimbun
, 14 July 2012. Available at ajw.asahi.com/(viewed 30 July 2012).

2
Available at
http://petitions.whitehouse.gov/
(viewed 6 June 2012).

3
Josh Rogin, “Japanese Comfort-Women Deniers Force White House Response,”
Foreign Policy
, available at
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/
(viewed 6 June 2012).

4
This point has been made by Timothy Brook, “Preface: Lisbon, Xuzhou, Auschwitz: Suffering as History,” in
Beyond Suffering: Recounting War in Modern China
, ed., James Flath and Norman Smith (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), xviii.

Introduction

1
The “Chinese Comfort Women” in the title refers mainly to the narratives of former comfort women drafted from Mainland China. Information on comfort women drafted from Taiwan, then Japan’s colony, has been published in English. See, for example, Nihon Bengoshi Rengōkai,
Investigative Report in Relation to Cases of Japan’s Imperial Military “Comfort Women” of Taiwanese Descent
(Tokyo: Japan Federation of Bar Associations, 1997); Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation, “Comfort Women,” available at
http://www.twrf.org.tw/
; and Yoshiaki Yoshimi,
Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II
, trans. Suzanne O’Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 115-17.

2
For postwar/postcolonial publications on comfort women, see C. Sarah Soh,
The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 145-73.

3
For survey and analysis of the controversy over the comfort women issue, see George Hicks,
The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 194-266; and Soh,
Comfort Women
, 29-77.

4
Ustinia Dolgopol and Snehal Paranjape,
Comfort Women: An Unfinished Ordeal
(Geneva, CH: International Commission of Jurists, 1994).

5
Linda Chavez, “Contemporary Forms of Slavery,” working paper on systematic rape, sexual slavery, and slavery-like practices during wartime, including internal armed conflict, submitted in accordance with sub-commission decision 1994/109, UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1995/38.1995; Radhika Coomaraswamy,
Report on the Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the Issue of Military Sexual Slavery in Wartime
, UN Doc. E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1, 4 January 1996; and Gay J. McDougall,
Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Systematic Rape, Sexual Slavery and Slavery-Like Practices during Armed Conflict
, final report submitted to United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 50th Session, UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1998/13, 22 June 1998. The three reports can be found under United Nations documents at
http://www.unhchr.ch
.