Chinese Comfort Women (9 page)

2 The Mass Abduction of Chinese Women

After the occupation of Nanjing, Japan’s North China Area Army launched a major offensive from Shandong Province in March 1938, during which Japanese troops encountered strong Chinese resistance and suffered heavy losses in two weeks of close battles at Taierzhuang. In April Japan’s Imperial General Headquarters ordered another massive encirclement campaign to destroy China’s major field forces. Although the two-month operation captured Xuzhou in Jiangsu Province, the Japanese forces were unable to trap the Chinese armies. Having failed to achieve a settlement by seizing China’s capital and being unable to eliminate the Guomindang’s (Kuomintang, Nationalist Party) major forces, the Japanese army directed its offensive against strategic points such as Wuhan in central China and Guangzhou in south China. The Japanese military’s operations east of Wuhan, along both banks of the Yangtze River and in the mountains to the north, began in the summer of 1938 and eventually involved 300,000 Japanese and 1 million Chinese troops. Around the same time, the Japanese 21st Army directed its offensive against Guangzhou.
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By late October of 1938, both Wuhan and Guangzhou fell into Japanese hands, and the war spread like fire across China.

The Japanese military’s invasion hastened the formation of a united anti-Japanese front in politically divided China. The Nationalist government moved to Chongqing and continued to resist. Although Japanese troops made territorial gains in northern and central China and in the coastal regions, guerrilla fighting, often led by the Communist Party, continued in the occupied areas. At the same time, major Nationalist forces fought to stop the Japanese advance in southwestern China. By 1940 the war had reached an impasse. The frustrated Japanese military deployed
jinmetsu sakusen
(operation destroy all), known as
sanguang
(the three alls – kill all, loot all, burn all) in Chinese, against the resistance forces and civilians in these areas. During this time millions of Chinese civilians were killed,
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tens of thousands were sent away to perform hard labour,
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and local Chinese women were abducted to serve as sex slaves as a regular part of military action under Operation Destroy All.

By 1939, the more formal comfort stations were already so much a part of the system that methods of establishing them were being taught at the Japanese military accounting school. Shikanai Nobutaka, a former army accounting officer who studied at the school from April to September 1939, comments in an interview:

At that time we had to figure out the endurance of the women drafted from local areas [
chōben
] and the rate at which they would wear out. We also had to determine which areas supplied women who would work best and how much “service time” should be allocated to a man from the time he entered the room until he left – how many minutes for commissioned officers, how many minutes for non-commissioned officers, and how many minutes for soldiers. (Laughter) The fees were also decided based on different ranks. Regulations regarding these were called the “Essentials for the Establishment of
Pii
Facilities,” which were taught at the army’s accounting school.
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Pii
is a derogatory term that Japanese soldiers used to refer to comfort women.
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Clearly, the content of the course was all about planning and running comfort facilities. It is worth noting that, when talking about drafting comfort women, Shikanai used a Japanese military term –
chōben –
which literally means “to obtain provisions locally in the battlefield.” His use of the term indicates that Chinese women were obtained locally and targeted for service in the military comfort stations. It also shows that these women were not considered to be human beings; rather, they were relegated to the status of military supplies. According to the former commissioned accounting officer of the commissariat of the 11th Army, the Japanese troops generally considered the comfort women nothing more than “public latrines.”
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The officer also indicated that, beginning in the early stages of full-scale warfare, the mid-level leaders of the Imperial Japanese Army employed “getting supplies from the enemy” as a major operational strategy.
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From 1938 onward, over 1 million Japanese troops were regularly deployed in China.
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As these troops plundered Chinese resources for army provisions, they designated Chinese women as being among their necessary supplies.
Chōben
, in this context, seems to have been used in a broad sense to refer to the general practice of drafting Chinese women to fill the comfort facilities rather than transporting women from Japan and its colonies. Indeed, the investigations conducted by the Research Center for Chinese “Comfort Women” show that about 60 percent of the military comfort stations in China were set up in rural areas and that they contained an extremely large number of Chinese comfort women who had
been drafted from local areas.
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Women kidnapped from rural areas were sometimes transported to comfort stations in major cities. The Military Entertainment Facility in Shanghai, for example, confined hundreds of women from the northern area of Jiangsu Province and villages near Shanghai.
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Conversely, women drafted from cities were also transported to stations in remote provinces. According to Jiang Hao’s investigation, after occupying Nanjing the Japanese military herded a large number of women into boxcars to take them from the city to other battle zones to function as comfort women for the troops.
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Recent research findings in China indicate that, contrary to the common assumption that the recruitment of comfort women was targeted mainly at Japanese and Korean women, from the very beginning of Japan’s aggression in China the Japanese military had in fact forced large numbers of Chinese women into military sexual slavery. Historians estimate that the Imperial Japanese Army had approximately 3.2 million regulars during the war and that the majority of them were deployed in Mainland China; at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, about 70 to 80 percent of Japanese troops were stationed in the Chinese theatre.
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In order to placate this colossal number of troops, the Japanese imperial forces relied heavily on forcibly drafting local Chinese women in order to set up comfort facilities. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when the battle lines extended to Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, local women from these areas were also coerced into becoming comfort women. Typically, women drafted from the occupied areas were treated atrociously by the occupation forces.

Although massive numbers of Chinese women were victimized by the comfort women system, until recently, information about Chinese comfort women has been scarce. Previously, based on the information available by the early 1990s, Japanese and Korean researchers held that the total number of comfort women was somewhere between fifty thousand and 200,000 and that 80 to 90 percent of them were Korean.
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In his research on comfort women, Senda Kakō estimates that the total number of comfort women, from the beginning to the end of the war in the Asia-Pacific theatre, was over 100,000. He cites the soldier-comfort women ratio during the Guandong Army Special Manoeuvre near the border between the Soviet Union and northern China in July 1941 as a reference. Senda reports that Major Hara Zenshirō, a staff officer who was in charge of provisioning the Guandong Army, calculated the troops’ needs for sexual services and requested a supply of twenty thousand comfort women from Korea to service 700,000 troops.
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This request indicated a soldier-comfort women ratio of 35:1. Estimates made
by researchers in the 1990s, however, come up with a ratio of 29:1 (
nikuichi
), which they believe was what was commonly used by Japanese military personnel when drafting comfort women.
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Kim Il-myon suggests that, if the total number of Japanese soldiers were 3 million, then, according to the 29:1 ratio, the number of comfort women would have been nearly 103,500.
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Hata Ikuhiko comes up with two estimations: 60,000 based on a 50:1 ratio and 90,000 with a 1.5 replacement rate.
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Yoshimi Yoshiaki, on the other hand, suggests that, if the replacement rate were 1.5, then the total number of comfort women would have been 3,000,000/29 × 1.5, or 155,172 women. If the replacement rate were 2.0, then the number would have been 3,000,000/29 × 2.0, or 206,897 women.
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However, due to the limited nature of the information available at the time, these estimates do not adequately reflect the number of Chinese comfort women.

The estimated number, whether 20,000 or 200,000, matters less than the fact that the sexual enslavement of women – whatever the number – is a gross crime. Yet, since numbers help to assess the scope of the victimization, Chinese researchers offered their estimations. Based on the evidence gathered by Chinese researchers since the 1990s, Su Zhiliang suggests that, from 1937 to 1945, the comfort women replacement rate was much higher than was previously thought, approximately 3.5 to 4.0, which brings the estimated total number of comfort women up to either (1) more than 360,000 (3,000,000 Japanese soldiers/29 × 3.5 = 362,068 women) or (2) to more than 400,000 (3,000,000 Japanese soldiers/29 × 4.0 = 413,793 women). In terms of nationalities, he estimates that about 140,000 to 160,000 of the total number of comfort women were Korean and that 20,000 were Japanese, with several thousand being from Taiwan and Southeast Asia and several hundred coming from European countries. The rest were Chinese women, who numbered about 200,000.
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It needs to be noted that Su’s estimation does not include those women who were sexually violated by the Japanese military but who were not detained as sex slaves for an ongoing period of time. The number of those women, many Chinese researchers believe, is much greater than the number who were taken as comfort women. Journalist Li Xiuping reports that, when she was investigating the Japanese military comfort stations at Yu County, Shanxi Province, in the early 1990s, local people often asked her the same question: “Do you want to know about the women who were detained in the Japanese strongholds or do you also want to know about women who were raped by Japanese soldiers but were not taken away?” When Li told them that she wanted to know about both, the local people would reply: “The latter cases
were too many to talk about. You will find it out if you stay in this area a little longer.” One example of what Li found out after having spent some time in the area was that, during a single mop-up operation at Yu County, Japanese troops raped over two hundred women in Xinghua Village: only two women managed to escape.
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Su Zhiliang’s estimation regarding higher replacement rates for comfort women is based on what, over the last two decades, has been revealed about Chinese comfort women’s experiences. As the research on Chinese comfort women progressed and the testimonies of former Chinese comfort women became available, the horrifying picture of how they were forced into comfort stations and then tortured began to emerge. Japanese forces used various methods to round up Chinese women. Although it is not possible to obtain statistics on the total number of kidnappings, documented cases suggest shockingly large numbers. For example, during the time of the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese army abducted tens of thousands of women from Nanjing and the surrounding areas, including over 2,000 women from Suzhou, 3,000 from Wuxi, and 20,000 from Hangzhou.
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These blatant kidnappings continued throughout the entire war, the youngest abductee’s being only nine years old.
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Local researchers on Hainan Island reported a large-scale abduction that occurred on 24 June 1941 in Lehui County, where four hundred Japanese soldiers burned down the villages of Beian and Dayang, murdered 499 civilians, and took A’niang and dozens of other young women to the military comfort stations at Boao.
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The brutality Chinese women faced when they were abducted into the military comfort stations was very similar to that faced by Philippine comfort women.
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Violent abductions were not limited to rural areas or to places where Chinese resistance forces were active. According to the testimony of Mrs. Andrew Levinge, a member of the British Volunteer Aid Detachment at St. Stephens College Hospital in Hong Kong, a group of Japanese military men abducted her and three other female members of the aid detachment when Japanese forces occupied the city. The Japanese troops repeatedly raped Levinge’s colleagues; they also detained four Chinese women and sexually assaulted them within the hospital compound.
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The alarming scope of victimization may also be seen in the fact that the occupation troops frequently replaced Chinese comfort women in order to satisfy the soldiers’ desires for virginity and novelty. Consider the comments of Wu Liansheng, who worked as a janitor at the Zhaojia-yuan Comfort Station in Hainan for nearly two years, from 1942 to 1943. According to Wu, the Zhaojia-yuan Comfort Station opened in February 1942 and regularly
kept about twenty to forty-five comfort women. The number of women it victimized, however, was actually much greater than that because Japanese troops frequently moved women from this comfort station to other places, killing those who were too sick or too weak to work. Because their bodies were destroyed and their replacements randomly drafted from local areas, no one knows exactly how many women were enslaved in Zhaojia-yuan Comfort Station from the time it opened until the end of the war in 1945.
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Similar situations also occurred in large cities. According to a document prepared by the Special Agents Department of the Tianjin Police Bureau on 3 July 1944, a comfort station run by the Japanese Garrison Headquarters in Tianjin drafted comfort women from the city in rotating groups: each group comprised twenty to thirty women who were to be replaced by a new group every three weeks.
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The document does not mention how long this rotation program lasted or how many comfort stations practised it, but the given replacement rate indicates that this one comfort station would have victimized 370 to 560 Chinese women in a period of one year.
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