5 Questions About Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Peipei Qiu discusses her book Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves.

Allison K. Tracy-Taylor’s review of Chinese Comfort Women is available online and in OHR issue 47.1. 

What’s it about and why does it matter?

During the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), the imperial Japanese military coerced a tremendous number of women across Asia into the so-called “comfort stations,” where these women were repeatedly raped and tortured. The Japanese military authorities claimed that “comfort women” were recruited in order to prevent the rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, however, the “comfort women” system institutionalized sexual violence, and most of the “comfort women” were either trafficked to the war zones from Japan and its colonies or abducted from the regions under the Japanese occupation. 

This book is the first English monograph documenting the experiences of Chinese women whose lives were ravaged by imperial Japan’s “comfort women” system. Through in-depth examinations of the archival documents, local histories, the survivors’ personal narratives, witnesses’ testimonies, and investigative reports, it provides essential information for a fuller understanding of the lived experiences of the “comfort women” and the scope, nature, and prevalence of the military “comfort women” system.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

Oral history is central to this book. The book consists of three parts. Part one traces the establishment and expansion of the Japanese military “comfort stations” from the beginning of Japan’s aggression in China in the early 1930s to its defeat in 1945. In this part, I used a range of primary sources hitherto only available in Chinese and the wartime documents produced by the Japanese military to provide a historical overview.

Part two presents the personal narratives of twelve “comfort station” survivors. The selected accounts represent victims of different geographical locations and abduction times. When translating their narratives into English, I made every effort to convey their voices and feelings faithfully and also offered information of the warfare at the local areas to place each woman’s testimony in the context of the war.

Part three of the book documents the survivors’ postwar lives and the transnational movement seeking justice for the “comfort women.” This part also draws frequently on the oral accounts of the survivors and the activists. It shows how, for a long period of time, the survivors suffered from discrimination, ostracism, and poverty due to the social prejudices and the political exigencies in the postwar era. Part three also delineates the strong support the Chinese survivors have received from the international community, especially from Japanese activists, researchers, and legal specialists.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

Oral history is an effective methodology to give voices to the silenced and marginalized people, which is crucial for understanding the “comfort women” issue. Information about the “comfort women” appeared sporadically in some publications in Asian countries after Japan’s defeat, but, for decades after the war, the “comfort women” survivors were silenced and the atrocities committed under the “comfort women” system remained largely unknown to the international community. Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of “comfort women” survivors stepped forward to tell their stories, but information about Chinese “comfort women” had been scarce in English.

I originally planned to write a book to introduce English readers to the Chinese research findings on “comfort women” in the 1990s. However, during the research, I found the survivors’ testimonies extremely powerful and important for our understanding of the traumatic past, as the reality of the traumatic events is best revealed by the oral histories of individuals who lived through the trauma. Therefore, I decided to devote a central part of the book to the survivors’ personal narratives. This approach seems to have been well received by readers and scholars in the field. In her comments on the book, Diana Lary (author of The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937-1945) says, “It gives voice, for the first time in English, to the Chinese women enslaved by the Japanese armies during the invasion and occupation of China.” I hope the oral history accounts provided in the book can help put a human face on the dark phase of history and contribute to the primary sources of our knowledge about the history of the Second World War and sexual violence during the war.

“It gives voice, for the first time in English, to the Chinese women enslaved by the Japanese armies during the invasion and occupation of China.”

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Among the published oral histories of the Japanese military “comfort women,” this book is unique for its demonstration of the close correlation between the proliferation of “comfort stations” and the progression of Japan’s aggressive war. By knitting together the testimonies of the Chinese “comfort women” and a large number of archival documents, investigative reports, local histories, as well as secondary documentation in Chinese, Japanese, and English, it reveals how the “comfort stations” were implemented by the imperial Japanese military to support its aggressive war. The book’s in-depth study of the experiences of the “comfort women” drafted from China—Imperial Japan’s largest enemy nation—also helped to fill a gap in the existing oral history projects on the “comfort women,” which have taken testimonial accounts mostly from Korean and Southeast Asian women.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

I hope that the book can help facilitate a fuller understanding of the human sufferings caused by the war and that the individual histories documented in this book are able to demonstrate that sexual violence against women is a crime against humanity. Today, women and girls are still kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery in countries all over the world. I hope the voices of the “comfort women” can help sustain the transnational endeavor to end this practice and to prevent the occurrence of more crimes against humanity.