Japanese Military Sexual Slavery in Occupied China

During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military coerced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into sexual slavery, calling them “comfort women.” Japanese imperial forces claimed they set up the “comfort stations” in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, comfort stations institutionalized sexual violence, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have not been properly addressed until today.

This presentation discusses the experiences of a particular victim group of the Japanese military comfort stations—women drafted from the occupied China.  In the international debate on the “comfort women” issue, the complexity of the ways in which women were sent into the comfort stations has often been used to deny Japanese military’s responsibilities for its wartime sexual slavery. However, the unspeakable brutality Chinese “comfort women” suffered, as the nationals of imperial Japan’s enemy country, indisputably revealed Japanese forces’ direct involvement in this war crime. Through research findings and survivors’ testimonies, this presentation exposes several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system, such as the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the large number of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and their massive kidnapping of women in mainland China.

This presentation draws partially upon my book Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves (with Su and Chen. UBC Press, 2013; Oxford University Press, 2014; Hong Kong University Press, 2014).