Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. xx, 254 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$32.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7748-2545-0.
This is an important book that signals fundamental shifts in understandings of the Japanese military’s use of “comfort women” in Asia during the Second World War. To date, most discussion of “comfort women,” the English translation of the Japanese euphemism ianfu, has focused on roughly 200,000 Korean and Japanese nationals. This volume sheds light on the suffering of an approximately equal number of Chinese women who were forcibly drafted by the Japanese military and whose experiences were silenced for decades. It is the first English-language monograph to record the memories of Chinese women at the “comfort stations” and it does a fine job of introducing these important findings to international audiences. The volume centres on oral interviews with twelve survivors conducted by Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei from 1998–2008, more than five decades after the “comfort women” system was dismantled and the women were “liberated.” One of the great strengths of this work is the demonstration that these women’s suffering continued long after the Japanese military was defeated and the war ended.
The volume consists of three sections. The first recounts the establishment of the “comfort women” stations, stressing the deliberate and calculated mass abduction of local women. Many of the women’s families struggled to raise the ransoms that the military demanded to free them, challenging often repeated assertions that Chinese do not value daughters. The middle section is a harrowing recounting of the experiences of the twelve women, who came from regions as diverse as the north of China and the southern island of Hainan. Their personal narratives are, as to be expected, moving and reflective of an enormous level of unjust suffering. The final section recounts the women’s postwar lives and the grassroots movement that has arisen to seek redress for the injustices that they endured. It clearly spells out the long-term costs that these women paid for the Japanese military’s violation of the most basic human rights and dignity.
The authors make clear that the purpose of this monograph is to facilitate understanding between Japanese people and their neighbours and not to encourage antagonistic, nationalistic stances. They argue that it is necessary to transcend the posturing of nation-states and recognize that the suffering caused by war is a violation of individual human lives. Whether this goal can be achieved may be debatable but the Japanese government’s ongoing failure to fully acknowledge the nature and extent of these war crimes is not. At the heart of this book lies the ruthless, militaristic nature of the “comfort women” system and the Japanese Imperial Army’s direct involvement in an unimaginable level of violence towards Chinese people that the Japanese government still refuses to be held morally, legally or otherwise responsible for. Chinese Comfort Women makes a very strong and compelling case that the Japanese military was systematically and deliberately involved in the kidnapping, sexual exploitation and enslavement of enormous numbers of Chinese women. While the purpose of the “comfort stations” was, according to Japanese military leaders, to ostensibly prevent mass rape and the spread of venereal diseases, the effect was to shatter and shame Chinese—and ultimately discredit the much-vaunted propaganda of Imperial Japan liberating China from Caucasian imperialism.
A chief contribution of this volume is the demonstration that massive numbers of Chinese “comfort women” were obtained locally and viewed as no more than military supplies, treated as “public latrines.” The scale of this inhumane treatment was enormous, with Su Zhiliang estimating that around 200,000 Chinese women were forced into sexual slavery by and for the Japanese military. The political symbolism of the system, with the raping and killing of Chinese women symbolic of China’s subjugation to Imperial Japan, compounded the women’s suffering by fuelling prejudices toward them and their suffering. Some of the women whose lives fill these pages were welcomed back into their families while others survived to find their families utterly decimated; to add further insult to injury, they were denounced as collaborators in the subsequent Maoist era. These women’s fates appear to have differed little from those of the countless thousands of other, mainly Korean, “comfort women” who also suffered enormously at the hands of the Japanese military—and patriarchy—and have been the major focus of “comfort women” research to date. While the authors do point out varied significances of the patriarchal norms within which the Japanese military operated, perhaps an even deeper, more prolonged analysis of patriarchy would strengthen further the authors’ stated ambition to move beyond nation-state renderings of the topic.
“Comfort women” have attracted increasing attention in recent years but this is the first English-language monograph to focus on the suffering of those Chinese women whose lives were forever altered by the abhorrent behaviour of the Japanese military. The twelve women whose experiences are recounted here deserve a great deal of credit for having survived the wartime crimes committed against them, subsequent persecution in the Maoist era, the refusal of the Japanese government to take full responsibility for the actions of its military, and the interviewing process, all of which must have been traumatizing. Chinese Comfort Women does an excellent job of linking these women’s lives to forces that darkened much of China’s tortuous twentieth century yet remain far too little understood.
Norman Smith
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada