IN THE SUMMER of 1932, the Japanese military requisitioned several large houses in Shanghai and turned them into 'comfort stations' for their 30,000 troops garrisoned in the city.
This was the start of one of the biggest crimes of World War II: army-run brothels for millions of Japanese soldiers all over Asia. Four hundred thousand women were tricked - or forced - into working as prostitutes, serving 10 men a day on average and 60 or 80 in special circumstances.
Next month, more than 1,000 people will convene in Tokyo for an international tribunal on the 'comfort women', which will hear the testimony of victims from eight countries and determine the accountability of the Japanese Government under international and humanitarian law.
Eight comfort women will go to Tokyo as part of a 30-person delegation from China led by Su Zhiliang, a professor at Shanghai Teachers' University who has pioneered research in China on this sensitive topic. He established that Chinese women were the biggest group of victims, accounting for about half of the total in Asia, because the network of brothels was largest in China, where Japan's invasion lasted from 1931 until 1945.
Among them were Zhu Naijie, now 91, who was forced to become a comfort woman at the age of 19 while living near a Japanese barracks in Shanghai, and Xi Yulin, also a comfort woman at the age of 19. Professor Su's book, Japanese Military Sex Slaves, is the most comprehensive study of the subject in China. It describes how the Japanese military set up the sex business for its soldiers with ruthlessness and efficiency. Comfort stations were the brainchild of Yasuji Okamura, the deputy chief of Japanese forces in Shanghai in 1932. He had been one of the main architects of the invasion of China since arriving in the country in 1917 as a military adviser to warlord Li Yuanhong, who served briefly as China's president.
Okamura saw that his soldiers fulfilled their sexual needs through widespread rape, which led to outrage among the local population and abroad, and the spread of sexual diseases. He recalled that these diseases killed more soldiers during Japan's invasion of Siberia in 1917 - in support of the then Russian government against the communists - than the fighting.
