Chinese ‘comfort women’: accounts of Japan’s wartime sex slaves remembered in newly translated book
US scholar hopes her book, which features the harrowing testimony of 12 survivors of the Japanese military’s wartime ‘comfort stations’, will help educate people so that what happened then can never happen to anyone again
There is a vast body of scholarly work and documented evidence of Korean “comfort women” – work started by Korean and Japanese researchers and feminist scholars in the early 1990s – but until a few years ago there was no book in English on the Chinese women who were forced to service Japanese soldiers.
When Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves was released in 2013, it was the first English publication that documented the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army in China. It details how between 200,000 and 400,000 women and girls were forced into sexual slavery in military “comfort stations” during the war years.
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Written by Peipei Qiu, a professor of Chinese and Japanese at Vassar College in New York, with the support of two Chinese scholars, Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, the book gives historical accounts of 12 comfort station survivors and is supported by witness testimonies, archival records and investigations. Earlier this month, Hong Kong University Press released a Chinese translation of the book and Professor Qiu was in Hong Kong for the launch.