Weianfu yanjiu, and: Rijun xingnuli: Zhongguo "weianfu" zhenxiang (review)

Studies on the subject of "comfort women" began in China in the early 1990s. Weianfu yanjiu is the first serious comprehensive work on this subject published in mainland China. Its author, Su Zhiliang, begins by recalling how, in March 1992, in a trendy coffee house in Tokyo, a Japanese scholar told him that the first "comfort house" for the Japanese military was set up in Shanghai. As a native of Shanghai and a historian of modern China he was shocked; he had never heard this before. Soon he plunged into an arduous process of investigation, bicycling all over Shanghai and traveling to other places in China searching for traces of former "comfort houses," interviewing eyewitnesses, and ploughing through archives and available materials in Chinese. Complete with photographs, tables, lists, references, and footnotes, his Weianfu yanjiu examines the origin and organization of the "comfort women" system, how it spread and functioned in China and Southeast Asia, and the sufferings it caused to its victims, who included not only Koreans, Chinese, and Southeast Asians but also Japanese and women of such Western countries as the Netherlands and Australia. The most original and important contribution of the book is its extensive research on the system in China. It concludes that the system was a national crime committed by the Japanese military, and a crime against humanity.

The issue of "comfort women" is complex. It can be dealt with from various angles. In Weianfu yanjiu, Su chooses to concentrate his arguments against the Japanese right-wingers, who deny that the "comfort women" system was a war crime. They insist that "comfort women" were prostitutes who enlisted in the military. Su, however, holds that "The term comfort women refers to those women who provided sex to the Japanese military and served as sex slaves under the orders of the Japanese government or military." They were not prostitutes who worked for the military, and should not be defined simply as "women who provide comfort to the officers and soldiers in war," a definition given by the Japanese dictionary Kojien (Weianfu yanjiu, pp. 10-11).

While Su recognizes that the first "comfort houses" established by the Japanese military in Shanghai in early 1932 did not strictly provide "comfort women" in the sense of "sex slaves," since they were Japanese civilian-run brothels and had Japanese prostitutes, he holds that these were nonetheless the beginning of the "comfort woman" system in China. Following the horrific Nanjing Massacre in December 1937, in which Japanese soldiers raped and killed a great number of civilians, the Japanese military decided to establish more "comfort houses" so that such facilities could provide protection for the soldiers against sexually transmitted diseases. Thereafter, "comfort houses" spread to almost all the occupied areas in mainland China. They were operated directly under the Japanese military, by Japanese civilians and authorized by the military to serve both Japanese soldiers and Japanese civilians, in temporary camps and on transport vehicles, and by Chinese brothels controlled by the Japanese military and the collaborationist regimes. Su's research shows that some Japanese-run brothels later forced Chinese women into them. More importantly, Su provides much evidence to show how Chinese women were forced into the system: some through abduction and deception, some through "handing over" by village heads at gunpoint, and some through the collaboration of local regimes. Some Communist soldiers became sex slaves as captives, and some prostitutes were forced to "serve" the Japanese military. Su concludes that during the seven-year period from 1938 to 1945, "comfort women" in the territory occupied by the Japanese numbered 360,000 to 410,000, among whom...