Hemorrhagic Pain: The Accusations of 26 Comfort Women

Author: Chen Qinggang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: "Comfort women" is a special group. This book records the tragic experiences of 26 comfort women and the lives they have changed due to those experiences. The tragic experiences of these 26 elderly women are merely a of all "comfort women" during the Japanese invasion of China. Their suffering is, in fact, also the suffering of our nation. The "comfort women" represent a page of blood and tears in our nation's modern history of. This history is a scar left on every Chinese person. Today, the living comfort women are few and far between, and due to various reasons, most victims were ashamed to speak of their tragic experiences until the day they died. How much detail of that history can still be left for us? Some say that revisiting painful memories is like experiencing them all over again. These elderly people, who have lived with heavy and sorrowful memories until today, are now in their late 80s. Facing them, I often don't know how to begin, how to ask those questions that always break their hearts. Truly, if possible, I would never want to touch the door of memory that has caused them pain for a lifetime. But I had to. "To remember history is not to let people live forever on the edge of hatred. A healthy and mature civilization should never let hatred be the center of people's thoughts." More than 50 years ago, Mr. Mei Ruao, the Chinese judge who participated in the Tokyo Trials, said: "I am not a revenger, and I have no intention of writing the blood debt owed by the Japanese imperialists on the accounts of the Japanese people. However, I believe that forgetting past suffering may lead to future disasters."
"Comfort women" refer to women who were forced to provide sexual services and serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The comfort women system was both a product of Japanese feudalism and a mark of Japanese militarism, a strange hybrid born from the mutual influence of traditional Japanese feudalism and militaristic thought. Over 400,000 Japanese comfort women were used by the Japanese army worldwide, with more than 200,000 in China. Most of the 200,000 Chinese comfort women have already died. Over 13 years, as the China Comfort Women Research Center systematically visited surviving comfort women, researchers traveled across more than 20 provinces nationwide and only found 100 survivors. Shanxi and Hainan provinces in China were the hardest-hit areas. In the autumn of 1937, Japanese forces invaded Shanxi, and the 20th, 108th, and 109th divisions began to establish long-term bases there. Hundreds of Shanxi women were captured by the Japanese and forced to provide sexual services in barracks for the officers and soldiers. Investigations have found that a large number of comfort women survivors are concentrated in today's Meng County, Shanxi. Additionally, Hainan was a major province where Japanese comfort stations and surviving comfort women were concentrated. There are currently more than 60 confirmed comfort stations, and over 20 comfort women are willing to give public testimony. This book is an interview with the elderly who have bravely survived and spoken out against the crimes of the Japanese army.