Hemorrhagic pain (26 Comfort women's complaints)

Author: Chen Qinggang
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2005-08-01
Features: "Comfort women" are a special group. This book records the tragic experiences of 26 comfort women and the lives they have lived since those experiences changed them. The tragic stories of these 26 elderly women are merely a of all comfort women during the Japanese invasion of China. Their suffering is also the suffering of our nation. The "comfort women" represent a page of blood and tears in the modern history of our nation. This history is a scar left on every Chinese person. Today, there are very few living comfort women, and due to various reasons, most victims were ashamed to speak of their tragic experiences until their death. How much more detail of this history can be left for us? Some say that revisiting painful memories is like experiencing them all over again. These elderly women, who have carried the heavy and sorrowful memories into their old age, are now in their late eighties. 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.
"Remembering history is not meant to keep people forever on the brink of hatred. A healthy and mature civilization should never let hatred be the center of people’s thoughts." Fifty years ago, Mr. Mei Ruaogao, the Chinese judge who participated in the Tokyo Trials, said: "I am not a revenger, and I have no intention of making the blood debt owed by the Japanese imperialists a burden on 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 sexual 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 interplay of traditional Japanese feudalism and militaristic thought. Over 400,000 comfort women were used by the Japanese military 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 found only 100 survivors. Shanxi and Hainan provinces in China were particularly hard-hit. In autumn 1937, Japanese forces invaded Shanxi, and the 20th, 108th, and 109th divisions, among others, 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. 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 were located and where comfort women survivors were concentrated. There are currently more than 60 confirmed comfort stations, and over 20 comfort women have been willing to come forward with testimonies. This book is based on interviews with elderly women who have bravely survived and spoken out against the crimes of the Japanese military.