Comfort Women” System: the Fruits of 28 Years of Investigation Into the “Comfort Women” Issue in China
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Volume 19 | Issue 5 | Number 7 | Article ID 5548 | Mar 01, 2021 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Reconstructing the History of the “Comfort Women” System: The Fruits of 28 years of Investigation into the “Comfort Women” Issue in China Zhiliang Su, translated by Edward Vickers Professor Su Zhiliang of Shanghai Normal University, China’s leading historian of the Abstract: Since 1991, scholars from all over “comfort women” system, has played a Asia have sought to reconstruct the history of prominent role in international efforts over the the Japanese military’s “comfort women” – that past decade to press for the inscription of the is, to recover the facts relating to this system of “Voices of the Comfort Women” Archive on sexual slavery – by analysing documentary UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. As I records and interviewing survivors. As a result, note in my own paper for thisAsia Pacific an international consensus has emerged Journal special issue,2 those efforts were concerning the status of this system as a championed by the Chinese state until a sudden wartime atrocity involving large-scale violation change of stance in mid-2018 (shortly after the of human rights, for which Japan ought to original Chinese version of this article was apologize. However, within Japan many persist drafted). At the same time, substantial public in denying responsibility for the invasion [of funding was channeled into historical research China and associated atrocities]. Therefore, no and the construction of related museums or effort should be spared to pass on the memory memorials in Nanjing and Shanghai, with Su of this history to future generations, through himself installed as founding director of both. discussing this atrocity of sexual slavery in school textbooks, applying for a [UNESCO] The readership for the original Chinese version Memory of the World inscription, producing of this article can be presumed to have documentary films, or building museums, included government officials, as well as memorials and so forth. Other Asian countries reviewers for the government’s research thus continue their intense disputes with Japan funding agency. While presenting much telling over the nature and scale of the comfort detail on the history of the ‘comfort women’ women system, and the appropriatesystem, it thus also offers insights into the terminology for describing it.1 political and ideological parameters of related scholarship on the Chinese mainland, where Key words: comfort women; China; sex slaves; endorsement of ideological orthodoxy is Japanese military; comfort stations; historical expected of historians working in such a memory politically sensitive area. However, Su Zhiliang’s record as a historian, educator and campaigner reveals him as a cosmopolitan scholar with an agenda of his own. Originally a historian of modern Shanghai, Translator’s Introduction he spent two years in the early 1990s as a 1 19 | 5 | 7 APJ | JF visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. It museums), this paper also cordons off was there that he first encountered scholarship discussion of the history of comfort women on the ‘comfort women’ issue, which was then from any wider consideration of the trafficking just beginning to attract widespread public or sexual subjugation of women in contexts notice in Japan and Korea (he was in Tokyo in other than the fourteen-year “War of Japanese 1991 when Kim Hak-sun made her famous Aggression”. The section here entitled “Time statement – mentioned in his first paragraph). and Space” begins with a declaration that “the On returning to China, he and others, including history of the comfort women system begins in his wife, Chen Li-fei, began investigating the 1932 in Shanghai”. This may be correct in the history of the comfort women system there. narrow sense that this was when and where the While he alludes to this work in the present Japanese authorities began formally paper, he omits to mention that it wasdesignating brothels as comfort stations for conducted, for the most part, without public military personnel. But a footnote on the same funding, and in a context of official apathy (at page explains that, before it was best) towards efforts to publicise the plight of commandeered by the military, the first Chinese comfort women. Su has a record of comfort station, the Dai-ichi Salon, in fact testing the boundaries of ideologicalbegan in the 1920s as a commercial enterprise, correctness; he once edited an innovative modelled on similar establishments in Japan, series of world history textbooks for Shanghai serving Japanese expatriates. Moreover, the high schools that was summarily withdrawn extensive involvement of the Japanese state in from circulation in 2007, following public establishing and managing the comfort station criticism from Party leftists of its excessively network, which Su convincingly documents liberal vision.3 here, reflects the ingrained chauvinism of a patriarchal regime that had long sanctioned the In this paper, Su scrupulously acknowledges exploitation for sex of women and girls the pioneering work of Japanese researchers in domestically as well as overseas. exposing and documenting the ‘comfort women’ system – even while he repeatedly Even while asserting the temporal and spatial emphasises the historical responsibility of the boundedness of the comfort women system, Japanese state. This position is consistent with this paper thus contains evidence indicating longstanding official orthodoxy in China, which how that system needs to be understood in a mandates stern criticism of the Japanese broader context of institutions and cultural authorities (portrayed as an “imperialist” entity assumptions underpinning women’s sexual with “traces of feudalism”) for their militarism exploitation, under varying conditions of and criminality, while prohibiting blanket coercion or brutality. The connections between condemnation of the Japanese “people”.early comfort stations in Shanghai and the pre- Although the rise of anti-Japanese nationalism existing sex industry there are particularly in recent decades has seen this principle often suggestive in this regard, implying potential for honoured more in the breach than thethe sort of paradigm shift in Chinese observance, both Su’s academic work and the historiography – towards a more strongly museums with which he is associated highlight transnational and feminist perspective – the prominent role of Japanese researchers and identified by Norma in recent work by Japanese activists in bringing ‘comfort women’ to public and Korean scholars (see her translator’s attention. introduction to the paper by Morita in this special issue). However, in common with publicly-sanctioned Chinese accounts of this phenomenon (e.g. in Transnational feminism, however, has not 2 19 | 5 | 7 APJ | JF prospered in contemporary China. Feminist to date of research into Japanese military activists, along with most autonomous civil comfort women and highlight some important rights advocacy groups, have found their scope issues that remain. for activism, and for collaboration with foreign organisations (except when sanctioned or mediated by the party-state itself), drastically 4 Reconstructing the History of Japanese curtailed. Any attempt to extend criticism of Military ‘Comfort Women’ Japan’s exploitation and brutalisation of women during wartime to an investigation of the We find oblique mention of comfort women in underlying attitudes that made this seem the verdicts of the Tokyo Far Eastern Military acceptable would lead, inevitably, to questions Tribunal, for example in a judgement issued on about how prevalent such attitudes remain in November 4, 1948, which states that “while China today. Since that is a debate which the occupying Guilin, the Japanese military Communist Party remains unwilling tocommitted rape, plunder and all sorts of countenance, it is hard for Chinese scholarship violence. They used the pretext of recruiting on the comfort women system to drawwomen factory workers, and forced those conclusions extending much beyond boilerplate women into working for the army as denunciations of Japanese state culpability. prostitutes…”.7 However, because of the haste Nonetheless, the invaluable work that Su and with which these trials were conducted, others have performed in tracing the nature, difficulties with collecting evidence and efforts evolution and extent of the comfort women at concealment by the Japanese authorities, the system in China provides ample material for comfort women phenomenon was never treated those able and willing to connect debate over as a distinct category of criminal act or the abuse of women in war to a more subjected to proper judicial investigation. thoroughgoing feminist critique. Since 1991, research into the history of the Edward Vickers, Fukuoka, March 2020. comfort women has undergone a fraught and complex recovery. Difficulties facing researchers result from both the action of defeated Japanese forces in destroying many related documents, and reluctance on the part In the 27 years since August 14, 1991,5 when 6 of the victims themselves, often reinforced by Korean former “comfort woman” Kim Hak-sun social opprobrium, openly to discuss their spoke out about her experiences, the Japanese experiences. And today, most of the victims military’s comfort women system, a criminal have already passed away. apparatus perpetrating inhuman sexual slavery, has become more and more widely known. Despite such difficulties, in Korea, mainland