Chinese Comfort Women
Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves
Peipei Qiu author Su Zhiliang author Chen Lifei author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of British Columbia Press
Published:1st Jul '14
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As the first English-language account of the devastating experiences of Chinese “comfort women,” this book fills a vital gap in our understanding of the abduction and enslavement of “comfort women” by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific war.
This is the first English-language book to record the experiences and testimonies of Chinese women abducted and detained as sex slaves in Japanese military “comfort stations” during Japan’s 1931-45 invasion of China.Accountability and redress for Imperial Japan’s wartime “comfort women” have provoked international debate in the past two decades. While personal narratives of “comfort station” survivors have been published in English, there has been a dearth of information about the women forced into service in these stations in Mainland China – a major theatre of the Asia-Pacific War. Through personal narratives from twelve Chinese “comfort station” survivors, this book reveals the unfathomable atrocities committed during the war and correlates the proliferation of “comfort stations” with the progression of Japan’s military offensive. Drawing on investigative reports, local histories, and witness testimony, Chinese Comfort Women puts a human face on China’s war experience and on the injustices suffered by hundreds of thousands of Chinese women.
This is an important book that signals fundamental shifts in understandings of the Japanese military’s use of “comfort women” in Asia during the Second World War. To date, most discussion of “comfort women,” the English translation of the Japanese euphemism ianfu, has focused on roughly 200,000 Korean and Japanese nationals. This volume sheds light on the suffering of an approximately equal number of Chinese women who were forcibly drafted by the Japanese military and whose experiences were silenced for decades. It is the first English-language monograph to record the memories of Chinese women at the “comfort stations” and it does a fine job of introducing these important findings to international audiences..One of the great strengths of this work is the demonstration that these women’s suffering continued long after the Japanese military was defeated and the war ended...Chinese Comfort Women does an excellent job of linking these women’s lives to forces that darkened much of China’s tortuous twentieth century yet remain far too little understood.
-- Norman Smith, University of Guelph * Pacific Affai- Winner of Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) Best Book Award for Non-fiction, Chinese American Librarians Association 2014 (United States)
ISBN: 9780774825450
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 420g
280 pages