Chinese Comfort Women

During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into comfort stations where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these comfort women were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate.

Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive.

The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by these women and the conditions that caused them.


[Comfort Women] aims to advance the ongoing legal action against Japan, in which redress is sought for the sufferings of those affected by the comfort women system. As such it is a polemic--but such is the tragedy of the women's experience that one overlooks any partisanship. It is also rigorous--scrupulously researched and demonstrating the highest academic integrity.--Asian Review of Books

This vital work, combining exemplary scholarship and humanitarian activism, should prove valuable to a wide audience and indispensable to specialists.--Publishers Weekly

'Chinese Comfort Women, ' by Peipei Qiu, a professor at Vassar College, and two China-based co-authors, Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, sheds new light on this tragedy with heartbreaking profiles of 12 Chinese comfort women.--Wall Street Journal

Chinese Comfort Women is significant in several ways. It provides the first English-language testimony, from twelve ordinary Chinese women, about the sexual enslavement of Chinese women during the war...Finally the book asks why these women did not receive justice under either socialist or neoliberal China in the years following the war. Highlighting the brutality of Japanese rapists, the book links Chinese patriarchal institutions and Japanese military masculinity. Examining the connection can help us to understand how and why women were treated as commodities: sold, bought, and tortured at the hands of both Chinese and Japanese men.--Women's Review of Books

[Qiu, Zhiliang, and Lifei] carefully explain the complexity of the story in a nuanced and sensitive way...The nature of the subject makes this groundbreaking scholarly account of interest to informed laypersons seeking to learn about military history, World War II, and the sexual exploitation of women.--Library Journal

The keen attention the authors paid to the notion of gender and sexuality in wartime and postwar Chinese sociopolitical systems makes this book not only and interrogation of war crimes committed by Japanese troops but also a critical reflection on the injustice to women perpetuated by local patriarchal society and masculine-nationalist history writing. This well-researched, well-structured book is indispensable for teaching modern East Asian history and politics and for rethinking organized violence.--CHOICE