Chinese Comfort Women

Peipei Qiu is a professor of Chinese and Japanese, Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair in Modern Languages, and the director of the Asian Studies Program at Vassar College. Su Zhiliang is a professor of history, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Communication, and the director of the Research Center for Chinese “Comfort Women” at Shanghai Normal University. Chen Lifei is a professor of journalism, the chair of the Department of Publishing and Media Studies, and the deputy director of the Center for Women’s Studies, both at Shanghai Normal University.

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.

Nicola Henry, author of War and Rape: Law, Memory and Justice:
An impressive book, well-written and researched. It provides an excellent analysis of the scope, nature, and prevalence of comfort stations in China and documents the lived experiences of Chinese comfort women. This book expertly knits together a range of invaluable primary sources hitherto only available in Chinese, with secondary documentation in Japanese, Chinese, and English.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, author of Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era:
This work contributes significantly to the literature on “comfort women” and on the question of violence against women in war, generally. The individual histories documented in this book are very moving, particularly because they include discussion, not only of the terrible ordeals undergone by these women during the war, but also of their family backgrounds before the war and of their experiences in later life.

Diana Lary, author of The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937-1945:

This book is heart-rending and courageous. It gives voice, for the first time in English, to the Chinese women enslaved by the Japanese armies during the invasion and occupation of China. I finished it with a great respect for the victims whose stories are told here and for the historians who have brought them to light.