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60-Year Sadness of Chinese Comfort Women
Editor's Notes: The "September18" National Humiliation Day is approaching again. The aggression and disaster of those years have moved farther and farther away and the blood color is fading gradually. However, only when a nation bears those years firmly in mind, only when it refuses to tamper with and forget history and only when it dares to face up to the suffering and filth it had experienced, can it stand up on the new stage, and avoid history to repeat itself.
It is precisely because of this that old people bring up past humiliation again. Recent news reports say that the new editions of Japanese textbooks either make no mention of or only lightly touch the Nanjing massacre and comfort women. If the bloody history is forgotten even by our posterity, then, it is not impossible that the tragedy would be re-staged.
The Comfort Women system carried out by the Japanese army during the Second World War was the ugliest, filthiest, darkest sexual slave system in human history of the 20th century. Enslaved by this system, about 200,000 Chinese women suffered devastation, but only about 200 of them can be checked against historical records. Many of those old people, for various reasons, are still trembling in the twilight of history.
At the time when the wheel of the times has "rumbled" into the 21st century, some Japanese Right-wingers are still trying to cover up their atrocities, such as the "Comfort Women" system and the Nanjing Massacre, committed during Japan's invasion of China, and to revive their old dream of "Great Japan Empire", striking an inharmonious note in the times of peace.
This December, a group of Chinese women ravaged by the Japanese troops will file a suit to the court of Tokyo to claim compensation.
Eighty-three-year-old Meizhi was once a comfort woman. She was taken away from home on Chongming Islet of Shanghai by Japanese army one day in April 1938 when she was 21.
Meizhi was taken to a "Comfort Station" to serve as a sex slave, henceforth starting her life of a hell on earth.
Early this year, Meizhi raged again when she saw on TV Japanese Right-wingers assembled in Osaka, openly denying the Nanjing Massacre atrocities. Recommended by another old man living in the same village, Meizhi attended the "International Academic Seminar on China Comfort Women" held late last March and denounced the atrocities of Japanese army with her experience of blood and tears. In order to participate in the Tokyo Women's International Court of War Criminal, the stepson of Meizhi, Wang Anzhang, with the help of staff of the legislation service office of the township and Professor Su Zhiliang of the China "Comfort Women" Research Center, has finished the plaint and is still gathering materials at present.
The 83-year-old Meizhi said: "Why don't they admit what they have done indeed?" "I must win this lawsuit. As long as justice can't be upheld, I won't cease the lawsuit," said she with tears covering faces already.
Zhou Mei, living in the same town with Meizhi, was also a comfort woman once and suffered from mental and physical pain too in those days. The 91 years old women, thought living a forlorn life now, still keeps a clear memory of the shocking and horrible experience happening more than 60 years ago.
Zhou Xie, son of Zhou Mei, witnessed all those when he was only five years old. The seed of hatred has long been rooted in his heart. Later on he took part in the war to resist US aggression and aid Korea, becoming an excellent pilot. He also has written the plaint and prepared for the opening of the Tokyo court this December.
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