Peipei Qiu is the author of Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, published in 2013. The book is the first English-language book featuring accounts of the “comfort station” experiences of women from Mainland China, forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War. Through personal narratives from twelve survivors, this book reveals the unfathomable atrocities committed against women 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. Peipei Qiu's research interests include Japanese poetry, comparative studies of Japanese and Chinese literature, Daoist tradition in East Asian literature, women in East Asian literature and societies, and Japanese language pedagogy.
Can you tell us about how you came to be interested in your research area of women in East Asian literature and societies?
I am a scholar of Japanese literature but I also studied Chinese literature and culture at Peking University, Tokyo University, and Columbia University. In studying the literary texts of these East Asian countries, I was deeply impressed by the narratives written by or about women. I found that the importance of these narratives is far beyond literary values as they vividly convey women’s voices and experiences that are often missing in the histories written by men. Hoping to introduce them to English-speaking audiences, I began looking at the literature on women in my teaching and research. One of the courses I have been teaching in that area is “Women in Japanese and Chinese Literature,” in which we examine the gendered narrative voices in representative Chinese and Japanese texts and analyze the images of women and the dynamic changes in women’s roles in society.
How did you become invested in the stories of "comfort women"?
I began research on the “comfort women” issue in the early 2000s when I served as one of the advisers of a Vassar student who wrote a senior thesis on the “comfort women” redress movement in South Korea and Japan. When working with the student I noticed that, although an extremely large number of Chinese women were abducted by the Japanese military and forced into military sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War, their victimization remained largely unknown to people outside China. I found this lacuna seriously impairing the understanding of the scope and the criminal nature of the “comfort women” system because Chinese “comfort women” comprised one of the largest victim groups and their sufferings reflected the darkest end of the spectrum of Japanese military sexual violence. I hoped to help tell their painful ordeals to the international community, so I began researching and writing about the Chinese “comfort women.”
How have the stories of comfort women been underrepresented or misrepresented in historic scholarship?
For a long time after WWII, the victims of the Japanese military sexual violence were kept quiet because they were viewed as shameful due to the patriarchal ideology lingering in society. In some cases, the victims were even treated as “collaborators serving the enemy” and were persecuted. The information about the large number of Chinese women enslaved in Japan’s wartime “comfort stations” was first brought to light in China in the 1990s when the “comfort women” redress movement in South Korea and Japan inspired a nationwide investigation onJapanese military comfort stations. However, research findings about Chinese “comfort women” have been mostly in the Chinese language at the time and people outside of China did not know about it. There had been little information in English available about Chinese “comfort women” before Chinese Comfort Women: Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves was published in 2013.
Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves also explores some of the social, political, and cultural factors in China that prolonged the suffering of comfort women for their entire lives. Can you talk a bit more about these factors and their impact?
Part 2 of the book features the personal accounts of twelve women who were forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. When writing the translations of these women’s testimonies, I included not only the narratives of their wartime enslavement but also their prewar life and the postwar struggle for justice. Their personal stories reveal that Chinese society in the 1930s and 1940 were still dominated by the patriarchal ideology which regarded women as subordinate to men, a tool to produce offspring for the continuation of the family line. Under such a social and ideological climate, daughters of poor families were often abandoned or sold to richer families, and wives were divorced or discriminated against when they were unable to bear children. This social condition contributed to the prolonged sufferings of these women and made them easy prey for the violence of Japanese troops. However, the brutal ways in which the Japanese military men treated Chinese women should not be simply attributed to the patriarchal society’s devaluation of women. Their large-scale sexual enslavement of “comfort women” was fundamentally made possible by the military occupation and was carried out to support Japan’s aggressive war.
Are any of these factors still relevant today? If so, what impact do they have on women and how history is told today?
Social conditions in terms of gender equality and justice have improved in the past decades, yet discrimination and sexual violence against women have been eradicated neither in China nor around the globe. Rape and human trafficking are still reported frequently. We have a long way to go and we need to take action together to fight for women’s rights and human rights. The website you created to engage in this social discourse Through HerStory is an effective way to support this fight. I am very impressed by your work.
What progress have you seen in these areas since the book was released in 2013?
The publication of Chinese Comfort Women: Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves drew wide attention from readers and media outside China, which helped the international community to learn about that dark phase of history and to understand the profound sufferings of the “comfort women.” I am glad to see that in recent years the memories and voices of the Chinese survivors are increasingly integrated into the collective memories of the international community, as seen in the San Francisco “comfort women” memorial that has the image of a Chinese victim standing hand in hand with Korean and Filipina victims. The experiences of the “comfort women” drafted from the countries invaded and occupied by the Japanese armies demonstrate indisputably that the “comfort women” system is a war crime and a crime against humanity.
What progress do we still need to make?
Despite the ample evidence that testifies to the large scale and criminal nature of the “comfort women” system, ultra nationalists in Japan are still attempting to erase the atrocities committed under that system from public memory; one such attempt can be seen in the Japanese government’s persistent effort to remove “comfort women” memorials. How to transform the contested war memories into transnational remembrance of human sufferings and a legacy for preventing similar traumatic events remains a challenging task. We need to continue working hard to have the stories of the “comfort women” and all women told. Your website Through HerStory is a remarkable effort toward that goal.
Thank you so much!
Learn more about Peipei Qiu's works here.