Sexual Violence in the People's Daily

Before analysing the coverage of the CCP's legal approach to sexual violence in the People's Daily, it is necessary to provide an overview of the Party's legal statutes on rape. The CCP did not issue any laws on rape until the promulgation of the Penal Code in 1979. After founding the PRC, the CCP abolished all the codices previously implemented by the KMT but did not create new legal regulations and systems. This legal vacuum on civil and penal codes, however, did not mean that the CCP had no criminal regulations in place. It did publish three major acts stipulating the penalties for counterrevolution, corruption and activities that sabotaged the state currency.Footnote ¹³ Crimes such as rape, robbery and theft, along with some other serious offences, were absent from the published regulations.Footnote ¹⁴ Perpetrators of these offences were either tried in ad hoc people's trials with unknown standards, or in newly established judicial courts which adhered to a series of unpublished, confidential regulations circulated among the relevant personnel.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the unavailability of these documents renders it impossible to ascertain exactly how the CCP imposed penalties for rape and other sexual offences. The People's Daily, on the other hand, did report on rape cases from time to time, and can prove to be an alternative valuable source for understanding the CCP's legal approach to sexual violence. Equally important, unlike internal (neibu 内部) documents, the People's Daily has always enjoyed a wide readership. Its content can be said to reveal the way the CCP intended the general public to understand its legal approach. At the same time, with a legal discourse well established in the public sphere, the CCP's legal approach may have also been influenced or limited by the discursive norms regarding sexual violence.

The following examines the People's Daily coverage regarding the CCP's legal approaches to rape and prostitution, with which the comfort women issue may have been associated, from the founding of the People's Daily in 1946 to the commencement of the trials in 1956. Sexual violence is all too often politicized, whether in wartime or peacetime, but this section is not concerned with verifying the degree to which newspaper articles are based on facts or merely used for propaganda purposes. Instead, the purpose of the analysis here is to examine the representation of the CCP's legal treatment of sexual violence in the public sphere and to provide context for the Party's legal approach in the 1956 trials.

When a “well-to-do” student from Peking University was raped by US soldiers in December 1946, the People's Daily followed the case intensely. An article dated 12 February 1947 draws an analogy between Japanese crimes in the past and the American ones in the present, stating that even the Japanese had not dared to rape college students in the old capital of Beijing.Footnote ¹⁶ The emphasis on the victim's social status demonstrates a facile understanding of rape, as well as discrimination against rural and non-elite women, showing a tendency to downplay crimes against the latter group that was prevalent in Chinese society at the time.Footnote ¹⁷ The rape case triggered mass student demonstrations against the US military presence and American crimes in China, which received heavy coverage in the People's Daily. The two American perpetrators were first found guilty and then exonerated in a retrial. The People's Daily fervently denounced the Americans’ exculpation, regarding it to be an insult to the “honour and dignity of China.”Footnote ¹⁸ In this light, the People's Daily, whether intentionally or not, set a tone of condemning rape committed against Chinese women by foreign soldiers in the public sphere. With a discourse condemning foreign troops’ sex crimes well established, it now became more likely that the CCP would deal with these kinds of crimes in its own war crimes trials.

Later, articles in the People's Daily reported on a large number of sentences handed down to landlords, bandits and those labelled reactionaries during the “Campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries” from 1950 to 1951, with rape being one of the charges. For example, on 23 May and 25 August 1951, the newspaper published long lists of court decisions rendered against defendants, some of which contain the crime of rape.Footnote ¹⁹ From March to May 1951, extensive coverage was given to crimes committed by KMT spies, landlords, bandits and those labelled reactionaries. Rape featured more than 40 times in articles published during this period, although it was frequently paired with other crimes, in the form of large numbers of people describing their bitterness and their recollections, and in the listing of punishments meted out to the perpetrators.Footnote ²⁰ In this way, the consistent coverage of rape and legal decisions involving rape in the People's Daily communicated to the populace that the CCP regarded rape as a crime to be prosecuted and punished. Moreover, the pattern of mentioning rape in passing together with crimes labelled “reactionary” demonstrates that rape was worth mentioning only when it could contribute towards the goals of the Party's political campaigns. This pattern also set a precedent for the CCP's legal treatment of sexual crimes in the 1956 trials, as discussed below.

On the other hand, terms such as “enforced prostitution” (qiangzhi maiyin 强制卖淫) or “comfort women” (weianfu 慰安妇) do not appear in the People's Daily until years later. However, the Japanese terms for “comfort women” and “prostitutes” used by Japanese war criminals in their written confessions were translated as weianfu and jinü 妓女 (prostitutes) in Chinese. The newspaper's portrayal of “prostitutes” is therefore worth scrutinizing. In contrast to rape, which was mainly regarded as a crime committed against women by both foreign and domestic enemies in the past and present, prostitutes were primarily considered as victims of the “old society” in the People's Daily. Who, then, was to be held accountable for their sufferings?

The answer, in short, was that previous regimes in feudal societies were the culprits, and criminal responsibility was primarily attributed to brothel owners and pimps. An article dated 9 February 1950 notes that the old society and brothel owners were at the root of the suffering endured by prostitutes in the past.Footnote ²¹ In this same month, the People's Daily also reported on punishments handed down to brothel owners and pimps.Footnote ²² In the following two months, two other groups were also found guilty of running brothels and exploiting prostitutes.Footnote ²³ Foreigners made appearances in the coverage on prostitution, but overwhelmingly as customers and rarely as the culprits forcing Chinese women into prostitution. As pointed out by Gail Hershatter, ever since the May Fourth movement, prostitution in China had been redefined and reconstructed “as an exploitative transaction,” with the exploitative relationship existing primarily “between the prostitute and her madam, not the prostitute and her customer.”Footnote ²⁴ This logic corresponds to the media discourse and propaganda during the early 1950s. By upbraiding the KMT government and brothel keepers for prostitution, the People's Daily obscures other factors such as patriarchy, class and gender. The problem of prostitution was addressed in the Chinese public sphere by verbally condemning old society and by announcing the punishment of criminal procurers. The People's Daily therefore domesticated and localized the issue of prostitution together with the social problems associated with it. It was within this local discursive context that the CCP had the Japanese suspects write confessions. The Party then initiated the war crimes trials.

Sexual Violence in the Japanese Confessions

It is important to note that individual scholars still have limited access to the original manuscripts of confessions and copies of the court records. As a result, one may cast doubt upon the authenticity and veracity of such accounts. Scholars such as Marukawa Tetsushi, after talking to many of those suspected of war crimes, argues that it is hard to deny the psychological pressure exerted upon them, but he points out that such pressure exists in all societies to a certain degree.Footnote ²⁵ James Dawes interviewed some of the Japanese detainees held by the CCP and also contends that the re-education project involved psychological coercion. However, he suggests that the detainees honestly recorded the crimes they perpetrated despite this coercion.Footnote ²⁶ Importantly, we cannot ignore the fact that most of the CCP detainees continued to offer testimony against the excesses of war while calling for reconciliation between Japan and China upon their return to their homeland, where they had the chance to openly recant their confessions and denounce the CCP trials. The continuity in their post-war testimonies and activities give the confessions used in the CCP trials historical value.

The confessions were first collected in 1954, then rewritten and expanded up until the trials were held in 1956. The 45 Japanese war crimes suspects who eventually stood trial were divided into three groups for prosecution according to their military affiliation and activities in wartime China: higher-ranking military officers, Manchukuo officers, and those who fought for or worked for the KMT during the civil war. The first two groups were prosecuted in two cases in Shenyang, and the third group in two other cases in Taiyuan. The 28 Manchukuo officers, who were tried in one case in Shenyang, were high-profile officials. Their confessions primarily recounted details of the military operations of the puppet state. These included anti-espionage policies and the forced recruitment of local Chinese for construction projects. There were no specific references to wartime sexual violence, except for a brief mention of the comfort women system in the confession of Nakai Hisaji, who recounted his arrangements for constructing a house to be used as a military comfort station in Aihun 瑷珲, Heilongjiang province, at the behest of the Japanese military in May 1939.Footnote ²⁷ The fact that this was the only link to sexual violence in the confessions of the 28 Manchukuo detainees in part explains why the CCP did not prosecute them for crimes of that nature. However, as Kumano Naoki has pointed out, the Kwantung Army was involved in the establishment and maintenance of comfort stations along the borderlands between Manchuria and the Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁸ Mark Driscoll has also shed light on the massive scale of Manchukuo administrators’ participation in human trafficking and prostitution rings.Footnote ²⁹ It is therefore highly probable that the officers prosecuted in the Shenyang trials were also directly or indirectly involved in sexual violence. The reason for their selective recounting of crimes cannot be determined, although Driscoll speculates that as human trafficking was so common in Manchukuo, female experiences did not particularly stand out. He also conjectures that, to some extent, Manchukuo itself had become a comfort station where human trafficking was taken for granted.Footnote ³⁰ However, since the former Manchukuo officers, excluding Nakai, did not mention such crimes in their confessions, the present paper examines only the confessions written by the remaining 17 defendants accused of war crimes.

Among the 17 suspects tried in three cases in Shenyang and Taiyuan (separated by the line between Uno Shintarō and Sagara Keiji in Table 1), 13 confessed to sexual violence of one form or another, as noted in the columns designated “Confession” in Table 1; however, not all were prosecuted or mentioned in the final verdict, as illustrated in the columns designated “Court record or judgment.” In particular, the only mention of comfort women appears in the court record of Tominaga Juntarō, even though Tominaga did not mention any crimes of sexual violence in his confession. Instead, a witness named He Cheng 何澄 testified before the court that the military personnel under Tominaga's command raped women on many occasions. When asked by a judge how his Pacification Corps (xuanfuban 宣抚班) harmed Chinese on the battlefront or in areas already occupied by the Japanese military, Tominaga answered that, along with other crimes, his troops sent women to Japanese military comfort stations and raped them.Footnote ³¹ However, these crimes were not investigated further by the court and, as a result, Tominaga's sexual crimes did not figure in the final verdict.

Table 1: Statistics on Sexual Violence Recorded in Confessions and Dealt with in Courts

Notes:

√ – mentioned or treated; X – not mentioned or treated; √/X – mentioned before the court but not in the judgment.

From Tominaga's case and other examples, we can clearly see the emergence of a discrepancy between the confessions of sex crimes and the courts’ treatment of them as such. Owing to the abundance of information in these records, instead of examining all confessions, this paper focuses mainly on two case studies: Suzuki Hiraku and Kikuchi Shūichi, who were tried in the Shenyang and Taiyuan Special Military Courts, respectively. These accounts have been selected on the basis that they represent a comparatively well-rounded picture of sexual violence against Chinese women. Descriptions of other war criminals’ confessions are also incorporated as supplemental evidence wherever needed.

Suzuki Hiraku was a lieutenant general of the 117th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army when he was taken as a prisoner of war (POW) by the advancing Soviet army. He confessed in writing to acquiescence to rape, the establishment of comfort stations and the abduction of women. Suzuki mentions a case involving a mass raping spree. The Japanese troops under his command raped more than 100 women in a village named Lujiayu 鲁家峪, located in Hebei province, after a manoeuvre to mop up the Eighth Route Army, the military force under CCP command.Footnote ³² Suzuki's confession does not indicate whether he was personally involved in these egregious acts against women. By confessing to his role in this mass assault, however, one thing is certain: Suzuki, as chief of the 27th Infantry Brigade, considered himself to be accountable for the atrocities committed by his subordinates.

In terms of the comfort women system, his account is more substantive. Under the same military title of chief of the 27th Infantry Brigade, he issued a command to install comfort stations in places where Japanese military units were stationed, and instigated the abduction of 60 Chinese women for sexual service.Footnote ³³ In addition, in a subsection entitled, “Crimes committed during the period of being commander of the 67th Infantry Regiment,” Suzuki describes ordering his adjutant, Major Horio, to set up a comfort station and how he had 20 Chinese and Korean women abducted to serve as comfort women.Footnote ³⁴ When Suzuki was commander of the 4th Brigade of the 117th Division, he gave orders to establish comfort stations in all areas garrisoned by Japanese troops and to abduct around 60 Chinese and Korean women to act as comfort women.Footnote ³⁵ In a separate document supplementing his written confession, Suzuki admitted that “when he received the order to transfer from Xinxiang 新乡 to the north-east in July 1945, he took five Japanese women from Xinxiang to Taonan 洮南 in the north-east.” He listed this under his category of “crime of abducting women.”Footnote ³⁶ Similar accounts such as acquiescence to rape and involvement in the comfort women system are also found in other high-profile officers’ confessions, such as that of Sassa Shinnosuke, who served as commander of the 39th Division at the time of his arrest.Footnote ³⁷ What the accounts of Suzuki and others spell out is the large extent to which they, as commanders of the Japanese military in various parts of China, were involved in the comfort women system as they gave orders for the establishment of comfort stations and the abduction of Chinese, Korean and Japanese women.

Towards the end of his confession, Suzuki refers again to his crimes of sexual violence:

In the same section of his written confession, Suzuki narrates that upon watching Konketsuji (Mixed Race Kids, 1953), a movie about the unfortunate fate of a child of a black GI and a Japanese woman, he further comprehended the severity of his crimes.Footnote ³⁹ It is not surprising that the Chinese detention centres showed the Japanese inmates films on the topic of occupation crimes and contemporary social problems resulting from the US occupation of Japan (1945–1952). The CCP propaganda was extremely critical of the US occupation, particularly after the so-called “reverse course” in which the priority of the US occupation policymakers switched from democratization and demilitarization to the reconstruction of the Japanese economy. The CCP denounced this policy shift as a US attempt to colonize Japan and rebuild the former enemy into a bulwark against the newly emergent Communist China.Footnote ⁴⁰ Films of this kind were apparently intended to arouse a sense of empathy in their targeted audiences, compelling them to draw an analogy between American crimes in Japan and Japanese atrocities in China. Suzuki's reflection on sexual violence nevertheless fails to acknowledge the fact that prostitution as a livelihood in the post-war era was not the same as abduction for enforced prostitution during wartime. Furthermore, Suzuki's acknowledgement of sexual crimes is not entirely grounded in sympathy for the female victims. His self-reflection focuses largely on the sorrow he felt towards the families of the violated and the disgrace brought upon the nation as a result of its women being forced into having sexual intercourse with its enemies; there is little mention of the physical and psychological scars inflicted upon the female victims. Scholars elsewhere have pointed out that women's bodies have been made to embody the nation and its sovereignty, and thus sexual assaults inflicted upon them represent both men's failure to protect “their” women and the national humiliation of the conquered.Footnote ⁴¹ Suzuki's line of thinking, unfortunately, has once again become dominant in contemporary discussions on the comfort women issue, as some of the reparation movements and commemoration activities are politically and emotionally charged.Footnote ⁴² Japan's comfort women system is too easily associated with the national shame brought to the victims' countries, and thus politically galvanized nationalist causes sometimes take precedence over the healing of women's physical and psychological pain.Footnote ⁴³ For Suzuki, national shame was highlighted, while individual victims’ experience, agency and trauma were downplayed.

Kikuchi Shūichi, a major general when he was captured by the CCP, confessed to multiple rapes and the establishment of comfort stations. As his accounts of sexual violence are far more detailed than those of Suzuki, only the most representative excerpts are examined here. Kikuchi writes that, between July 1938 and September 1945, he committed 57 instances of rape, according to his own estimation.Footnote ⁴⁴ In most of these instances, he committed the crimes with either the assistance of Chinese interpreters employed by his troops or the Security Corps (baoandui 保安队), which was a collaborationist force made up entirely of Chinese nationals.Footnote ⁴⁵ For example, on one day in June 1943, at 22:00, Kikuchi intimidated the company commander of the Security Corps, Li Yongqing 李永清, into guiding him to the home of a 16-year-old girl who was raped on the scene. Later, Kikuchi states that he raped this same girl three more times.Footnote ⁴⁶ The interpreter's dwelling also became a place where Kikuchi raped other women who he ordered to be brought there, and it appears that it served not only as a raping station on a singular basis but also as an incarceration cell in which women were imprisoned for the purpose of multiple rapes, most likely over a span of several days. For instance, on a day in late March 1942, at 22:00, Kikuchi gave orders to the interpreter to bring to his house a 19-year-old woman, whom he later raped eight times.Footnote ⁴⁷ Chinese women were not only confined to a place where they were repeatedly raped but also were at times coerced into accompanying Kikuchi as sex slaves. For example, in May 1940, he raped a woman when he was a contingent commander and thereafter sexually assaulted the same woman more than 20 times in Wuzhaicheng 五寨城 and Shenchicheng 神池城.Footnote ⁴⁸ These multiple incidents of sexual violence against the same people in different locations indicate that these victims must have been detained by Kikuchi. Both the women made to accompany Kikuchi and those who were detained in a given location were evidently sex slaves, and the crimes Kikuchi confessed to ought to be considered as the sexual enslavement of women.

Kikuchi's confession is quite detailed, and information such as the exact date and time of day is recorded along with other confessed crimes including murder and looting. It is remarkable that Kikuchi's recollections of his crimes are so precise. Because he died in 1979, it is impossible to interview him about the veracity of his statements.Footnote ⁴⁹ The detailed nature of his confession might have been in response to CCP pressures to recount his crimes in as much detail as possible. Whatever the reason, Kikuchi, like the other detainees, never denied the authenticity of his confession or denounced the CCP trials after he returned to Japan.

Kikuchi's acts of violence against women continued, albeit to a lesser extent, even after Japan's surrender. His confession indicates that from September 1945 to April 1949, when he was fighting on behalf of the KMT, he raped four women, one of whom was raped twice and another five times.Footnote ⁵⁰ In addition to these incidents of rape, Kikuchi was also proactively engaged in setting up comfort stations for Japanese soldiers and officers who had agreed to stay in China and fight for the KMT. In late March 1948, at his suggestion, his corps paid 100 bags of wheat for a comfort station originally managed by the Sixth Corps of the Japanese Army. After some repairs, the new managers recommenced activities at the comfort station. Six Chinese comfort women were confined there.Footnote ⁵¹ This episode unambiguously demonstrates the involvement of Kikuchi, a Japanese military officer, in the establishment and operation of comfort stations, similar to Suzuki's confession noted above. It is unclear how these Chinese women were procured. However, it is clear that Chinese women were subjected to sexual violence by Japanese perpetrators between 1945 and 1949, after the end of the War of Resistance. Kikuchi's account suggests that the end of the war did not put a halt to the fear of abduction, enslavement and rape commonly shared by Chinese women at that time, at least not in Shanxi province, where Japanese servicemen remained.

Indictments and Verdicts: The CCP Trials, Reconsidered

The CCP trials were conducted expeditiously in Shenyang and Taiyuan from June to July 1956. The trials deliberately aimed at guaranteeing fair-trial protection, as the court assigned lawyers to war crimes suspects and granted the defendants the right to question witnesses and to defend themselves. As all the war crimes suspects had admitted to the crimes listed in the indictment and pleaded guilty as charged, there was no process of cross-examination in court. Therefore, instead of serving as a forum for prosecutors to provide a detailed case against a particular defendant, the trials focused on hearing cases from victims and witnesses, and having the defendants acknowledge their crimes and apologize in open court. The trials functioned to some extent as a stage on which to demonstrate the purported achievements of the CCP's re-education programme.Footnote ⁵² The performative nature of the trials thus informs the following investigation of the ways in which incidents relating to sexual violence were dealt with in the CCP trials. The examination below focuses on the legal proceedings against Suzuki and Kikuchi, who were tried in Shenyang and Taiyuan, respectively.

The indictments list chronologically the crimes the defendants committed. Each paragraph details atrocities perpetrated during a certain military manoeuvre in which the Japanese defendants were involved, or during a particular period in which the defendants were deployed at a particular military outpost in China. Overall, the judgments bear a remarkable resemblance to the indictments, as all the defendants acknowledged their crimes and readily pleaded guilty, with some supplementary testimonies heard before the court. In Suzuki's case, his crimes were substantiated by 181 letters of accusation from victims and relatives of victims, 45 testimonies from witnesses, 89 inquiry transcripts, one investigation report, 33 photographs, one copy of a Manchukuo newspaper and his confession.Footnote ⁵³

Among the crimes committed in Lujiayu, the village Suzuki mentioned in his written confession where more than 100 women were sexually violated, the indictment details the case of Qian Lianfa 钱连发, who stated that his 18-year-old daughter was gang-raped to death after being poisoned by gas. The indictment also mentions the case of Liu Qinglong 刘清隆, who testified that his wife was burned to death after being raped.Footnote ⁵⁴ Unlike Suzuki's confession, in which the large number of victims (more than 100) was discussed, the prosecution identified two victims of rape. Moreover, these descriptions are the only record of sexual violence found in Suzuki's indictment. The indictment was substantiated by a witness named Zhang Junjin 张俊金 who appeared before the court. Zhou Shuen 周树恩, another eyewitness who testified to the slaughter that occurred in Panjiadaizhuang 潘家戴庄 in Hebei province, where Suzuki's troops were stationed, also referred to the Japanese servicemen's mass sexual assault against Chinese women. He stated that the Japanese rounded up 100 young women and drove them to a large yard. There, they proceeded to rape and gang-rape these women, one of whom was his wife.Footnote ⁵⁵

The sexual atrocities described in Zhou Shuen's testimony were not included in Suzuki's confession, but were included in the final judgment, because Suzuki confirmed the authenticity of this testimony during the trial. The concluding paragraph of the final judgment reads:

Suzuki was sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment on the charges recorded above. As the CCP trials did not break down the penalty handed out for each crime, we cannot ascertain exactly how much weight was given to sexual violence in the final deliberation of judgment.

Kikuchi's indictment was substantiated by 60 letters from victims and relatives of victims, 35 testimonies from witnesses, six investigation reports and his own written confession. Kikuchi was also charged for his post-war crimes in Taiyuan.Footnote ⁵⁷ Despite the extensive accounts of sexual violence recorded in Kikuchi's confession, the only mention of them in the final indictment was that, “based on the accusation letters from victims […] and the defendant's former underlings […] from March 1944 to March 1945, the defendant […] raped and acquiesced to his subordinates raping women.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Regarding these particular atrocities, the judge asked Kikuchi whether the charges that he had raped and connived for his subordinates to rape women were true or not. The answer was in the affirmative.Footnote ⁵⁹ The final paragraph of the judgment passed down to Kikuchi reads:

Kikuchi was sentenced to 13 years for these crimes. The atrocities committed by Kikuchi against Chinese women after the War of Resistance were entirely absent from either the court proceedings or the judgment. This signals that the suffering forced upon Chinese women was understood to be secondary to the crime of fighting on behalf of the KMT.

The CCP trials as a whole, as illustrated by the Suzuki and Kikuchi cases and as shown in Table 1, did indeed hold war crimes suspects accountable for the rape of Chinese women. This is substantiated by the fact that rape was mentioned in both the indictments and the witnesses’ testimony heard before the court, which were included in the final judgments. It is noteworthy that the prosecution indicted these men for the crime of sexual violence. It is also worth noting that the court examined accusations of rape against Uesaka Masaru, who was found guilty of the crime in one of the Shenyang trials, despite a complete absence of any record relating to sexual violence in his written confession (see Table 1). The court examination and final judgments elucidate the CCP's willingness to deal with rape charges as long as there was sufficient evidence to substantiate the accusation. However, mentioned only in passing alongside other crimes, rape never became a focal point of the CCP's prosecution. Kikuchi's extensive accounts of the various incidents of rape in which he was involved were condensed into a single sentence in the court proceedings. Furthermore, no rape victims were called to testify before the court. As stated above, one of the objectives of the CCP trials was to hear from the victims and witnesses and to make it possible for the defendants to give an apology and express remorse.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, the victims and witnesses of many other crimes had their voices heard in this legal, public forum, but not the rape victims, whose suffering went unacknowledged in the public domain.

Except in the case of Tominaga Juntarō, the comfort women system did not figure in the court proceedings, despite 7 of the 17 – or 8 of the 45 if the case involving 28 top-level Manchukuo officials is included – war crimes suspects describing related activities in their confessions (see Table 1). Meanwhile, the legal negligence over the comfort women issue strongly suggests that the confessions of the war crimes suspects on this issue at least were not forced; if the CCP regarded the operation of comfort stations as a war crime and forced the Japanese detainees to confess to it, it would have dealt with the comfort women issue in the legal proceedings. It is difficult to ascertain the exact reasons underlying such a prosecutorial omission, but a few well-founded speculations may be made here.

First, the prosecutors might have encountered difficulties in building a case against the comfort women system, since it raised many questions regarding the evidentiary value of the personal accounts in the written confessions. The CCP trials strove to ensure the fairness of the trials and to make sure that all the crimes prosecuted were substantiated. Without other verifiable evidence, the confessions alone may not have been deemed sufficient to make a strong case in court. Furthermore, it was generally very difficult for female victims to attest to the sexual violence inflicted upon them, fearing further marginalization by China's patriarchal society.

Second, both the words chosen for the confessions and for the Chinese translations obscured the cruelty and coercion of the comfort station system. The detainees’ confessions were written in Japanese and then translated into Chinese for the purposes of the court. Some suspects used the Japanese word ianjo 慰安所 for comfort stations, while others such as Funaki Kenjirō, Ōno Yasuharu, Sassa Shinnosuke and Nakai Hisaji also used yūkaku 遊郭, gikan 妓館, shunya 春屋 and girō 妓楼, respectively, all of which denote brothels of different types.Footnote ⁶² The different terms used for comfort stations of various types to some extent support Sarah Soh's argument that there existed a wide range of Japanese comfort stations, and their functions and operational nature varied over time and across physical locations. Based on her study on Korean comfort women, she maintains that both commercial sex and sexual crimes took place in comfort stations.Footnote ⁶³ Fujime Yuki, on the other hand, fundamentally questions the so-called commercial sex industry of Japan's pre-war state-regulated prostitution system, which she considers to have been a system of sexual slavery that placed women under constant surveillance by the state and subjected them to violence. She further argues that the wartime comfort women system amounted to a militarized, intensified and deteriorated version of the pre-war licenced prostitution.Footnote ⁶⁴ Adding Chinese experience to the picture, Peipei Qiu and Su Zhiliang contend that what happened to the great majority of Chinese comfort women in various comfort stations constitutes sexual slavery.Footnote ⁶⁵ The purpose of the discussion here is neither to establish a hierarchy among comfort women victims nor to conflate all comfort stations into one category, but to demonstrate that the variety of the terms used by the war criminals points to the existence of comfort stations of multiple types under a system that exploited women's bodies and sexuality. In fact, as Ueno Chizuko has pointed out, even for the comfort stations that went by the same name of ianjo and the slave-like conditions to which female victims were subjected, historical context and circumstances matter in our understanding of the comfort women system and the experiences of female victims.Footnote ⁶⁶ Despite the various terminology used, the appearance of such words in the confessions provided a chance for the CCP to investigate this issue further. However, the translators of the confessions were unlikely to be able to capture the subtle nuances of these Japanese words accurately, and translation into equivalent Chinese terms was nearly impossible. The phrase “comfort station” (ianjo) is a euphemism, literally denoting a place for comfort, and in most cases was transliterated as weiansuo 慰安所 in Chinese. The Japanese terms yūkaku, gikan and girō were translated as “brothel” (jiyuan 妓院 and jiguan 妓馆).Footnote ⁶⁷ Intriguingly, shunya was rendered as both chunwu 春屋 (meaning brothel or place for prostitution) and weiansuo.Footnote ⁶⁸ Language does matter because it shapes and structures judicial understandings of crimes to a certain degree. The Chinese transliteration of the Japanese euphemism ianjo obscured the criminal nature of the Japanese comfort station system; furthermore, the translation of the term as “brothel” rendered victims as prostitutes, thereby further stigmatizing them for having made money by sleeping with the enemy.Footnote ⁶⁹ Moreover, as noted above, prostitutes were regarded as the direct victims of brothel keepers and indirect victims of old society, a scenario in which foreigners were not involved.

Third, the prosecutors may not have viewed Chinese comfort women as victims. Yun Xia points out that the dominant public discourse under the wartime KMT regime condemned not only females who were genuine collaborators and thwarted the resistance efforts through their activities but also those who were closely associated with Chinese collaborators and/or Japanese, regardless of their political stance.Footnote ⁷⁰ She further contends that women who maintained sexual relationships with either Chinese male collaborators or Japanese occupiers were equally defiled and stigmatized.Footnote ⁷¹ Likewise, Akiyama Yōko has noted that female Chinese soldiers who were taken by the Japanese military as POWs were ostracized by their local communities after their release and labelled as “women who slept with the enemy.”Footnote ⁷² In the case of the comfort women system, the reasoning was that however reluctant Chinese comfort women may have been, by satisfying the sexual desires of the enemy, they had inadvertently helped to maintain Japanese men's morale, and thus they had contributed to the Japanese war effort.Footnote ⁷³ Instead of being victims of sexual violence, Chinese comfort women may therefore have been viewed as collaborators by CCP prosecutors and the Chinese populace in general.Footnote ⁷⁴ As Nicola Henry has pointed out, wartime comfort stations blur the responsibilities of the perpetrators by implicating female victims for their alleged complicity.Footnote ⁷⁵ What Henry calls the “victim hierarchy” thus becomes conspicuous in the CCP's prosecution of sexual violence: victims of enforced prostitution were not classed as rape victims and appeared less authentic in terms of their victimization.Footnote ⁷⁶

Whatever the reason for the decision not to prosecute the Japanese servicemen for these acts, this omission rendered invisible the suffering inflicted upon Chinese comfort women. Legal proceedings in the aftermath of mass violence serve to produce an authentic record of the crimes, to attribute responsibility and offer acknowledgement of suffering, and thus to contribute to the formation of collective memories.Footnote ⁷⁷ Female victims in China were excluded from justice and their victimhood was not acknowledged in the CCP war crimes trials nor in society in general.