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History World War Ii

Chinese Comfort Women

Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves

by (author) Peipei Qiu

with Su Zhiliang & Chen Lifei

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Jul 2014
Category
World War II, China, Prostitution & Sex Trade
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780774825450
    Publish Date
    Jul 2014
    List Price
    $32.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774825474
    Publish Date
    Oct 2013
    List Price
    $99.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780774825443
    Publish Date
    Oct 2013
    List Price
    $90.00

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Chinese Comfort Women 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.

About the authors

Awards

  • Winner, Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) Best Book Award for Non-fiction, Chinese American Librarians Association

Contributor Notes

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Pacific Affairs