• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1418 0

in the south, a hundred in South-East Asia, ten in the south-west Pacific and ten on south Sakhalin. Women were deployed in proportions of one to every forty soldiers. Around 100,000 were centrally conscripted, in addition to many others recruited locally; Hirohito’s warriors were issued with condoms branded ‘Assault No. 1’, though many disdained to use them. Chinese peasants called their Japanese occupiers ‘the YaKe’, meaning dumb, because few Japanese condescended to learn or speak Chinese. ‘The YaKe treatment’ described the piercing of a man’s or woman’s legs with a sharpened bamboo, the customary punishment for supposed Chinese disobedience.

One of its victims was a nineteen-year-old girl Lin Yajin, who like many of her contemporaries bore YaKe scars for the rest of her life. She was a peasant’s daughter in Hainan province, one of six children, when she was seized by Japanese soldiers in October 1943. They took her to their base camp and questioned her perfunctorily about local guerrilla activity. She sobbed in terror through her first night of captivity; during the second, four men filed into the hut where she was held.

One of them was an interpreter who told me the others were officers and then left. All three raped me. As I was a virgin, it felt very painful so I screamed very loudly. When they heard me cry they said nothing, just continued to fuck me like animals. For ten days, every evening three, four or five men did the same. Usually, while one of them raped me the others watched and laughed.

I tried to escape but it was very difficult. Even when you went to the lavatory, you were guarded by a soldier – a Bengali who didn’t rape us. Then I was moved to another village, called Qingxun, only one and a half kilometres from my home. Here also several soldiers came every day. Even when I had my period they still wanted to fuck me. After one month I was sick. My face was yellow and my whole body was dropsical. When the Japanese soldiers realised what had happened – I had caught a venereal disease – in the end they let me go home. I found my father was also seriously ill, and a month later he died – my family was so poor we had no money for a doctor. My mother treated me with herbs from the fields. It took quite a long time for my sickness to be cured. By then it was the summer of 1944. Four other girls were taken to the Japanese camp with me, and in 1946 I learned that all of them had died of venereal disease. Later, when the villagers learned that I’d been raped by Japanese, they too mocked and beat me. I have been alone ever since.

Deng Yumin, from Xiangshui in Baoting county, suffered a similar fate. Like many of her people, members of the Miao ethnic minority, she was conscripted for forced labour in 1940, living in a work camp first planting tobacco, then road-building. One day, the overseer told her she had been chosen for special work. She was taken to meet a Japanese officer, who she thought was about forty years old. Through an interpreter,

he told me I was a pretty girl, and he wanted me to be his friend. I didn’t have a choice, so I nodded to tell him I agreed. A few days after, late in the evening the interpreter took me to meet that officer again, and left me alone with him. His name was Songmu. He immediately took me in his arms, then groped my body. I struggled instinctively, but there was nothing I could do. He did what he liked. When I went back where I worked, I was very ashamed to tell the other girls what had happened. After that he raped me every day. I was a virgin, fourteen years old. I hadn’t started my periods. I didn’t feel very much. It just felt very painful.

It was like that for more than two months. One day the interpreter took me to Songmu’s place. He was not there. I saw another two officers whom I had never met. I wanted to leave and call Mr Songmu but one of the officers stopped me and closed the door. They said they wanted to marry me. When I resisted, they slapped my face – one was about twenty years old, the other about fifty. Both of them raped me that day. I told