Inferno - Max Hastings [272]
Between 1942 and 1944 big battlefield encounters in China were rare, but Japanese forces conducted frequent punitive expeditions to suppress dissent or gather food. One of the most ferocious of these took place in May 1942, designated by the Japanese high command as an act of vengeance for America’s Doolittle raid on Tokyo. More than 100,000 troops were dispatched into Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces, with support from the biological warfare unit. By September, when their mission was deemed fulfilled and the columns withdrew, a quarter of a million people had been killed. Throughout the war, Chiang’s capital of Chungking was routinely bombed by Japanese aircraft, and raids inflicted heavy civilian casualties in several other cities.
The files of the medical branch of the Tokyo War Ministry show that in September 1942, enslaved “comfort women” were servicing Japanese soldiers at 100 stations in northern China, 140 in central China, 40 in the south, 100 in Southeast Asia, 10 in the southwest Pacific and 10 on southern 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 scarcely any 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 and 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