Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [138]
The Japanese occupation of China, 1937–45
Wu Yinyan, twenty-year-old daughter of an official in a village near Tianjin, was fortunate. Her family—parents, grandmother, uncle, two brothers and three sisters—had enough money to flee as the Japanese approached. Sometimes they walked, sometimes they bought rides in carts. The neighbours left behind suffered the usual fate of their kind: “Women were raped, houses were burned,” said Wu laconically. The family went to stay with an aunt in Beijing, where Wu was able to attend school and later university. Yet when the Japanese occupied the city, a curtain of fear descended. “I never went out alone, without friends, because a Japanese could do what he wanted to anyone. I was always afraid.” Every Chinese was obliged to bow to every Japanese, a source of bitter resentment. Wu’s family survived mainly on maize, for there was no meat and few vegetables. Like almost all Chinese women, she lived in conditions of strict sexual segregation. Only in Communist areas did war bring to China some of the new freedoms and opportunities which it conferred upon women elsewhere. The family had no radio, and until August 1945 they knew almost nothing of what was happening in the outside world. Like most Chinese, they focused upon survival from one day to the next, nursing a dull hatred of their occupiers.
Whatever the Japanese wanted, they took. Lin Yajin was nineteen, gathering rice in the fields near her village in Hainan with three other girls one day in October 1943 when they were all seized by Japanese troops. At first they were merely questioned about local guerrilla activity, then held overnight in a hut. Next evening, in separate buildings the screaming girls were raped by a succession of Japanese soldiers. Thereafter, this became a nightly routine. Often, one soldier watched while another addressed a girl. When the unit moved to another village, the women were herded behind. By the summer of 1944, Lin had become seriously ill, and therefore of less interest to the soldiers. She was allowed to go home. She had contracted venereal disease, but there were no medicines to treat her condition. Both she and a sister who suffered the same fate were mocked by their neighbours, and indeed became near outcasts in the years that followed. She never married or had children. In 1946 she learned that the other three girls seized with her three years earlier had died of disease in Japanese hands.
Chen Jinyu was only sixteen when the Japanese army took her to become a “comfort woman,” together with every other available girl in her village in Baoting district. “Because I was pretty they used me more often than the rest. After a month I couldn’t bear it any more. One day I and some other girls were bathing in the river. I slipped over to the far bank and had started running when a Japanese guard saw me. He blew his whistle. Soldiers caught me, beat me pretty badly, then locked me up. Next morning, in heavy rain, I was forced to crawl across the ground in front of everyone, then beaten till I was a mass of cuts and bruises. In the end I couldn’t move any more, and just lay there in the mud and the water. The other girls begged the Japanese officers to spare me. If they hadn’t intervened, I doubt that I would have survived.” She remained a comfort woman until June 1945, when in desperation she escaped to the mountains, where she scavenged until the war ended.
Jiang Fushun, a boy of thirteen in 1944, was one of eight children of a peasant who worked as a water