Rape has always been used as a weapon of war. The actions of the Japanese troops during the Rape of Nanking where it is estimated that between 20,000 to 80,000 women were raped enraged the Chinese people and the international community. Iris Chang documented this in her book by taking the eye witness accounts of foreigners including the discovery of the diary of German businessman and Nazi, John Rabe, who was the head of the International Safety Zone and who saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives.
Rabe wrote: “There were girls under the age of 8 and women over the age of 70 who were raped and then, in the most brutal way possible, knocked down and beat up. We found corpses of women on beer glasses and others who had been lanced by bamboo shoots.”
Noting the huge anti-Japanese rage that was stoked, Okabe Naozaburo, a Japanese military leader, established “facilities for sexual comfort” to prevent another instance of wide-spread raping by Japanese troops. This led to the establishment of the “comfort women” system where Asian women were enslaved to serve the Japanese military. A grassroots movement sprang up in the 1990s to seek redress for these women who, according to the book Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, Korean and Japanese researchers number between 30,000 and 200,000, while Chinese researchers that from 1931 to 1945, approximately 400,000 women were forced to become military comfort women (half were Chinese).
This continues to reverberate in American culture, as the American military had a system during their occupation of Japan and the sex industry and sexual assault were documented during the Korean and Vietnam wars and around and in military bases today.
Telling these survivor stories was very difficult because many of the women hid them for decades out of shame. If they told, they were often driven out of their villages similar to what is happening today in India or Africa. Telling them in public must be all the more devastating to the women to have to relive theses excrutiating experiences. But telling the stories was extremely important to justice and sometimes healing.