‘Comfort women’ list revealed
Print Edition
A LIST confirming the names of 135 “comfort women” in World War II was revealed by Chinese and South Korean experts yesterday.
The list of 210 people originally from the Korean Peninsula and who lived in Jinhua in east China’s Zhejiang Province, had been kept in the Jinhua City Archives. It was dated April 1944.
The document was discovered in the archives at the end of the 1980s, but didn’t attract much attention, said archives head Chen Yanyan.
“The 210 people were from the Korean Peninsula. The document lists their names, ages, place of birth and professions,” Chen said.
In November last year, Su Zhiliang, director of the “comfort women” research center at Shanghai Normal University, studied the document and discovered the information that was missing from the list.
“There were photographers, businessmen, caterers, drivers, shop assistants, confectionery dealers, and translators, but there are no details of the professions for over 100 females aged between 20 to 30. Their addresses were found to be the same as owners of comfort stations,” said Su.
“We made the conclusion that these people worked for the station and they were ‘comfort women,’” he said.
“Being forced to be ‘comfort women’ was a unspeakable shame, so their profession was not stated on the list,” he said.
“Comfort women” were women and girls forced into sex slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.
Among the list of 210 people, 147 are believed to have worked at comfort stations — seven owners, five staff, and 135 “comfort women,” Su said.
In Jinhua alone, there were 10 comfort houses, he said.
Su said several other documents substantiated the existence of the comfort stations. One Chinese “comfort woman,” now over 90, also confirmed their existence. She refused to be named, Su said.
Lee Sin-cheol, from South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University, said the document is an important piece of evidence confirming the Japanese army established comfort stations during the war.
Lee said similar documents have been found in South Korea.
Su estimated that some 400,000 women in Asia were forced to serve as “comfort women” during World War II, nearly half of them Chinese.
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