Media

HKUL Book Talk - Chinese Comfort Women:
Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves

12 Oct 2017

 

Speakers:            Professor Peipei Qiu 丘培培 (Vassar College, USA)
Moderator:           Professor Clara Wing-chung Ho 劉詠聰 (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Date:                   19 Oct. 2017 (Thursday)
Time:                   6:30 - 8:00 pm
Venue:                Special Collections, 1/F, Main Library, The University of Hong Kong
Language:          English

About the Speakers

Peipei Qiu is The Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair Professor of Chinese and Japanese, and Chair of the Department of Chinese and Japanese, Vassar College, USA. Qiu is the recipient of a number of honors and grants, including a Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, Columbia University President’s Fellowship, and The Japan Foundation Fellowships. She is the author of Bashô and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai (Hawaii University Press, 2005), Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves (with collaborating researchers Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, University of British Columbia Press, 2013; Oxford University Press, 2014; Hong Kong University Press, 2014), and many research articles in English, Japanese, and Chinese

About the Book

During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate.

Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive.

The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by and the conditions that caused them.

The book was named a Best Book of the Year by the Chinese American Librarians Association.

The Chinese edition of the book (日本帝國的性奴隸：中國「慰安婦」的證言) is also published in 2017.

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