[China Now] China starts to have interest in comfort women

A Chinese internet media Sohu Cyber (www.sohu.com) reported about an elderly Korean woman  living at Kangmiao district, Angui province in central China, for more than 50 years. She was learned to have forcibly brought to China as a comfort woman by Japanese imperial army during the World War II, it said.

According to the media, she was living as a Chinese in the village until early 1990s when she first identified herself as a Korean. At that time, nobody around her believed what he said because she was unable to speak Korean, knew nothing about Korea and could speak only in dialectal Chinese of that region, it said.

She was not telling a lie. But, her circumstancial conditions didn’t support what she said. Finally, she was found to be a Korean woman who served as a comfort woman for Japanese army. Subsequently, a lot of informations about herself came to be revealed. 

She, identified as Lee Chon-yong or Li Tianying in Chinese, was only 15 when she was brought to China and started working as a comfort woman at a brothel for Japanese troops, located near Harbin in Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China. The media said her painful experience was the living example showing how brutal and inhuman the sex slavery was.   

Since 1992 when diplomatic relationship between South Korea and China was normalized, a lot of South Koreans have begun to rush to China. She managed to find relatives in South Korea with the help of several Korean students studying in China. But, it was in June 1994 when she was able to set foot at her hometown in South Korea with the financial help of a Korean businessman.

Despite the reunion with her relatives in Korea after more than 50 years of separation, she couldn’t exchange any talk with them due to her inability to speak Korean. But she barely remembered a traditional Korean song she learned before being brought to China. When she sang the song, all the relatives around her shed tears, the Chinese media reported.

Probably due to her convenience, she returned to China after the reunion and has been living at her home in Kangmiao district.

The Chinese media, though belated, seems to have reported the story in reflection of the growing consciousness among the Chinese people  about the matter concerning war-time comfort women. 

The Chinese media further said that the first comfort station in China opened  on Jan. 13, 1938, at a Japanese army barrack, located near Shanghai, under the name of “entertainment house.” Some 104 comfort women from Korea and Japan were forced to sexually serve Japanese soldiers there. Since then, a lot of women from other Southeast Asian nations were brought to China as comfort women, according to the media.