Comfort Women Museum and Archives of China

August 14th, 1944, captured comfort women in Myitkyina. Photo credit - Wikipedia

That is the second museum and archive in China and the fourth worldwide, dedicated to exhibiting, researching, and documenting the comfort women issue, serving as a living testimony of the biggest sexual war crime ever happened in history. The first archives opened in Japan in 2005, the second in South Korea, and the third in Nanjing, China.

The term Comfort Women is related to more than 200,000 girls and women from China, New Guinea, Burma, the Philippines, and Korea, who before and during WW2, were abducted from their homes, held in captivity at front-line brothels by the Japanese army, forcing them into sexual slavery. They lived in inhuman conditions, suffered violence and rape daily.

The museum opened on October 22nd, 2016, the same day a Comfort Women statue was unveiled on the Shanghai Normal University grounds.

In the museum, there are 48 display boards and 80 exhibits that include original items and artifacts donated by the victims and their families, some were collected from brothel stations.

The research center holds written and recorded testimonials of Chinese comfort women and documents on the 158 comfort stations in Shanghai and 67 stations in southern Hainan Province. Recent researches show that there were 200,000 comfort women in China only.

Both the museum and the statue are the effort of Su Zhiliang, a professor at Shanghai Normal University and head of research on the issue of comfort women.

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The second floor of the Eastern Division Yuen building in Shanghai Normal University, 100 Guilin Rd. Shanghai, China, 200234

 

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Between 1931 and the end of WW2, hundreds of thousands of girls and women were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. They were called euphemistically “comfort women.” The Japanese Administrations continued to deny the truth of this massive crime against humanity, but the women who survived the horror had the courage to reveal it to the world. In 2015, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors decided to build a memorial to the “Comfort Women” to educate the community about stopping human trafficking of women and girls. The memorial was unveiled on September 22nd, 2017. A year after the memorial dedication, San Francisco’s sister city, Osaka, ended their 60 years sister-city relationship due to the lack of acceptance of the accusation of Japan in this massive crime. The memorial of a 10-feet tall bronze statue, also known as the Column of Strength statue, made by Steven Whyte, was installed in 2017 to honor these women, their strength, and their courage to come forward and share their stories. The statue depicts three girls standing back to back holding hands. Each represents a country from which came the highest numbers of victims: China, Korea, and The Philippines. At a distance stands a bronze figure of an older woman watching the girls. This woman represents Kim Hak-Sun – a Korean human rights activist who was the first ‘comfort woman’ to tell her story in public. On August 16th, 2019, a smaller version of this statue was unveiled in Seoul’s Mt. Namsan, South Korea. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
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