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At 89, Zhang still haunted by horrors of war
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AT 89, Zhang Xiantu still wakes up in the middle of the night, seized with horror and soaked in sweat.
“In my dreams, I am taken away by the Japanese soldiers again,” said Zhang, whose deteriorating health has her confined to bed in her home in north China’s Shanxi Province.
In a recent interview with Xinhua news agency about her suffering in the hands of the invading Japanese soldiers, Zhang said the nightmare had haunted her for more than seven decades.
Zhang was 16 and had been married for just a few months when a group of Japanese soldiers broke in and looted her house of all food, bedding and cattle on the second day of the Chinese lunar new year in 1942.
Zhang was held at a Japanese war camp, where she said she was raped by at least 20 Japanese soldiers every day.
After about three weeks, her family paid a ransom for her release.
She has since been fighting chronic gynecological diseases and psychological scarring.
She cannot bear to spend the night alone, so her son has to stay at her bedside.
Zhang sued the Japanese government in 1998, demanding a public apology and proper compensation. Of all the 16 former so-called “comfort women” in the province’s Yuxian County, only Zhang is still alive.
She said she is now fighting for justice on behalf of all these victims.
Li Xiumei was among the first comfort women to sue the Japanese government in 1995. But up until her death in April, she had not received the apology she demanded.
“She was only 14 when she was taken as a sex slave,” said Li’s daughter-in-law Zhao Zhuangxiang.
“Her mother committed suicide out of guilt and grief.”
Thousands of Asian women were forced into sexual enslavement by the Japanese soldiers during the World War II, including an estimated 200,000 Chinese.
In Shanxi Province alone, 126 former “comfort women” are on record.
Zhang Shuangbing, a former primary school teacher, has made several visits to these women over three decades, taking down their accounts and helping them file lawsuits.
“Twenty percent of the women were too ill to bear a child. At least 60 percent were divorced and unprovided for,” he said.
Zhang has compiled his findings into a book entitled “Women in Japanese Wartime Camps.”
On September 18, 1931, Japanese troops blew up a section of the railway under their control near Mukden (now Shenyang), and accused Chinese troops of sabotage as a pretext for attack. They bombarded a barracks the same evening, beginning a large-scale armed invasion of northeast China.
The “9.18 Incident,” or “Mukden Incident,” was followed by Japan’s full-scale invasion of China and the rest of Asia, triggering China’s 14-year war against Japanese aggression.
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