Course:CSIS200/2025/Twenty Two: Constructing the Subjectivity and Visibility of Chinese “Comfort Women” From a Patriarchal Perspective

Introduction

Who were "Comfort Women"?

Ten East Asian girls, sold into prostitution by their destitute families were found on Okinawa after a skirmish with Japanese soldiers.

“Comfort women” refers to women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied regions before and during World War II (1931–1945).This state-organized system subjected an estimated 400,000 women to coercion, violence, and captivity, with the largest proportion believed to have been taken from China, Japan, Korea and other parts of East and Southeast Asia. Among them, the number of victims in China is particularly large, reaching as many as 200,000.

The system operated through military-run or military-supervised brothels, initially justified by Japanese authorities as a means to regulate soldiers’ sexual access and prevent rape and venereal disease. In practice, however, it institutionalized sexual violence on an unprecedented scale and intensified both physical and psychological harm.

Countless women died as a result of brutal treatment, disease, starvation, and long-term trauma. After the war, the Japanese government for decades denied, minimized, or reframed the existence of the “comfort women” system, delaying official acknowledgment, apology, and restitution. The survivors who returned home often faced deep social stigma, silence, and erasure within their own communities, further compounding their suffering.

The Chinese version of the poster of the documentary Twenty Two.

The Documentary Twenty Two

Twenty Two is a feature-length documentary directed by Chinese filmmaker Guo Ke, focusing on the surviving victims of the Japanese military “comfort women” system during World War II. The film was released in mainland China on August 14, 2017.

Set against the backdrop of the 22 surviving “comfort women” in mainland China as of 2014, the documentary weaves together the personal stories of several elderly women and the accounts of individuals who have long cared for them. Rather than relying on narration, historical footage, or emotional manipulation, the film adopts an understated and observational approach: there is no voiceover, no archival images, and music appears only at the very end. Its aim is to record the women’s present lives as objectively and respectfully as possible.

Why Did the "Comfort Women" Exist?

Patriarchy in East Asia

Japan had institutionalised state-regulated sexual exploitation as early as the late sixteenth century through the kōshōsei (licensed prostitution system), which legitimated state control over women’s bodies and normalized their sexual subordination. This historical foundation, together with militarism, contributed to the establishment of the “Comfort Women” system. However, among these factors, one of the most significant was the deeply entrenched patriarchal structure that had long shaped East Asian societies.

In Patriarchal societies, men hold primary power and dominate roles of political leadership, moral authority, social priviliege, and control of property — including sexual behavior. Women are regarded as inferior to men at home and in society as a whole, whether seen as sexually passive or active. Their sexuality is strictly controlled, and are seeing as men’s dependents or extensions, rather than autonomous individuals.

The victimisation of “comfort women” arose from “the institutionalized everyday gender violence tolerated in patriarchal homes and enacted in the public sphere, steeped in what is called ‘masculinist sexual culture’” across colonial China, Korea, etc., and imperial Japan.

Women are exploited both at home and at bigger social structures. Specifically in colonized wartime China — as well as in other regions with similar historical trajectories — women suffered from both domestic patriarchy and colonial patriarchy, which together created the conditions that made them particularly vulnerable to systematic sexual exploitation.

Chinese survivor telling her experiences of being raped in documentary Twenty Two.

The Colonial Patriarchy

Under the licensed prostitution system and patriarchal state ideology, gender discrimination became a normalized social consciousness. With official support from the Japanese government and military, “comfort stations” were established, administered, and supplied through state power. When women were sent to these stations, they became the“property of the Japanese expire” which held absolute right over their bodies, turning them into sources of both profit and sexual pleasure for Japanese soldiers. They were subjected to brutal physical domination and reduced to the status of enslaved “sexual tools,” deprived of autonomy, dignity, and basic human rights.

"...I saw two young women hiding under a single blanket, lying there… Later, after seeing it too many times, I finally understood that these poor girls were not allowed to wear clothes even in broad daylight…" —— A Chinese refugee coerced into serving as a cook for the Japanese army

"One woman was made to serve 15 to 20 men. The soldiers held papers stamped with the company commander’s seal, took off their loincloths, and waited for their turn." —— Tadokoro Kōzō (Japanese soldier)

"A Korean girl who was with me merely questioned, ‘Why are we forced to serve 40 men a day?’ For saying that single sentence, she was punished by being made to roll on a board studded with nails, and after she died in agony, her head was cut off and displayed in public. I personally saw several comfort women suffering from severe venereal diseases being loaded onto a truck and buried alive in a pond."

"In many detachments, soldiers were not provided with condoms, so a large number of women became pregnant. But as long as they could still endure the assaults, they were forced to continue serving even while pregnant. Once they became unable to ‘serve,’ they were taken outside the trenches, tied to stakes, and used as targets for bayonet practice by new recruits."

—— A Korean Victim

Domestic Traditional Gender Order

The traditional gender order in Chinese villages also contributed to the construction of wartime sexual violence. When the long-term occupation of the villages by the Japanese military became unavoidable, villagers began offering daily supplies to the soldiers in order to preserve the village, and were even forced to meet the quotas of women demanded by the Japanese army. Who would ultimately be “sacrificed” depended on the family’s status within the village, its relationship with local authorities, and even the woman’s relationship with her husband’s family.

Yin Yulin, a survivor from Yu County in Shanxi Province, recalled: “There were many girls in the village more beautiful than I was, and many newly married young women as well. But why they chose me? I think it was because I had lost my husband. So even if I wanted to speak for myself in the village, I had no ‘social face’ (no one would support me).”

Before the Japanese invasion, the women in this village lived under the patriarchal household system in which men were the heads of the family, subject to both protection and suppression by the male-dominated lineage structure. Thus, even when we recognize the village’s predicament with historical sympathy, and acknowledge that the local gender order was not the fundamental origin of wartime sexual violence, it nonetheless played a partial role in producing the suffering experienced by the “comfort women.”

The Aftermath: Silence, Trauma and Public Gaze

Why did this history remain silent for half a century?

After the end of World War II, the “comfort women” entered a period of nearly half a century of collective silence, a phenomenon closely tied to gender discrimination in patriarchal societies. In traditional East Asian contexts, women—regarded as the “private property” of men—were confined to the domestic sphere and often rendered “invisible,” “inaudible,” and “voiceless” in the public domain.

Within a patriarchal culture that highly values female chastity, many Chinese survivors viewed their coerced experience as “comfort women” as a lifelong source of shame, and those around them shared this perception, treating their suffering as a disgrace to the entire community. As a result, both the women themselves and other villagers chose to remain silent, consciously forgetting and concealing this part of their history.

Survivors were reluctant to recall this memory
The elder told the production team that they didn't mention this memory for decades, and the young generation didn't talk about that. This was shot in 2014.	The staff said it's a shame for the victims, and they tried to ask as less as possible. This was shot in 2014.	The elder didn't want to mention this memory, and didn't like others asking about it. This was shot in 2014.

In China, the term “comfort women” first appeared in state media in 1962, when People’s Daily used it to refer to “U.S. military comfort women.” After that, the term disappeared entirely from Chinese media until 1992. Recognition of the issue in the international community followed a similarly limited trajectory.

What did the survivors of the "comfort women" experience in their later lives?

People may communicate that certain individuals are not following the norms of their social milieu through what is called “informal social control,” such as gossip, shunning, and other forms of social sanction. This involves attempts to regulate others’ sex lives and, to some extent, their sexual morality. This is exactly what the surviving victims faced for decades. Even without invoking the cultural expectations of “purity,” severe physical and psychological trauma left some women infertile, while others gave birth to children of Japanese ancestry. Combined with marital difficulties, these factors alone rendered many survivors marginalized figures in rural societies that placed heavy emphasis on lineage and reproduction.

Constructing Visibility and Subjectivity

The Renaming to Eliminate Insults

Newspaper advertisements for recruitement of comfort women for the Japanese Imperial Army in 1944.

The term “comfort woman”(“慰安妇” in Chinese, pronounced “WEI AN FU”) is not originally a Chinese expression, it was created by the Japanese military during World War II and pronounced “I AN FU” to distinguish these women from those in civilian contexts such as “prostitutes” or “courtesans”. It specifically referred to women forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers.

However, the term “comfort” itself deceptively suggests voluntariness, obscuring the fundamentally inhumane and criminal nature of the system. In addition, during the war and in its immediate aftermath, Chinese journalists often adopted traditional Chinese labels such as “camp prostitutes” or “military prostitutes.” Yet this character (prostitute, “妓” in Chinese, pronounced “JI”) placed a culturally stigmatizing mark on victims of sexual violence, becoming one of the reasons these women continued to face humiliation in the postwar years.

At the same time, survivors endured malicious treatment from people around them. During the Cultural Revolution, some were accused of having “married Japanese soldiers” and were derisively called “Japanese whores”.

In 1996, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted a report by Radhika Coomaraswamy, Report on Military Sexual Slavery in Wartime, which replaced the derogatory term “comfort women” with the designation “military sexual slaves”. Strictly speaking, the suffering of these women is more accurately conveyed through this terminology: “victims who were forced into sexual slavery during World War II”.

From Visibility to Subjectivity

Beginning in 1996, reports on “comfort women” in mainland China began to rise in frequency, reaching a notable peak around 2007 and increasing sharply after 2012. As their stories were gradually uncovered, public visibility of this group slowly emerged. However, unlike South Korea, Japan, and China's Taiwan, although Chinese mainland media coverage expanded rapidly and seemed to have “entered domestic discourse,” the survivors were more often framed as an "abstract", a nationalistic symbol situated within diplomatic confrontation and grand historical narratives.

Thus, “visibility,” while important and certainly a significant step forward, is not sufficient. More crucial is the construction of these women’s subjectivity.

In the documentary Twenty Two, director Guo Ke focuses primarily on the women’s present living conditions and psychological states rather than reconstructing history or accusing past atrocities. This form of representation is relatively new among audiovisual works on the subject. “memory is not a matter of reproduction but of construction”, how we depict the “comfort women” determines how we construct their social image. Treating them merely as sources of “historical evidence” or as objects of sympathy is necessary but insufficient. To reconstruct their subjectivity, beyond the established truth of historical violence, there remain many questions worth documenting: how their identities shifted—from survivors, victims, and silent witnesses to accusers; how their environments and psychologies adapted; why they remained silent; and why they eventually chose to speak? Foreign domination constitutes the primary mechanism of oppression, while patriarchy functions as a subordinated yet collaborative mechanism incorporated under the power of external aggression. We should not only record the occurrence of historical events, as many reports and cultural works do, but also document their inner worlds as independent subjects. This constitutes a resistance to being merely “narrated” and challenges a document-centered approach to history.

Interact with the elderly, showing genuine concern
The director Guo Ke visited Wei Shaolan in 2015.	Li Meijin hosted the working group and served them zongzi. The photograph was taken in June, 2014.	Li Meijin is viewing the contents with the stuff. The photo was taken in June, 2014.

At times, moving beyond grand and overwhelming narratives of suffering to interrogate the mechanisms behind that suffering—such as the long-term trauma produced by patriarchal structures—offers greater care and respect to individuals. This is a social reconstruction that transforms them from “victims” into independent persons endowed with subjectivity.

About the Author

My name is Mingxi Hang, and I’m a third-year exchange student from Renmin University of China. I double major in Communication and Data Management. I was always curious about sexuality studies, and that’s why I took CSIS_200 this year.

Also, I would like to mention my relationship with this specific topic. I was born and raised in Beijing, the capital and political center of our country. And I’ve always been passionate about our history and about what we’ve experienced unjustly. Specifically, as a woman, I feel that the history of comfort women has not been fully addressed. Within collective memory in my country, “comfort women” often appear as symbols of national trauma, invoked to condemn the cruelty of war within the framework of nationalism. Yet in this framing, something essential is missing: the women’s subjectivity has been dissolved. The cultural construction of “comfort women” equates them almost exclusively with their suffering. Compared to other countries that have many victims, we still need to do something to fully address this issue.

*Although “sex slaves” would be a more accurate term, the phrase “comfort women” is more widely recognized and remains the official translation used in many scholarly and artistic works. Therefore, this project continues to use “comfort women” to refer to this group.