Lei Guiying is slight and stooped with age. She is poor and illiterate. But the 79-year-old Chinese peasant says she knows that Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, was wrong this month to deny that the Imperial Army coerced women into army-run brothels during the Second World War.

She was barely 13 when she was raped by a Japanese soldier and, for the next two years, forced to work in a Japanese-run brothel on the edge of the southern city of Nanjing.

In her first interview with a foreign newspaper, Ms Lei says that she is ready, if the Chinese authorities will support her, to file a case against the Japanese Government for its wartime abuses. She knows nothing of a private fund created in 1995 by the Japanese Government that provided a way to support former sex slaves without offering official compensation and which expires today. But she echoes the views of other “comfort women” who have rejected the payments, demanding formal government compensation and an apology approved by the Japanese parliament.

For more than 60 years Ms Lei concealed her history. She was too ashamed to tell her husband. When her son, adopted in 1957 at nine months old, heard rumours two years ago of her past, she chastised him for paying heed to gossip.

Mr Abe sparked a furore when he said there was no evidence to show that the “comfort women” were coerced, backtracking from a government admission that the Japanese military had forced women to work in brothels.

This week the nationalist Prime Minister offered an apology to women who suffered in the brothels but was careful not to bow to international pressure to acknowledge that Tokyo forced as many as 200,000 women into prostitution.

Ms Lei’s father died when she was 7, her mother was abducted to become a concubine and she found herself an orphan, roaming the streets with her brother to scavenge for food. When the Japanese took her city in the infamous Rape of Nanking (now Nanjing) in late 1937, she was 9. She remembers how young women dug tunnels to hide from the invaders and how she begged for food at a “comfort house” run by a Japanese businessman.

On one side of the street was a military brothel with Japanese women. She found a home opposite with the businessman, working as a nursemaid to his toddler son. One day three Japanese soldiers came and dragged her away. They bayoneted her in the leg and head. She still limps.

“Even before my wounds were healed, they raped me. Then they made me serve ‘clients’ for two years.” She managed to escape to her mother’s new home.

Ms Lei retains from that time a jar of potassium permanganate. “I liked the way the little pieces shone in the light, so I collected this up when some spilt out of a tin.”

Su Zhiliang, a historian at Shanghai Normal University, says that the jar is important evidence. Since the 1949 Communist takeover, the chemical has been available only as a fine crystal, while Ms Lei has a jar filled with chunks. He said: “We know that the women in Japanese brothels used this as a disinfectant.” Mr Su added that despite their poverty not a single Chinese woman had applied for money from the Japanese fund and only about 100 had come forward to acknowledge working in the brothels. Of the 46 still alive, most prefer to retain their anonymity.

Ms Lei recounts her tale quietly. Tears run down her cheeks. Her voice rises: “How could I have children? I was just a child and I was too small. So after that thing happened, of course I never had a child.”

Violation

50,000
victorious Japanese troops marched on Nanking 6 weeks of carnage

300,000
killed by Japanese troops in Nanking, many of them women and children

1/3
of the city’s population died

20,000+
women raped. Japanese historians dispute these figures

Source: Princeton University, China Daily

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