#zhang schuangbing

[boricuacherry-blog]

For the past 70 years, Liu Fenghai has had her sleep interrupted countless times by the same nightmare.

"I dreamed about Japanese soldiers with sabers on their backs hunting me like an animal," Lui, from China's Shanghai province, said.

Liu was sexually assaulted when she was just 16 and her limp, lifeless body left for dead in a ravine by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers. She managed to summon what was left of her energy and crawled back home. The ordeal left her bed bound and unable to walk for over a month.

Comfort women were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II. More than 100 were from Shanghai and those still alive today are still waiting for an official apology from Japan.

On June 13, 1943, Hao Yuelian, who was 15 at the time, was raped by two Japanese soldiers in her own home while her parents were out.

Later that same day, beaten, bruised and shaken from her earlier encounter with the soldiers, she was abducted and put to work in a military brothel to provide sexual services to the Japanese Army. She was kept tied up and raped day and night.

"The Japanese government must acknowledge the crime and apologize. I must live and wait for the day to come," Hao said.

Hao was left infertile due to her ordeal. Hers is not an isolated case. "Nearly one-sixth of the comfort women I visited were infertile because of what they were put through," said Zhang Schuangbing, who set out to interview surviving victims.

Those that struggled, or tried to escape, were murdered, while others committed suicide, and some simply tried to forget what had happened and refused to talk about it.

"I spoke to nearly 130 women in Shanghai, but there were more women in the province who had been forced into sex slavery during the war. I did not get the chance to meet them all," Zhang said.

Some 400,000 women in Asia, half of whom were Chinese, were forced to serve as comfort women during World War II, according to Su Zhiliang, director of the comfort women research center at Shanghai Normal University.

On behalf of the women victims in Shanghai, Zhang submitted a letter of complaint to the Japanese government in 1992. The Supreme Court in Japan threw out the lawsuit in 2007. The three groups of comfort women who tried to sue the Japanese government all passed away without receiving an apology or compensation.