China-Japan friction saves 'comfort women' houses

Several dilapidated old buildings in Nanjing were finally recognized as being of city-level historical heritage early last month, one month before their scheduled demolishing.

Historians lobbied the city government for 11 years to protect the buildings. But it was the friction between China and Japan over China's Diaoyu Islands, 1,000 miles east of Nanjing in the East China Sea, that really changed the matter overnight.

You cannot find No 2 and No18 on Liji Lane in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, in any online maps or GPS system. But the seven shabby, three-storey brick buildings used to be the largest "comfort women" houses in East Asia from 1939 to 1945 that most Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in Nanjing knew well. The soldiers killed 300,000 civilians in the first winter of their occupation of the former capital of China.

Researchers from Tokyo, Nanjing and Shanghai on comfort women - enforced sex slaves for the Japanese army in World War II - and several comfort women survivors from China and South Korea gathered at the site in 2003 to persuade the city government to save the buildings, believed to be the scenes of hundreds of women forced to provide sex services for the Japanese invading army over five years.

But the righteous voices fell on deaf ears of the local officials, who urged the appealers to apply for a city-level historical-heritage title for the buildings. Or, the government could not set aside special funds to repair and protect the buildings that had been deserted as workers' residential houses of a state-owned enterprise.

One of the researchers, Rumiko Nishino, a Japanese writer and the museum director of Women's Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo, submitted applications to the Nanjing authority later, who, however, said after a long time that they did not receive any qualified applications.

The Japanese army set up more than 40 comfort women houses in Nanjing. Only four are left today after the others were demolished to give way to commercial buildings and parking lots.

The one on Liji Lane is the only one that appears in detailed historical records of various sources and a number of old photos found in China and Japan. It had been revisited several times by comfort women survivors after the war.

The historians from Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing played key roles in persuading the city government to postpone transfer of the land to property developers time and time again. The price of one square-meter of residential houses around the old buildings now is nearly 20,000 yuan ($3,300), and commercial property prices are almost 10 times that high.

In 2012, the scholars' efforts almost paid off. The Baixia district government agreed to make a museum out of the buildings. But the Baidxia district merged into Qinhuai district one year later. And no officials spoke out to implement the old plan made by a former district government that no longer existed.

Unexpectedly, the Qinhuai district government took the initiative to invite experts to attend a meeting three months ago, discussing the possibility of recognizing No 2 and No 18 of Liji Lane as a historical heritage.

The city government declared on June 7 that the buildings had been given the title. The spokesman of the city's cultural relics protection administration said the title is usually given collectively to several sites every few years, and "we treat the No 2 and No 18 of Liji Lane as a special case this time" and give it the title quickly through special channels.

What turned the fate of the buildings from a problem that few officials wanted to handle to such a special case was the central authority's change of attitude.

On June 10, the spokeswoman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement that the Chinese government would send an application to UNESCO to list relevant files of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and comfort women as part of the organization's Memory of the World program. The program has been collecting important world documents relating to world heritage since 1992. UNESCO said it has received China's application but that no decision will be made until 2015.

This is one of a series of countermeasures taken by the Chinese government against Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's repeated denials of Japan's war history and right-wing provocations of revising Japan's pacifist Constitution and challenging China's sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands.

The question is, What if Abe has not behaved so badly? Probably the old houses of Liji Lane in Nanjing would follow the same fate as dozens of other comfort women houses in the city and in Shanghai that had disappeared. According to a survey of Su Zhiliang, a researcher on comfort women at the Shanghai Normal University and China Comfort Women Issue Research Center (CCWIRC), there were only 57 comfort women survivors left on the Chinese mainland by the year 2000, and all lived in very difficult conditions.

CCWIRC started providing each survivor 100 yuan ($16) subsistence allowance each month from 2001. But the donations they receive are so meager. The research center only obtained one donation of 200 yuan, in the first eight years of its operation from 1993 to 2001, from a resident in Nanjing, who said he would like to help a 92-year-old survivor Zhu Qiaomei, who died three years later in a village in Shanxi.

Since the comfort women survivors from Shanxi filed a lawsuit in Tokyo court in 1995 for the first time, other survivors from Shanxi, Hainan and Taiwan have also taken legal actions demanding reparations from the Japanese government.

But without the Chinese government's support, these grassroots reparation allegations mostly ended with the plaintiffs losing. The excuses given by the Japanese courts included statues of limitation, "problem of exclusion", individuals not being an entity under international laws."

The Chinese government should do more to help preserve the memory of war history to encourage Chinese nationals to draw lessons from history.

Huang Yiming and Cang Wei contributed to this story.