“Bronze of Iris Chang in Nanjing Massacre Memorial” by x li, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
By Libby Nemitz
Every year on December 13, the bustling city of Nanjing, located in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province, comes to a standstill. Cars stop and honk. Pedestrian traffic freezes. The national flag flutters at half-mast. This vibrant provincial capital, home to roughly nine million people, holds a significant place in Chinese history. Once the capital of China during various dynastic eras and briefly in the Republican period during the early twentieth century, Nanjing is now a thriving hub of culture, commerce, research, and politics. Yet, on this solemn day, the city’s relentless pace slows, if only for a few minutes; it’s enough to hold breath.
It is enough to allow a nation to grieve.
The date marks a tragic period in Chinese history and the World War II era, when invading Japanese troops seized the city of Nanjing in the morning hours of December 13, 1937. With the city in their grip, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) proceeded to wage a terror campaign on the city’s residents, murdering around 300,000 civilians, carrying out indiscriminate torture on women and children, staging killing contests that included the slaughter of infants, beheading captured prisoners, and destroying private property. The rampage was to such a shocking scale that it resulted in the mass depopulation of the city’s native residents—many, if not most, of the Nanjingese of today are composed of families who moved from other cities after WWII.
Among the IJA’s most notorious and heinous crimes were the mass rape and mutilation of Chinese women, including young female children and elderly women. Scholars estimate that Japanese soldiers committed around 20,000 to 80,000 cases of rape and mutilation, all within the span of six weeks. The brutality in Nanjing and greater China left an indelible impression on the nation’s contemporary politics and society. Its legacy stays with the Chinese people today.
A Forgotten Holocaust
The Nanjing Massacre or Rape of Nanjing (Nanking, as it is often romanized) constituted one of the most brutal examples of wartime rape in history. Yet, it is almost entirely absent from Western textbooks. Such a conspicuous gap in the Western archive spurred Chinese and Taiwanese-American author Iris Chang (張純如), who was instrumental in exposing Imperial Japan’s war crimes, to aptly dub the massacre “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.” Chang herself was reportedly deeply disturbed by the subject matter of her research, which worsened her deteriorating mental health and led to her decision to take her own life at age 36. For this reason, Chang is sometimes thought to be the massacre’s final victim.
Despite Chang’s activism, it is hardly the first time that women’s experiences during war have failed to grace the pages of history. During World War II alone, the IJA carried out similar atrocities against women, girls, and other civilians in conquered Asian nations including Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Japanese-colonized Taiwan, and the occupied Korean Peninsula. In the wake of the massacre, the IJA expanded their massive sexual slavery operation in hopes that the controlled and systematic supply of female bodies would preclude a repeat of the civilian carnage in Nanjing.
The female victims of the IJA’s sexual slavery were known euphemistically as “comfort women,” a seemingly “soft and cuddly name” that betrayed the day-to-day horrors of the victims. Women and young girls had no choice but to endure hours and even days of unremitting rape and physical violence in IJA military units and brothels. Many did not survive. When they did, they often returned to their villages with severe trauma, only to confront harsh stigma and shame in their native communities.
“They Were ‘Only Asian Comfort Women’”
For decades after the end of WWII, former “comfort women” suffered in silence. Many “comfort women” died in the military brothels, took their own lives, or felt too intimidated to come forward; due to these factors, few people even knew of their existence. Only in 1991 did the first survivor and Korean activist Kim Hak-sun (김학순) come forward to tell her story. Moved by a burgeoning women’s rights movement in South Korea in the 1990s, Kim Hak-sun came forward to testify publicly about the crimes the IJA committed against women and civilians during WWII. Kim Hak-sun campaigned for justice all her life, inspiring countless other women to come forward with their stories before she passed away in 1997. To this day, almost a century later, Kim Hak-sun has not yet received justice. Her court case is still ongoing.
Jan Ruff O’Herne was one of the many women inspired by Kim Hak-sun’s activism. In 1992, she came forward to tell her own story after watching the testimony of Korean comfort women on television. The child of Dutch parents in Dutch-colonized Indonesia, Ruff O’Herne was forced to perform hard labor in a concentration camp before being taken to a brothel by Japanese forces during Japan’s occupation of Java. For years, Ruff O’Herne never spoke of her ordeal until she testified at the Tokyo Tribunal, later addressing the U.S. Congress in 2007. Reflecting back on the experience, she said, “When I spoke out in Tokyo, the whole world was there, wanting to know the truth. They weren’t taking that much notice before, because they were ‘only Asian comfort women.’ It’s terrible to say, but that’s the truth.” Ruff O’Herne was one of the only European “comfort women” of WWII and the first European survivor to speak publicly about IJA abuses. As a girl, she wished to become a Catholic nun—one of many childhood dreams shattered by war.
“The Last Girl in the World with a Story Like Mine”
To this day, Japanese war apologism and Nanjing Massacre denial continue to plague trilateral relations between Japan, China, and South Korea. Many believe that Japan’s current democratic government never sufficiently apologized for the nation’s war crimes. Critics point out that the country failed to undergo a comprehensive reckoning of its imperial past akin to Germany’s thorough “denazification” process in the aftermath of WWII. In 2018, the mayor of Osaka in Japan’s Osaka Prefecture unilaterally withdrew from a 61-year-old “sister city” relationship with San Francisco to protest the installation of San Francisco’s “comfort women” memorial statue. Controversies over “comfort women” statues, Japanese history textbooks, and Japanese officials’ repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine—the final resting place of some 1,000 WWII war criminals—continue to inflame tensions in East Asia. Conservatives and Imperial Japanese apologists in Japan insist that “comfort women” were voluntary prostitutes.
Ongoing efforts to secure justice for “comfort women” and other wartime rape victims— many of whom are aging and passing away—underscore the unending battle to quell stigma toward survivors of gender-based violence and protect the rights of women, particularly in times of conflict. But the issue of wartime sexual violence is hardly unique to Asia. The world abounds with other historical and contemporary examples of wartime violence against women, including the systematic rape of tens of thousands of Bosniak women in “rape camps” during the Bosnian War, the assault of Tutsi women during the Rwandan genocide, and crimes against Ukrainian women in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian War, among many other devastating cases. Today, the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sudan, where the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have routinely used rape as a weapon of war, serves as one of the latest and most painful reminders of the need to protect women’s safety in war zones.
In Sudan, the RSF and allied militias have continued to launch ethnically motivated attacks against the country’s African, non-Arab populations, including the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa. Millions have been displaced due to the fighting, which has created a widespread humanitarian catastrophe that is growing increasingly dire. “The sheer scale of sexual violence we have documented in Sudan is staggering," said Mohamed Chande Othman, the chair of a U.N. panel that has compiled an 80-page report on the deteriorating situation. The mass sexual violence and civilian killings in Sudan today are reminiscent of the Darfur genocide of 2003, during which Janjaweed militias carried out brutal violence against minorities as a part of a broader ethnic cleansing campaign. An estimated 200,000 civilians were killed within a two-year span in Darfur, and around two million were forcibly displaced.
Nadia Murad, Iraqi-born Yazidi activist and survivor of sexual slavery at the hands of the Islamic State (IS), once said, “When genocide is committed, it must be seen. People must look at it with open eyes, not minimize its impact.” Accordingly, the world must see and recognize the plight of Sudanese women and countless other women and girls trapped in war.
Women are half of humanity. Activists like Kim Hak-Sun, Iris Chang, Jan Ruff O’Herne, Nadia Murad, and countless others remind us that despite strides in women’s rights worldwide, gender-based violence and sexual slavery persist in a myriad of evil forms—wartime rape, human trafficking, honor killings, child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM). World governments must take greater measures to protect women and girls, both in and out of conflict zones, and hold those who use rape as a weapon of war accountable. We must not allow the assault of one more woman to become part of world history.
“I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine,” Murad poignantly writes in her memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State.
Statues of Peace, Stories of Pain
Central Seoul, South Korea — The Girl sits directly opposite the Japanese embassy, a presence both peaceful and haunting. Day and night, she stares at the closed doors of the embassy with an inexpressive gaze, never looking away. Her hair is shorn short and uneven, representing the abrupt end of countless childhoods. Her resolute face and clenched fists reflect the determination of the many women who struggled for justice and never received it. Her feet are bare; her soles do not touch the ground. Uprooted from her native homeland, her body is in a state of perpetual waiting.
Waiting for what, one wonders. For justice? Recognition? Compensation? All of the above?
She could be eight years old, ten years old. Eleven. Thirteen. She has no single name but rather embodies the names of thousands of stolen girls and women. The Girl, better known as the Statue of Peace, is specifically dedicated to Korean “comfort women” during WWII. However, every survivor of gender-based violence around the world can see a piece of themselves in her. She represents the infinite preciousness of global girlhood and the worldwide need to protect women’s lives and freedom.
Today, a similar statue is located outside Shanghai Normal University. The statue features the same iconic figure, but a new addition sits beside her. A second girl, a friend, represents the Chinese victims of WWII. Beside them, an empty chair waits both in honor of the generation of girls lost and in invitation for the next generation to take a seat, sit beside them, and share their pain.
Perhaps sitting together, they will not be so lonely anymore.
This blog reflects the author's opinions and does not necessarily represent the views of the Human Rights Program or the University of Minnesota.
Libby Nemitz (CLA '26) is a junior studying Global Studies and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) with an emphasis on Human Rights and Justice. She was one of the inaugural members of the Human Rights Program Undergraduate Working Group and currently serves as an editor of 'Human Writes.' Her interests include women's and children's rights, adoptee rights, and political affairs in Asia.