Japanese military brothel listed as historic site

A former Japanese military brothel in downtown Nanjing has been listed as a protected historic site, the municipal government's official Weibo account said.

The decision was made on June 9, according to the account on Wednesday. Seven buildings in Liji Alley in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, were sites of Japanese-run "comfort women" stations, the largest of their kind in Asia.

Jing Shenghong, a history professor with Nanjing Normal University, said Japanese troops ran more than 40 such stations in the city during World War II.

In Liji Alley, over 200 "comfort women" from Japan, the Korean Peninsula and China were forced to work for Japanese soldiers in the buildings. "I hope the buildings can be better protected and built into a museum for the world to remember these crimes of war," Jing said.

Historians estimate that 200,000 women were forced into sexual servitude by Japanese forces during the war.

Last week, UNESCO accepted China's application to list documents relating to the Nanjing Massacre and the enslaving of wartime prostitutes on the Memory of the World Register.