A picture album that documents oral testimony from 90 survivors of the Japanese military's World War II "comfort women" system of sex slavery was released in Beijing Saturday.
The Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing released the album, which contains over 500 pictures as well as more than 100,000 words of oral history provided by the largest number of survivors of any such remembrance project.
Surviving victims from countries including China, S Korea and ROK through the pictures and oral histories retell their tragic experiences and the crimes against humanity committed by Japanese troops during WWII, said the report.
The identities of about 20 survivors were disclosed to the public for the first time by the album, as the result of author Li Xiaofang's research over years. There are only 16 surviving Chinese comfort women, according to Beijing Times.
Besides the album, the museum has uploaded the stories of the 90 women to its official WeChat account, and also created a section of its website dedicated to the project, said the report.
Some 400,000 women across Asia were forced to serve as comfort women for the Japanese army during WWII, nearly half of whom were Chinese, Su Zhiliang, director of a research center on comfort women under the Humanities and Communication College of Shanghai Normal University was quoted as saying by the Xinhua News Agency in October.
He Rumei, born in 1931, one of the surviving comfort women from Northwest China's Shanxi Province, was raped by Japanese army officers for three days at the age of 13, according to the Beijing Times.
After being rescued by villagers, she suffered from discrimination and no one in her community would marry her. She eventually got married to a disabled man who lived far away from her home village.
After learning about her tragic past, the husband did not despise her but encouraged her to step forward to expose the crimes that were committed against her.
