More than 100 images of Chinese women who were abused by Japanese troops highlight photographer Chen Qinggang's latest book on the topic. Deng Zhangyu reports.

Photographer Chen Qinggang, 48, has been looking for survivors among China's "comfort women" for a decade at least. The women, described as such, were forced into sex slavery by the occupational Japanese troops during World War II.

Chen has been on a mission to show the younger generations of Chinese the pain that these women endured for years. His latest book Memoirs of Chinese Comfort Women has more than 100 photographs of elderly women who were abused by the Japanese military, with about 150,000 words to narrate the victims' stories during the war.

It's Chen's third book on the subject of "comfort women". The first two were published in 2004 and 2007.

Although Chen has spent some 12 years looking for them in China, he met less than 50 such women, a small fraction of the 200,000 that historians estimate were enslaved.

"Most Chinese comfort women don't dare to go public. They keep their trauma to themselves forever. Some have passed away with their sufferings untold," he says.

For his latest book, Chen visited eight provinces including Hainan, Shanxi, Hunan and Hebei, where most of the women he interviewed are in their 80s. While some have no children, others have lived alone since fleeing sexual bondage or being freed from it. A few have adopted families.

The lives of these women are far from comfortable. Other than the emotional scars that will likely never heal, many of them live amid poverty and disease.

Abducted by Japanese soldiers when they were young, the "comfort women" were coerced to work in Japanese military brothels. Some of them were as young as 13 when they were picked up, Chen was told.

After a period of torture that ranged from a few months to years, some fell sick, some were abandoned, and others ran away to hide in the mountains until the Japanese troops left.

Chen says many survivors changed their names and moved to villages far away from their original homes to avoid being discriminated against by society. Chen may have been the first person in whom many of them confided.

"When they shared their miseries with me, it was also the first time that many such families had heard of their stories. It was too private to tell," says Chen, who usually paid families several visits before the elderly women opened up to him.

The victims of the atrocities await a sincere apology from the Japanese government, he says. In recent years, some of Chen's interviewees have passed away. In some ways, Chen's book has also attempted to document history.

The book now can be purchased on Chinese online shops such as Dangdang and Jingdong, priced at 39 yuan ($6.40). The English and Japanese versions are still in translation and are likely to be available overseas by year-end, according to Gao Yang, chief editor of China Photography Publishing House.

Contact the writer at dengzhangyu@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 08/27/2014 page19)