China publishes videos on sufferings of wartime sex slaves

Former Chinese "comfort woman" Zhang Xiantu looks through the window of her house in Xiyan Town, Shanxi Province, China, July 18, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

BEIJING - China's State Archives Administration (SAA) plans to release videos documenting the suffering of sex slaves at the hand of the Japanese military over 70 years ago.

The eight-part video series will be released on the SAA's website, one per day, beginning exactly 70 years after Hirohito announced Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945.

Japan invaded northeast China in September 1931, with a full-scale invasion on July 7, 1937. Around 35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed or injured in the war which followed.

An estimated 200,000 women, euphemistically known as "comfort women", were forced into sexual servitude by Japanese troops.

Only a handful are still alive, and few have publicly admitted to having been comfort women. Thousands took their secret to the grave without receiving any apology or compensation from Japan.

"These horrific, institutionalized acts of violence committed by Japanese invaders, rarely seen in the history of human civilization, constitute state crimes and gross violation of the human rights of the victimized women. They are some of the most painful chapters in the annals of history," the SAA said in a preface to the video archives.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Friday statement to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II made no direct reference to the "comfort women".

The first in the video series quotes a Japanese war criminal Ebato Tsuyoshi as saying that a woman was forced to become the comfort woman of a Japanese sergeant during the invasion of the Shandong peninsula.

The sergeant killed her when food became scarce and ate her flesh which he shared with his squadron after telling them that it was regular meat from their battalion headquarters, Tsuyoshi said.