SHANGHAI -- A comfort women museum in Shanghai opened to the public on Saturday, displaying various items donated by researchers and survivors to expose the notorious crimes of Japanese troops during World War II (WWII).
The museum, located at Shanghai Normal University, has displayed items such as the condoms belonging to Japanese soldiers during WWII, which researchers obtained when surveying the sites of comfort women stations of Japanese troops.
The items also include photos, testimonies of victims, passports of victims who went to Japan to file lawsuits, and the indictments from the first group of victims from the Chinese mainland to ask for compensation from Japan.
Chen Liancun, a 90-year-old victim from south China's Hainan province, and an 88-year-old survivor from the Republic of Korea (ROK) attended the opening of the museum.
Chen was raped by three Japanese soldiers when she, then 13 years old, was tending cattle on a hill. Three years later, she was captured along with other girls in nearby villages by Japanese troops to serve as comfort women in Baoting County, Hainan.
"I will not forget the atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers. I hope justice shall be served and demand an apology and compensation from Japan," she said.
"The oral testimonies and abundant historical materials and evidence all prove that the comfort women system was a national crime committed by Japan during wartime and was anti-humanitarian," said Su Zhiliang, director of the comfort women research center at the university.
Some 400,000 women in Asia were forced to serve as comfort women for the Japanese army during WWII, nearly half of whom were Chinese, according to Su.
Su said there are only 19 surviving comfort women on the Chinese mainland.
NGOs from countries including China, the ROK and Indonesia are working together to nominate documentation about comfort women for inclusion on the Memory of the World Register, established by UNESCO in the 1990s to preserve the world's most important documents.
