Wan Aihua has been haunted by her nightmares of being raped by Japanese intruders in China during the World War II for six decades. As time passed by, the bitter memories have failed to fall into oblivion. They have been relived since early this year, which is the 60th anniversary of the Chinese people's victory in the anti-Japanese war.
Though actually Wan was not among the 200,000-plus Chinese women who served as sex slaves, or comfort women (the euphemism used by Japanese aggressors during the WWII), she was China's first victim of sexual violence in the war, who has bravely stood up to denounce and lodge a lawsuit against Japanese atrocities.
Among the comfort women, most war survivors have been living in anonymity and have felt reluctant to refer to their miserable experiences. Some of them have died in solitude.
Wan, however, has kept asking for justice from the Japanese for the wartime sex slaves and herself over the past 13 years.
In an exclusive interview with Xinhua, Wan, now aged 77, said the mention of the word Japan at any time and any place will remind her suffering 60 years ago.
"They (the Japanese intruders) were so inhuman," Wan sighed in memory of miseries and humiliations.
FOREVER BITTERNESS
Born in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Wan Aihua was sold by a human trafficker to Yuxian County of Shanxi Province, also in the northern part of the country, when she was a little girl.
In the 1930s-40s, after Japanese troops occupied Shanxi, they killed villagers, burned down houses and raped local women. Wan was actively dedicated to helping people in resistance against the aggressors, making shoes for Chinese soldiers and making publicity for anti-Japanese campaigns.
Unfortunately, she was caught by a cluster of the Japanese aggressors in June 1943 when she was only 15 years old and served as the head of a village women committee.
"In the daytime, they hanged me on a tree for torture, attempting to force me to give away resistant activists in our village; At nights, they put me into a cave and raped me in a gang like beasts," Wan said, her lips and hands shivering.
She escaped and was caught and put into hell by the enemies several times until the beginning of 1944, when the Japanese cast her, unconscious from torture, into a local river. She was rescued by some villagers, deformed with fractures in her thighs and ribs and with her waist sinking into her pelvis and her neck into her torso.
Once a pretty, lively girl, Wan is was disfigured and has had nightmares all of her life.
LIFE-LONG LONELINESS
Her disability almost deprived Wan of her ability to take care of herself. Under the help of the villagers, she adopted a little girl and they began to depend on each other for survival.
Having lied in bed for three years, Wan served as a maid and did some needlework to make a living. When her adopted daughter became a teenager, Wan began to support her schooling.
"Though I stayed at school for several years, the real time for studying summed up to less than 12 months," said Wan's adopted daughter, now in her 60s. "Usually, I went to school in the morning and begged for food on afternoons."
Wan's miserable experiences in hands of the Japanese intruders cast an implacable shadow over her whole life, which made her reject some men who intended to take care of her. She never married.
In 2002, the provincial charity agency of Shanxi included Wan in the list of people in need of special aid.
DEMANDING JUSTICE
In December 1992, the United Nations Human Rights held an international hearing for female war victims in Japan. Wan Aihua, as a representative from the Chinese mainland, denounced at the hearing the atrocities committed by the Japanese aggressors against her, pointing at the scars on her body and fainting several times in grief.
At the hearing, a Japanese woman in her 70s, said to Wan, "Many of us Japanese only know the A-bomb havoc in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only after hearing your stories have I known that we Japanese perpetrated so much wrongdoing in your country."
"This deserves a page in Japanese history books, which have always turned a blind eye toward our aggression against China and other Asian countries. Your words should be available for the public in Japan and help the next generation of our nation get to know the historical facts," the old Japanese woman added.
Since then, Wan Aihua, together with a dozen or so other surviving comfort women from Shanxi, have lodged suits with Japanese courts for an official apology and financial compensation from the Japanese Government.
Last March, the supreme court of Tokyo turned down the case of Wan and her peers.
"I am 77 years old. I'm afraid I will not live to see the day when we win the lawsuit," Wan said. "But my daughter will keep asking for justice after I die," she added with a resolve.