WASHINGTON - A documentary featuring the plight of China's comfort women during World War II was screened in the US capital on Saturday, days before the 87th anniversary of the Sept 18 Incident which marked the outbreak of Japan's large-scale invasion of China.
Around 300 people, most of them Asians, watched the film titled Twenty Two at the Avalon Theatre in Washington. It was free and open to the public and sponsored by a number of local Chinese-American organizations.
The phrase comfort women is a euphemism for girls and women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during WWII. More than half of the 22 women featured in the documentary have reportedly passed away since 2014.
"My heart is heavy because of their (comfort women's) sufferings," said Zhuangfei Chen, head of Greater Washington Area Asian Pacific World War II Atrocities Memorial Inc, after the screening.
"Justice and dignity should be attained for them."
Around 400,000 women across Asia were forced to be comfort women for the Japanese army during WWII, nearly half of them Chinese, according to the Research Center for Comfort Women at Shanghai Normal University.
Old age is now taking the lives of many of them, and only 14 comfort women were still alive in China's mainland areas, a report found in July, quoting the research center.
"For viewers unfamiliar with the topic, Twenty Two provides the basic facts about the estimated 200,000 women enslaved in Japanese-occupied China," Mark Jenkins wrote in a review published by The Washington Post last year after its debut, noting the film took "a quiet, deliberate approach that must be partly out of respect for the women and their suffering".
Unexpected hit
The documentary, crowdfunded by 32,099 people, was an unexpected hit, with box office revenue exceeding 139 million yuan ($21 million) within nine days after its debut in China last year, grabbing the attention of the whole nation.
On Sept 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army stationed in northeast China destroyed a section of the railway near Liutiaohu and then falsely accused the Chinese military of causing the explosion. Using this as a pretext, the Japanese then bombarded Shenyang and began invasion of northeast China.
