In April 1941, a group of Japanese invading forces in China gang-raped Zhao Runmei in northern Shanxi province. The soldiers had first killed Zhao’s foster parents in front of her, stabbing her father’s throat with a bayonet and slashing the back of her mother’s head. And then the attack on her began.
Zhao was then taken to a blockhouse to be raped daily, a horror that lasted for more than 40 days. She was just 16 years old.
More than 80 years later, the children of 18 now-deceased Chinese “comfort women” – including Zhao’s family – have filed the first-ever lawsuit in China against Japan for alleged crimes committed during the second world war.
