Nearly 80 years after 15 young women were forced to “offer” themselves to protect their community from Soviet troops invading Japan’s Manchurian colony in 1945, the survivors among them have spoken out publicly about their horrific experiences.
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The accounts of the three survivors are at the heart of In Their Own Words: The Women of Kurokawa, a new documentary by director Fumie Matsubara, which will be released in Japan on July 12. Matsubara unveiled the film at a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on Wednesday.
The women recalled being forced by their isolated community to submit to the Soviet soldiers’ demands and being repeatedly sexually assaulted. They were shunned and became the subject of gossip following their return to Japan.
“It was life or death for us then,” survivor Harue Sato says in the film. “In fact, I died there once,” she adds, referring to the repeated rapes she endured over two months after the Soviets arrived in their village in Manchukuo, the puppet state set up by imperial Japan in Manchuria.
“All we could do was grit our teeth and hang on. We held each other’s hands and cried for our mothers to save us,” she says.
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In 1942, more than 600 settlers from the remote mountain village of Kurokawa, in Gifu prefecture in central Japan, took over vast tracts of land on the plains of Manchukuo.