Beijing - China opened its first museum on the use of "comfort women" to provide sexual services for Japanese troops in World War II, as part of a series of events to mark Saturday's 70th anniversary of war with Japan. Three women, who were forced by Japanese troops to work in Chinese brothels, spoke at the opening of the museum on Friday at Shanghai Normal University, the official China Daily said.
Exhibits at the museum include recorded interviews and written accounts by former "comfort women", who numbered about 200,000 in China according to Chinese historians.
Two diplomats from the Japanese consulate in Shanghai attended the opening of the museum, which joins two similar ones in Tokyo and Seoul, the newspaper said.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was harshly criticized for saying in March that there was "no evidence" of Japan's military forcing thousands of women in East Asia into sexual slavery.
The anniversary on Saturday was the 70th of the July 7, 1937 "Luguou Bridge incident," which started Japan's full-scale invasion of China.
The Japanese attack on nationalist guards at the bridge near Beijing "marked the long-premeditated launching of all-out war on China" and the start of the "largest imperialist invasion ever experienced by China," according to an official history.
It led to a loose alliance between Nationalist and Communist troops in what is now known in China as the War of Resistance Against Japan.
"Lugou Bridge symbolizes the beginning of national disaster, and also the beginning of the awakening of the Chinese," Song Chengyou, a historian at Beijing University, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Groups of schoolchildren placed dozens of red candles in the shape of a giant number 70 on Thursday near the bridge, which is also known in the West as the Marco Polo Bridge.
A two-day seminar on the "Lugou Bridge incident" opened on Friday at the nearby memorial hall and hundreds of people attended an official memorial ceremony on Saturday.
In a commentary published on Saturday, China Daily said the anniversary was marked "because we Chinese always believe historical lessons can be a guide to our future".
"We mark this day because we do not want younger generations to forget what happened to their grandparents during the eight years (1937-45) of war against Japanese aggression and how their motherland was devastated by aggressors", the commentary said.
This year also marks the anniversary of the Nanjing massacre, in which Japanese troops are estimated to have killed up to 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in December 1937 and January 1938.
The Chinese government this week allowed the first showing of "Nanking", the new Hollywood documentary film on the massacre, which takes its title from the old Western name for Nanjing.
