Taipei, May 6 （CNA） Eight witnesses from Taiwan and China testified at an international symposium in Taipei Sunday on how they or their family members had suffered during World War II under Japans practice of forcing foreign women into sex slavery and able-bodied men into slave labor. 

The symposium was held by National Taiwan Universitys College of Social Sciences, with the participation of 12 scholars from Taiwan and Japan, and two Taiwanese legislators. 

The witnesses included former comfort woman Wan Ai-hua, rape victim Lu Man-mei, Hanaoka labor camp survivor Li Tietsui, and a former slave laborer at the Mitsubishi coal mine in Nagasaki Prefecture, Li Tsingyun. 

In additional to the Taiwanese academics who presented papers and joined the discussions, six Japanese scholars and experts also presented evidence collected in Japan to the symposium in an attempt to tackle various aspects of the issues. 

The Japanese participants included Ryukoku University Professor Hiroshi Tanaka, who has conducted research in China since the 1980s on victims of forced labor during the Second World War; Tsueno Yachida, a deputy head of a committee for the establishment of a peace memorial for the Hanaoka Incident of 1945; Okayama University professor Toneko Ishida; and Japanese lawyer Reiji Kiyoi. 

A report by Japanese scholars has put the number of Chinese forced to work in Japans slave camps during the war at 39,000, accounting for 13.5 percent of all Chinese workers used by Japan during the war years. The report claims that, of the total, more than 6,800 died in Japan. 

However, an investigation by the late professor Wu Tianwei of Southern Illinois University says that since 1931, about 37 million Chinese were force into slave labor by the Japanese military, and that 10 million of them perished as a result, including many who were killed collectively. 

Chinese nationals, including survivors of the Hanaoka labor camp, had filed lawsuits against the Japanese government since the 1900s, demanding compensation for their wartime suffering. 

Of the more than 800 Chinese laborers forced to work at the Hanaoka copper mine, located 525 kilometers north of Tokyo, 418 died of malnutrition and torture. The slave workers staged an uprising on June 30, 1945 and killed several Japanese guards. Scores of them were held responsible for the incident and tortured to death. 

A Japanese Supreme Court ruled on April 27 that the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique made it legally impossible for Chinese nationals to seek compensation for their suffering at the hands of the Japanese military. 

（By Han Nai-kuo）