Zhou Fenying is a living witness to the dark history that still poisons China's relations with Japan more than 60 years after World War Two.

When Zhou was 22, Japanese soldiers came to her village in eastern China, grabbed her and her sister-in-law and carted them off to a military brothel, she says.

Now 91, Zhou has broken decades of silence to speak of her traumatic experience as a "comfort woman" -- the euphemism the invading Japanese used to describe women forced into sex slavery.

The Chinese government says Japan has yet to atone properly for its war crimes, which it says included massacres and forcing people to work as virtual slaves in factories or as prostitutes.

Zhou said she had served as a "comfort woman" for two months before a local town official rescued her by paying off the Japanese.