Shanghai company fined for disgracing comfort women

A Shanghai tech company has been fined for making emoticons based on comfort women, police said.

Shanghai Siyanhui Technology Co., Ltd. was fined 15,000 yuan (about 2,255 U.S. dollars) and ordered to suspend operations for two months for making the emoticons, the Shanghai municipal public security bureau said on Sunday.

The emoticons were screen grabs of "Twenty Two," a documentary about 22 "comfort women," a euphemism used for girls and women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during WWII.

The emoticons appeared on the Internet on August 18 and police said they negatively affected the already miserable experiences of the comfort women.

The company apologized for hurting public sentiment.

Some 400,000 women across Asia were forced to be comfort women for the Japanese army during WWII, nearly half of them Chinese, according to the Research Center for Comfort Women at Shanghai Normal University.

Only 14 comfort women are still alive on the Chinese mainland, according to the center.

Box office revenue of "Twenty Two" has exceeded 160 million yuan (20.8 million U.S. dollars).