ON APRIL 24, historical researcher Dana Lee made at the Manila Elks Club in Makati City a presentation on the history — and current situation — of the thousands of teenage girls and young women who were abducted and forced into sex slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army from 1932 to 1945.
These girls and women across Asia who were forced to sexually service Japanese troops during World War II were called “comfort women.”
While only a few of them are still alive today, there is a strong interest among advocates to keep alive the record of what they had suffered.
Lee’s presentation was part of a three-day event that also discussed the ongoing pursuit for justice for the comfort women and for the Japanese government to formally apologize to them. The groups Malaya Lolas and Lila Pilipina continue to keep that issue alive, as is Lee. Stories about these women are still being told and shared on social media and in documentaries.
In 2017, Chinese-Filipino civic organization Tulay Foundation and the National Historical Commission of the Philippines unveiled in Manila a statue to memorialize the comfort women. It caused an uproar, with the Japanese embassy here demanding an explanation.
In response, the Philippine government removed the statue months later.
On March 8, 2023, the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) ruled that the government failed to provide adequate reparation and support to the surviving Filipino comfort women. It recommended that the government provide them with “full reparation, including recognition and redress, an official apology and material and moral damages, for the continuous discrimination that they suffered.”
In 1996, United Nations (UN) researchers called the crimes against the comfort women “crimes against humanity.” The United States Institute for Peace said these former sex slaves could have been as many as 500,000.
The UN has called for an official apology, material compensation, and the inclusion of their history in schools. Following the Cedaw ruling, the government acknowledged the comfort women’s suffering, and in May 2023, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. directed agencies to extend assistance to the Malaya Lolas and address the UN’s findings.
Most of the comfort women died of disease, malnutrition or suicide, or from violence, before the end of the war. Those who survived kept their wartime ordeal a secret for fear of rejection and discrimination.
In South Korea, as many as 200,000 women and girls were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese army during Tokyo’s occupation of the Korean peninsula. UN researchers learned in 1996 that these women suffered dehumanizing treatment that also amounted to “crimes against humanity.” They have been the most vocal about demanding justice.
This writer once went to South Korea to join a street protest on the matter and greet the survivors beside a statue of a child facing the Japanese embassy in Seoul — a symbol of the thousands of these abused women and girls. (To be continued)/PN
