Comfort women keep the faith

MANILA, Philippines – Fidencia David sits in a corner of her home in Padilla, Antipolo, browsing through old photo albums of her journey with fellow “comfort women.”

On the walls of her house are more memories, framed and faded with age.

From these photos showing women in solidarity through a shared struggle, the 88-year-old points out who are still around.

There are more who are not. “Isa-isa nang nawala (one after another have gone),” David said.

A day before, she received word that a comfort woman whom she had just visited in Arayat, Pampanga passed away.

David is one of the few living comfort women, a euphemism for military sex slaves of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.

Lolas Kampanyeras, the comfort-women support group she belongs to, now has less than 10 active members from over a hundred when it formed in 2000.

Seven decades after the war, they’re still waiting for an official apology, just compensation and inclusion of their story in history books.

David was one of the first victims to step forward and file a legal suit against the Japanese government as part of the first comfort women group, Lila Pilipina.

None of those cases prospered. Lack of government support has also been blamed for the loss of every legal battle since 1998.

Meanwhile, Japan offered a formal apology and $8.3 million payment to Korean comfort women last year.

These days, David is increasingly being told it’s a lost cause. She and the remaining lolas, however, are keeping the faith and the fight. If there’s strength in numbers, they are holding on to each other and drawing strength even from their dwindling number.

“I am trying to be strong for our late president. When our president was dying, she said ‘Lola Fidencia, continue the fight until you get justice.’ Perhaps the Lord gave me a long life because I have many obligations to the lolas who are still alive,” David said. 

She was 13 when she was detained, along with her grandmother, by Japanese soldiers in a municipal hall-turned-garrison in Dasol, Pangasinan. For 10 days, she was forced to do manual labor during the day and repeatedly raped at night. Later on, she would witness her own grandmother being raped and killed.

In the early ‘90s, at the onset of the comfort-women activism that began in Korea, about 300 Filipinas broke their silence on their wartime ordeal in response to calls made over the media.

David traveled to Japan five times to tell her story, subsequently verified by a Japanese fact-finding committee. In 2007, she testified at Canada’s House of Commons, which then passed a motion urging the Japanese government to offer a formal apology to comfort women. 

Whenever she tells her story these days, David said there’s no more anger in her heart but “you never run out of tears.”

“You’re not supposed to dwell on the past, but I have to talk about it so that we will not be forgotten,” she said.

Time running out

“Time is really running out for these lolas,” stresses clinical psychologist and Kampanyeras coordinator Cristina Rosello. “But this is also the right time (to step up the campaign) because media interest has waned, (we’re sounding like a) broken record and the lolas are dying.”

Rosello, who authored the book “Disconnect: The Filipino Comfort Women,” has been a volunteer psychologist to comfort women since 1995.

Based on her studies, their experiences could be described as worse, as they exhibited combined symptoms of single-rape events victims and prisoners of war.

“So you would be shocked, how did these women survive?” Rosello asked.

She noted that what happened to the Filipino comfort women was distinct and “explicitly criminal” because not only were they non-combatants, it happened towards the end of the war when aggression was much more brutal.

The comfort women issue, however, has grown complex amidst “deepening friendly relations” between the Philippines and Japan.

According to Rosello, they’ve been told that the government “cannot deal with the issue without considering the context that Japan is now an ally and providing economic aid.”

Last month, a “groundbreaking” deal was signed that would allow Tokyo to transfer defense equipment and technology to Manila.

Rosello said the lolas have nothing to do with the current situation of Japan. “It must be a stand-alone issue,” she said. Nevertheless, she believes that there must be a new approach to it. “We cannot just continue bashing Japan,” she added.

From their hardline stance, Lolas Kampanyeras are moving to educational – away from street protests and instead, reaching out to the younger generation.

The group partnered with the University of the Philippines-Diliman Gender Office and the Alpha Nu Fraternity to hold the forum “Voice of Our Scars: Intimate Contexts of Military Sexual Slavery in the Philippines” in observance of women’s month last month.

Rosello also echoed the appeal of other advocates to at least include the lolas’ story in Philippine history books.

“It’s not talked about – invisible.  Why? Patriarchal (mindset). ‘Mga babae lang yan (these are just women), they are not soldiers,’ which should not be the case,” she said.

The only historical marker for comfort women is found in Liwasang Bonifacio in Manila in the hope that the tragedy will never happen again.

For Rosello, the implications of continuing the fight for these lolas – the living but fast-fading reminders of wartime atrocities – are wide-ranging. 

“We should get redress and justice for these women because they didn’t deserve the wartime victimization. Their suffering didn’t stop in the war, it continued beyond. A lot of them brought the grief to their deathbed,” she said.