This banner in Yuri Ysabel Tan's mixed art installation sums up the message of Filipina comfort women who seek justice and peace to resolve the wounds of their past. (Photo by Enrico Berdos)
Story by Enrico Berdos
As Filipino comfort women reach the twilight of their years, their stories of being sexually and emotionally abused during the Second World War are at the brink of being forgotten. Now, their voices have come alive in the form of photos and artworks.
Exhibits like Celline Marge Mercado’s In the Spaces We Mend, Inheriting the Unfinished Narrative of the Filipino Comfort Women showed that “art-making provides space to address pain, preserve memories, and educate.”
Among the artifacts presented in Mercado’s exhibit were drawings of Maria Rosa Luna Henson of Pampanga and Remedios Felias of Leyte, which are vivid sketches of their personal stories. Though they lived in different areas of the Philippines, their anecdotes told the same narrative. Both had happy, rural childhoods that were interrupted by panic as Japanese invaders arrived in their towns during World War II. Their stories of beatings, torture and rape in Japanese military garrisons were also the same.
Felias drew a picture of an outdoor military camp surrounded by tall palm trees, bushes and huts. A naked Japanese soldier forces himself into her by the tree as another man puts on his military uniform and rifle. Three more soldiers fall in line as they wait for their turn. The abuse was so physically exhausting that she could not even get the strength to stand up.
Henson’s more realistic drawings became the basis of UP Playwrights’ Theatre’s Nana Rosa, which had its run last March in celebration of International Women’s Day. Scenes within the theatrical play accurately depicted Henson’s nine-month ordeal in a military hospital in Pampanga, from the props down to the costumes.
Looking at Henson’s actual drawings in Mercado’s exhibit triggered flashbacks of scenes from Nana Rosa. In a room reserved for her, a Japanese captain named Tanaka would enter through a curtain, put down his rifle and bayonet, and unbutton trousers. As other soldiers lined up, she would lie down naked, opening her legs at the ready. Another soldier tied down her left leg before raping her.
Another scene from Nana Rosa had Henson lying along the hospital’s corridors, refusing to eat despite being beat down by hunger. Behind her, there was a row of women wailing, writhing in pain and screaming for their mothers as they were being simultaneously raped by soldiers. There were tears and sniffling in the audience as they see the women being united by the same suffering despite being separated from each other by wooden walls.
After fifty years of bottling up her past life by living as a housewife, Henson heard human rights defender Liddy Nakpil through DZXL radio, on Jan. 30, 1992. At the time, Nakpil and other members of the Task Force for Filipino Comfort Women were looking for victims of sexual slavery during World War II. It took Henson nine months to tell her story, when another radio broadcast from the Task Force broke her into tears after hearing the message, “Stand up for your rights”.
Henson’s testimony encouraged several other fellow Filipina comfort women to speak up and share their stories. Calling themselves the “Malaya Lolas”, they banded together in the 1990s to file cases against the Japanese government and to ask for a formal apology plus reparations from the Japanese government. Unfortunately, after two appeals with the Japanese Supreme Court, their cases were dismissed and their stories fell into obscurity.
Despite this gloomy moment in history, both Nana Rosa and personal drawings from Henson end up on a positive note, hoping that the remaining comfort women survivors would finally win their struggles and earn the justice that they deserve.
According to the Malaya Lolas Group of Comfort Women, around 90 Malaya Lolas were still alive in the 2000s; but the number of remaining survivors has dwindled down to 28. Many of the Lolas want to continue remembering their experiences and to seek justice despite the odds.
For Malaya Lolas’ president Isabelita Vinuya, 84, they still fight through local and global rallies for the sake of the youth.
“We fight because we don’t want what happened to us to be repeated to women today. If war breaks out again, the children may not be able to endure what we experienced,” Vinuya said.
In an interview with The Japan Times, Vinuya stressed the importance of remembering the forgotten story of former comfort women like her.
“[Mercado’s exhibit] is very important so that those who don’t know our history and the kind of life that we lived will understand us. It is important for them to understand our experiences so they can help us in our demand for justice,” she said.
“There are only 28 of us now remaining alive. We hope that our government will hear us out, help us, and support us,” she wished.
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