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Tokyo Courts, Thank you

June 27, 2012

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There is hope after all.

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An Excerpt From Maria Rosa Henson's autobiography, COMFORT WOMAN: Slave of Destiny

Maria Rosa Henson, or Lola Rosa, was the first Filipina Comfort Woman of WWII to come forward publicly on September 12, 1992 . Because of Lola Rosa, many other Filipinas who had been living with this secret for over 50 years found the courage to come forward and finally speak their truth, finally ask for their apology, finally free themselves from the stories. Here is an excerpt from her book, COMFORT WOMAN: Slave of Destiny (Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 1996). This passage occurs in 1943. She's 16 years old and she has just been abducted and placed into a garrison, a former town hospital close to Magalang, Pampanga near Manila. Without warning, a Japanese soldier entered my room and pointed his bayonet at my chest. I thought he was going to kill me, but he used his bayonet to slash my dress and tear it open. I was too frightened to scream. And then he raped me. When he was done, other soldiers came into my room and they took turns raping me. Twelve sol

Summary of Circumstances of My Sufferings: Prescilla Bartonico

Lola Precsilla Bartonico was born on January 6, 1926 on the island of Leyte, Philippines. Here is an excerpt from Lola Prescilla’s testimony to the Japanese government: One day in the late months of 1943 when I was about 17 years old, the Japanese soldiers captured us as we were hiding in one of the air raid shelters. We were only two women in that group who were all my relatives. They started raping my cousin while the other soldiers tied up the men. I was about 17 years old then. Then they tied me and one soldier raped me. I wanted to resist but I was too afraid to for fear of getting killed. After, they brought us to the town of Burauen and I was brought to the elementary school which they converted into garrison. We arrive in there late afternoon. I saw around 15 women who were also raped like what they did to me. After that, I was brought to the Home Economics Building and saw two women inside. Then my suffering started at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. We were bei

The House We Built

When I first began my journey with the lolas back in 1999, I was researching their experiences for a screenplay, a story made up of the facts of their lives. They allowed me and the girls, the dalagas, into their world to do that project. On the day of our despedida party, the lolas circled me, tugged at my dress, said, "When are you going to write our real stories?" I have been working on those stories ever since, on documenting the testimonies of 16 surviving Filipina "Comfort Women." I have more than 40 hours of interview tapes, mostly in Tagalog, a smattering in other dialects like Ilocono, Visayan, and Waray, and on a few occasions, English. The labor of this work was in the transcription, the translation, and then the issues of structuring the book. I visited the women as often as I could on grants, and fellowships, on eight months of funding from Fulbright, just so I could verify the testimonies, hear them more than one time, and on seven occasions

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