MANILA– Philippine activists slammed Japan yesterday, for its continued refusal to express remorse and apology, over wartime sex slavery 76 years after the end of World War II.
Lila Pilipina’s (League of Filipino Women) spokesperson, Sharon Cabusao-Silva, said, hundreds of Filipino women, who served as domestic and sex slaves to Japanese soldiers still demand justice.
Lila Pilipina is an organisation of Filipino comfort women and their sympathisers in the Philippines, fighting for recognition, apologies and reparations from the Japanese government, for its unaddressed sexual slavery crimes against Asian women.
The Japanese occupation of the Philippines occurred between 1942 and 1945.
Hundreds of thousands of women from around Asia, including China, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others, were abducted and forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels, during World War II.
In the Philippines, there were more than 200 women, who came out in the open in the 1990s, to tell their harrowing experience with the Japanese military.
Silva said, many of the wartime victims in the Philippines have died, without seeing justice, and there are only 12 of them alive now, mostly in their 80s and 90s, and in worrying health condition.
Like other Asian “comfort women,” a euphemism for those who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military brothels during World War II, the Filipino “comfort women” also demand an official apology from the Japanese government, as well as, compensation and inclusion of the comfort women issue in Japan’s historical accounts and textbooks
Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK