Tuesday, August 28, 2007 Tantingco: The Malaya lolas of Candaba By Robby Tantingco Peanut Gallery
WE ALL have heard of comfort women -- those hapless young girls abused by Japanese soldiers in World War II, who grew up to become hapless old women hiding a terrible secret.
There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, all over Southeast Asia and China. They were the unknown victims of the war, whose names never appear on any war memorial, unlike fallen soldiers, and who never received compensation, unlike war veterans.
Soldiers who perished in battle are actually luckier, because they lost only their lives. Comfort women lost everything -- their virginity, their dreams, their reputation and peace of mind, their family's respect and love. Today, 60 years after World War II, they have finally and mercifully also begun losing their lives.
In their old age, after a lifetime of guilt and fear of being found out, these women have at last summoned enough courage to come to terms with their past, and reveal their secret to their families and to the world. Some cruel people suspect their true motives for coming out, but when you come to think of it, compensation is actually the least to ask and the easiest to give. These women should have required Japan to turn over to them its entire GNP, because all the money in the world could not buy back their shattered lives. Or they should have asked Japan to use all its technological resources to turn back the hands of time so that they could get their one chance at happiness, which they had lost. Yet they chose to ask only for a little money so they could buy medicines and give their families the little comforts that the war and its aftermath had deprived them of.
Japan chose instead to offer an apology. Well, ultimately, an apology is probably better than compensation. It may not give our comfort women the relief they need but at least it restores the dignity they seek.
Comfort women were not the war's collateral damage; then as now, rape of civilian women is used during war and conflict situations as a tool of terrorizing local populations and demoralizing enemy soldiers. In other words, soldiers rape civilians not because they get horny, but because they are ordered to -- by their officers, by their generals, and who knows how high up it goes. Actually, the war's rape victims -- including some from the Philippines -- were given their day in court in the Far East Military Tribunal after the war ended, but the stories in Pampanga never surfaced then. The first Kapampangan comfort woman to step forward was Rosa Henson of Angeles City. Because of the media attention her coming out generated, other comfort women in the country stood up to be counted, too.
And came the comfort women of Candaba, Pampanga, more than 50 of them, claiming to have been raped en masse near their village in Mapanique, on the border between Candaba and San Ildefonso, Bulacan.
Their story happened on Nov. 23, 1944, towards the end of the war, when Japanese soldiers were desperately pursuing Filipino guerillas (Huks) and smoking them out of their hiding places in the countryside.
The Japanese surrounded their village, bombing and torching houses and herding the villagers to the public school, where the women were separated from the men.
In full view of their wives, mothers and daughters, the men were mauled, some of them stripped naked and their private parts cut and inserted in their mouths. The rest were hung upside down from trees and then beheaded. Their bodies were dumped inside the school building, which the soldiers then set on fire. (One boy escaped and grew up to become the school grounds' caretaker; I met him when I brought a group of HAU students and instructors to Mapanique to construct a marker on the spot where the charred remains of the men had been buried.)
The women were forced to walk two kilometers across the field, carrying looted sacks of rice, to an abandoned mansion that has come to be known as Bahay na Pula, because of its rouge paint. There, the soldiers raped them. Some of the women were abused repeatedly by different soldiers; a few were little girls who were raped with their mothers. Those who resisted were bayoneted and then raped as they lay bleeding.
The next morning the women were sent back to Mapanique, where they collected the charred bones of their loved ones and buried them in a common grave. Since their houses had been destroyed and they had lost the men who would till the fields, the women had no more reason to stay in the village. They left Mapanique to live in different towns, severing ties with one another so that they could erase the past and hide their secret, from the men they would eventually marry and the children they would eventually raise.
Imagine the pain and shock these families had to endure in their homes when the women finally told them. And imagine the stares and questions they had to face when they went outside. Yet it was the one last ordeal they had to survive before they could experience what their country had experienced 60 years earlier -- liberation.
Thus, they call themselves the Malaya Lolas (Emancipated Old Women). With the help of the Asian Center for Women's Human Rights, they have linked up with other comfort women in other regions and turned into an advocacy group, pressuring the government to demand compensation from Japan on their behalf. They have even attended the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Sexual Slavery, held in Tokyo, which tried the rape cases and found the entire Japanese military and civilian hierarchy, including the Emperor, guilty as charged. But the court was not recognized by Japan and so the victory remained merely symbolic.
Today, the Malaya Lolas meet regularly in the home of one of their members in Mapanique. They sing protest songs, play cards and talk to anyone who is willing to listen. Every now and then they get visits from media and students doing term papers, or get invited to symposia. They also accompany visitors to the Bahay na Pula, abandoned since that fateful night in 1944.
The nipa huts of the Malaya Lolas are dwarfed by big, concrete houses that have sprouted in the last few years. Mapanique has gotten richer, thanks to the remittances from OFWs working in, of all places, Japan.
I am tempted to think that this is probably how Japan is compensating for what it has done to this village, but OFWs earn every single dollar they send back home, and they continue to pay dearly for it, because they leave behind children at a time when they need their parents most.
Mapanique may have moved on, and our Malaya Lolas can describe themselves as free, but just because they have unburdened themselves of their secret and Japan has apologized, doesn't mean the case is closed. Until these old women get real, concrete compensation so that they could improve the quality of their life in their last dying days, or at least get the satisfaction that their families will be taken care of after they're gone -- until then, Japan's apology is not accepted.
(Reference: The Women of Mapanique, published by ASCENT)
