Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military

Rating:
Summary: Sad Story, But...
Review: In rape cases, to point out some problematic facts in the story told by the plaintiff would often be branded as the second rape.

Still, as a Japanese, I must stand up here and make the argument for the sake of the honors of our own grandfathers who may have been falsely accused for this disgusting crime of "sex slavery" because, in fact, there are lots of suspicious inconsistency in this auto-biographical account of Maria Rosa Henson.

The followings are only few examples of the small-but-cannot-plainly-be-ignored problems in Ms Henson's account;

<1> The comfort station where Ms Henson was taken in and forced to be a comfort woman was also the Japanese Army headquarters and garrison. To be precise, the downstairs was the headquarters (and bathroom?) and the upstairs was the comfort station. But, that kind of arrangement is extremely odd for the Japanese Army who was renowned by their reputation of decency, at least for the facade, I would moderately add.

<2> Ms Henson says that the Japanese soldiers would shout "Miyo tokai [no] sora [akete]!" as they do their daily exercise and when the routine was over, they shouted "banzai!" three times. This is, again, very odd. The former is a song with nice melody that I do not think suits for exercise. And, although "banzai" can be casually used like, say, "hurrah!", it should be a special occasion when people shout it "three times". Similarly, the Japanese use the word "baka"(stupid) with some kind of affection even when used with a punishment of slap. So, again, Ms Henson's claims that evil Japanese torturing people shouting "baka!" seems quite odd.

<3> Ms Henson would ask herself: "Why did I not try to escape? Because they might kill me." But, according to Ms Henson herself, the only one guard outside of their rooms was kind to all the women there and seems to have showed no hostile intention to punish the women severely in the event of escape. On the contrary, he even helped her (maybe others, too) daily cleaning by scrubbing the floor with a wet cloth and some disinfectant. One would wonder if she really found no chance to escape while this only guard got on all fours scrubbing her floor.

<4> Ms Henson claims that some "twenty to thirty" soldiers "raped" her every day, however, I cannot help wondering if they really had such spare time to rape women when the situation of the war in the Pacific theatre had been drastically declining for the Japanese at the time in question and hundreds of Japanese ships were being sunk by the U.S. Navy in the sea near by.

Now, the followings would arouse more serious doubt;

<1> Ms Henson claims that she had become able to understand some Japanese by the time when she overheard Captain Tanaka and the colonel talking about a plan to conduct a zoning operation in Pampang, her barrio, because many of the residents there were guerrillas. She was able to understand that the colonel had said that the Japanese soldiers had captured guerrillas from there, and they were in the garrison downstairs. But, she was with the Japanese for only nine months, and, if it was only Captain Tanaka who liked her and taught some Japanese to her, it makes only 1 month or 2. I really doubt that anyone can ever become understand Japanese Language in such short time considering the fact that military terms are usually more complicated and difficult even for the ordinary Japanese.

<2> When Ms Henson was proposed by Domingo, she confessed to him that "[she] had been raped by Japanese soldiers, but [she] never told him that [she] also become a comfort woman." Why? Is it not because a "comfort woman" means a prostitute, never the same as being raped? If she regarded her whole experience in the comfort station as "rape" she could have told him so. And, is that not because why the subtitle of this book used the word "prostitution" although Ms Henson never says that she was in the business?

Apart from the fact that Ms Henson was working in one of the largest communist guerrilla organisation in Philippine at that time, who would spread Anti-Japanese propaganda in the civilian population to mobilise people as their combatants for the communist revolution, those inconsistencies made me assume her account is unreliable.

In reality, as the Japanese authority of this issue Yoshiaki Yoshimi publicly admitted, there is no single documented evidence to support the allegation Japanese Imperial Army kidnapped and forced them to prostitution, or more grotesquely described by the feminists as "sexual slavery".
Yoshimi's large volume of all governmental documents he could ever found on this matter shows that the women made at least 300 yen and at most 1,500 yen per month whereas the soldiers's monthly wage was 9 yen. The charge was range from 1.5 yen from 3 yen per 30 minutes for the privates. (Officers and generals were charged much higher.) Although the women had to pay back their advances to the trader by 50 percent of their earnings, still it was good-waged business to the women from poor countryside. The Japanese Imperial Army did not run the comfort station but paid great attention to the women's welfare so that their soldiers could profit in their morale and spirits by satisfaction of the earthly desire without any worry about venereal disease.

Because of lack of evidence that substantiate the allegation other than those unreliable testimonies of the ex-comfort women's and many evidences that support the Japanese Army's innocent, the government refused to recognise this matter as the issue of compensation. However, Maria Rosa Henson received one million yen (about 250,000 peso) for the "temporary money" from non-governmental organisation in Japan in 1996. It was two years before this book was published. I am just wondering why that fact was omitted. Maybe because this whole issue is a propaganda and Ms Henson is a victim of the ideological warfare.

Rating:
Summary: IGNORE THE RIGHT-WING CLAP-TRAP BY THE REVIEWER BELOW
Review: This is a good book as it illumiinates the horrors of war and the strength of human courage & dignity. Unfortunately, people such as 'Hiromi' who have reviewed it below, in typical right-wing Japanese fashion end up denying or trying to cast doubt on events that undoubtedly took place, but unfortunately there are still a fair number of Japanese who like to deny this, which is why there is still so much mistrust of Japanese in Asia even today. Read this book, it will give you an insight of the good & bad of human conduct in war.

Rating:
Summary: Survivor's story
Review: This is the most terrible book I ever read. This is a book about a 15 years old girl, Maria Rosa Henson. Maria was taken by the Japanese soldiers and forced into prostitution as a "comfort woman" during the Japanese occupation in Philippines. She was captured and had been sexual tortured and abused for years. After keeping her secret for over half a century, she broke her silent and told the public about her painfully experience. I was stunned by her words and as well the illustrations in the book. However, I admired her courage--her courage to tell the truth and to face her family. Her truth words definitely offer hope and perspective to other survivors who need too heal from the wound.