Comfort Woman : a Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under ...

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Introduction
war, that the truly horrifi c picture of this widespread sexual violence
against Filipinas during the occupation fi rst emerged. This was made
possible when Maria Rosa Henson, the author of this autobiography,
courageously came forward and revealed her painful past as a “comfort
woman.” Encouraged by her action, many other women spoke out,
one after another, and gave detailed testimonies about their wartime
ordeals. Eventually, the testimonies of fi fty-one women were collected
by a local nongovernmental organization, called Task Force on Filipino
Comfort Women, together with a group of Japanese lawyers. 8
The testimony of these Filipina victims makes clear that the
“recruiting” methods that the Japanese troops employed in the Philippines
were somewhat different from those used in other regions in the
Asia–Pacifi c occupied by the Japanese Imperial Forces during the war,
in particular Korea and Taiwan. The most common expedient used in
Korea and Taiwan was deceit—false promises of employment in Japan
or other Japanese-occupied territories. Typically, a daughter of a poor
peasant family was approached by a labor broker and promised that
she would be employed as an assistant nurse, kitchen helper, laundry
worker, or something similar. She would not fi nd out the real nature
of the work until she was taken into a comfort station and raped by
members of the Japanese armed forces.
Some women were sold to labor brokers by their parents (due to
their desperate fi nancial straits), eventually ending up at comfort stations
somewhere in Southeast Asia or China. Some women testifi ed that they
were kidnapped by unknown civilians or arrested by police for no crime
and then sent off to comfort stations overseas. In any case, in Korea
and Taiwan, it was rare that military personnel were directly involved
in recruiting women, which was usually carried out by Japanese or local
labor brokers. In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where the local
population generally welcomed the entrance of the Japanese Imperial
Forces into the territories as “liberators” from Dutch colonialism, it
seems that deceit was also a common tactic employed by the Japanese to
“recruit” local women. Forcible recruitment by intimidation or violence,
such as the case of Dutch women and girls who were forcibly taken
out of the detention camps in Java and pressed into service in comfort