COMFORT WOMEN:
A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military
By MARIA ROSA HENSON
Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999,94 pages, $17.95 (paperback)

Jill A. Tardiff

"One morning in June 1992," recalls Maria Rosa Henson, "while I was hanging my laundry on the clothesline, I heard a female voice on the radio talking about women who were raped and enslaved by Japanese troops during the Second World War. I shook all over, I felt my blood turn white." It was not until September, when she broke down in tears while hearing a similar report broadcast by the Task Force on Filipino Comfort Women, that she confessed to her eldest daughter that she had suffered just such a fate during the war.
For more than fifty years Rosa had concealed her agonizing story from everyone except her mother. With reassurance from her daughter and at the request of the Task Force, she came forward on September 18, 1992, at a Manila press conference and bore witness to the crimes inflicted on her and more than 1,100 other Filipino women at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army. She was the first non-Korean former "comfort woman" to come forward about her experiences, inspiring others to do the same. Her testimony is the heart of this book.
Rosa tells her story simply and deliberately, as if we are sitting with her in the one-room house in Pasay where she lived when she wrote this memoir. (She died in 1997.) It begins with her mother's birth in 1907 and ends in 1993 with her joining the Task Force. We learn that her grandparents were poor farmers, and that her mother was raped by the landlord of the barrio. The rapist was her mother's boss, and as a result of the rape, Rosa was born.
When war broke out, Rosa was still an innocent. Her reaction after being raped by Japanese soldiers for the first time, in the spring of 1942, was: "Why did this happen to me? I remembered the landlord who had raped my mother. Did I inherit my mother's fate?" Soon after, fifteen-year-old Rosa became an active member of the Hukbalahap, the people's resistance army, collecting and distributing supplies. While on a mission, she was abducted at gun point by a Japanese sentry and brought to a town hospital turned garrison where her nine-month ordeal of repeated rape and beatings took place. She recalls "serving" more than a dozen soldiers every day. "I sat on the bamboo bed, remembering all that had been done to me. How could I escape or kill myself? . . . Sometimes I lost all hope."
In late 1943, Rosa and her fellow "comfort women" were transferred to a rice mill not far from the hospital. "The mill was on Henson Road, named after my father's family, who owned the land where it stood." The painful irony of her predicament becomes apparent when Rosa tells how officers took the women to a big house and raped them. "That house belonged to my father, and it was where my mother worked while she was in her teens." Rosa came to believe that she was a "slave of destiny."
Rosa was rescued when Hukbalahap guerrillas raided the rice mill in January 1944. Her recovery was slow. Though haunted by nightmares and hampered by ailments, she struggled back to life. She married, had children, and worked at various jobs. Decades passed in apparent normalcy, but her "need to have a measure of justice" remained strong.

When she finally revealed her experiences, reactions to her testimony were varied. Family and other former "comfort women" were overwhelmingly supportive, but public opinion was often contemptuous and accusatory, rooted in prejudice toward a woman from humble circumstances. Yet Rosa had no regrets about coming forward with her story. She had become a heroine, resolute in her desire to "see justice done" and "be reconciled with the past."
This book makes clear that what the Japanese army did was only the worst example of oppression against women in the long history of colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines. It serves as a corroborative text for historians, a call to arms for feminists and human rights activists, and finally, a life-affirming reminder of the indomitability of the human spirit for all readers.
Of particular note is the introduction by Yuki Tanaka, co-author of Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Tanaka provides an incisive overview of both the history of the Japanese military's use of "comfort women" and current efforts to hold Japan accountable.

Jill A. Tardiff is an international book-industry consultant, a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly, and the UN/NGO Alternative Representative for the Women's National Book Association.