♪♪
-Today, these five Filipina women,
all in their 80s and 90s,
are uniting for the first time in two years.
It's a bittersweet moment,
as they all share part of the same painful history.
More than 75 years ago, during World War II,
they were held against their will
and raped over the course of weeks and months
by members of the Japanese Imperial Army.
♪♪
Estelita Dy was 12 years old when she was kidnapped.
-When we got off the truck,
we were taken to a house with rooms.
I was thrown into the house.
After a while, a Japanese soldier arrived.
He put his arms around me and raped me.
-Dy is a member of Lila-Pilipina, an organization
working to give these former so-called "comfort women"
the recognition and justice they demand.
It's been a difficult road.
Comfort women are more often associated with South Korea,
but during the war, Japanese soldiers and officers kidnapped
and raped thousands of women across Asia.
-You were outnumbered. You'd be suffering.
If you said no, they'd hit you with horse's whips,
burn you with cigarettes.
-The Japanese government has not formally apologized
for war crimes involving forced sexual slavery.
Survivors and their advocates
put part of the blame on the Philippine government.
Japan is now one of the Philippines' top investors.
The economic partnership is largely seen
as the biggest deterrent,
keeping the government from pushing Japan too hard
on the issue.
-It's a matter of justice
that the Philippine and Japanese governments
address the question of the military sexual slavery
that was done to Filipino women during World War II,
not only because of the trauma and the sufferings
that the women have undergone, along with the families,
because the trauma does not go away easily.
It passes onto the generations, long after the war is gone.
-Last year, President Rodrigo Duterte said
he did not want to antagonize Japan.
More than seven decades removed
from the Japanese invasion of the Philippines,
Lila-Pilipina has just eight members left,
and time is running out for them.
-We do not want sexual violence of any form to happen
to any woman in any country,
and so we try to keep the memory and the stories
of our lolas alive.
♪♪
