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MANILA: The tears trickle down Virginia Villarma's weathered face as she recalls the day back in 1943 when she lost her youth and her innocence.
Sent out by her aunt to get some food she was attacked by a group of Japanese soldiers on a suburban Manila street and tossed like an animal into the back of a jeep.
Then just 14 years old, she was taken to a barracks in the port area and thrown into a bare room where she was stripped and raped repeatedly by soldiers, three or four at a time.
At first she screamed and tried to fight off her attackers but they punched and kicked her tiny body until she passed out.
When Villarma awoke the room was silent but the pain has stayed with her for ever.
"That is when my hell began," the soft-spoken 78-year-old grandmother said as she wrapped and unwrapped a pink handkerchief around her fingers.
Occasionally she would stop and take off her gold rimmed glasses and dab her eyes.
"I want people to know what happened to us back then and why we who are left will never give up until Japan formally apologises to all of us - living and dead - for what they did.
"For three months I was abused from morning to night. They were the longest three months of my life."
An allied bombing raid saved Villarma from more abuse and in the confusion she managed to escape but her life had been changed forever.
In later years, when her husband found out she had been a sex slave for the Japanese, he walked out on her and their five children.
When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told parliament earlier this month there was no evidence Japanese troops forced sex slaves into brothels during the Second World War he again turned the spotlight on a large group of women who have become known as the "forgotten ones".
They came from many parts of Asia, some are now dead, many could never marry because of the shame, some were so brutalised they could never have children while others just shut themselves away from society all together.
Japan would prefer to ignore this part of its war time history but grey haired women like Villarma and her friend Simeona Ramil, 79, also brutalised as a sex slave, will never allow Japan to forget.
From Indonesia to China as many as 200,000 women, some as young as 12, were used as sex slaves according to a report by Amnesty International in 2005.
Despite the widespread prevalence of what was essentially institutionalised rape the issue of comfort women was ignored by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that was established after the war to prosecute Japanese war criminals.
For decades these women remained silent hoping the nightmares would go away.
Only in the 1990s did survivors start to speak out about their ordeal.
Women like Jan Ruff-O'Herne, born in Java in 1923 in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), has become an international advocate for the protection of women in war.
She was 19 when the Japanese invaded Indonesia.
Together with thousands of women and children she was interned in a prison camp for three and a half years.
"Many stories have been told about the horrors, brutalities, suffering and starvation of Dutch women in Japanese prison camps," she told the US House of Representatives' hearing on "Protecting the Human Rights of Comfort Women" in February.
"But one story was never told, the most shameful story of the worst human rights abuse committed by the Japanese during World War II ... the story of the 'comfort women' and how these women were forcibly seized against their will, to provide sexual services for the Japanese Imperial Army."
Now living in Australia where she has a grown family, Ruff-O'Herne told how in 1944 high ranking Japanese officers arrived at the camp and selected 10 "pretty girls".
"I was one of the 10," she said. Despite protests from their families the girls were packed into the back of a truck and driven to a Dutch colonial house used by the Japanese as a brothel.
"We were a very innocent generation," she told the congressmen.
"I knew nothing about sex. The horrific memories of 'opening night' of the brothel have tortured my mind all my life.
"We were told to go to the dining room, and we huddled together in fear, as we saw the house filling up with military. I got out my prayer book and led the girls in prayer in the hope that this would help us.
"Then they started to drag us away, one by one. I could hear the screaming coming from the bedrooms. I hid under the table, but was soon found. I fought him. I kicked him with all my might.
"The Japanese officer became angry because I would not give myself to him. He took his sword out of its scabbard and pointed it at me, threatening me.
"I curled myself into a corner, like a hunted animal that could not escape.
"He then threw me on the bed and ripped off all my clothes. He ran his sword all over my naked body, and played with me as a cat would with a mouse.
"I still tried to fight him, but he thrust himself on top of me, pinning me down under his heavy body. The tears were streaming down my face as he raped me in a most brutal way. I thought he would never stop.
"When he eventually left the room, my whole body was shaking. I gathered up what was left of my clothing, and fled into the bathroom.
"There I found some of the other girls. We were all crying, and in total shock. In the bathroom I tried to wash away all the dirt and the shame off my body. Just wash it away.
"But the night was not over, there were more Japanese waiting, and this went on all night. It was only the beginning, week after week, month after month."
Gil Won-Ock, an 80-year-old South Korean woman, still suffers from flashbacks and nightmares.
"Whenever those vivid, terrifying memories are brought back my heart beats suddenly and I cannot breathe," she said, gasping for breath.
She said Abe only "added insult to injury" when he questioned whether comfort women were forced to serve as wartime sex slaves.
Gil is among a handful of former comfort women who have been meeting outside the Japanese embassy in central Seoul every Wednesday for the past 15 years in a vigil to press Tokyo to officially apologise and pay compensation.
Gil was 13 years old when she was lured by bogus promises of work at a factory and confined to a shack near a Japanese military barracks in the northeastern part of China that housed many other Chinese and Korean girls.
"Because of the infections in the wounds I received in the productive organ, I had to undergo operations four times and had my womb removed," Gil said.
Lee Yong-Soo was 16 when she was "kidnapped" in the southeastern Korean city of Daegu by a Japanese soldier in 1944 and shipped to a brothel in Taiwan.
She was raped, beaten and tortured with electricity when she attempted to escape.
The Wednesday rally recently drew several Japanese activists, including Hiroko Tsubokawa.
"We urge the Japanese government to stop adding pain to those grandmothers (comfort women) and solve this issue immediately," she told the crowd.
Japan has never formally apologised for its sex slavery.
In 1995 it established the Asian Women's Fund but the fund's restriction to private sector donations was seen as the government evading its responsibility.
When Abe said there was no evidence that women had been coerced into sexual slavery, he appeared to be contradicting a statement in 1993 by a senior official in which he voiced "sincere apologies and remorse" acknowledging that Japan's Imperial Army was involved "directly or indirectly" in sexual slavery.
But in the ensuing controversy, Abe has insisted that he does stand by the 1993 apology.
Su Zhiliang, director of the Chinese Comfort Women Research Centre, said: "Abe's remarks are nonsense. Maybe he had some political purpose."
For the most part only a few Chinese women have come forward to tell their story not wanting to bring shame on their families, Su said.
Su claims there were more than 400,000 comfort women in Asia of which 200,000 were Chinese, figures that contradict estimates by groups like Amnesty.
"Many of the victims do not want to recall the nightmare again, that is why so many choose to keep silent," he said.
Four cases filed since 1995 on behalf of Chinese women have all failed in the Japanese courts.
In Taiwan between 1,000 and 2,000 women were forced into sexual slavery, according to lawyer Wang Ching-feng who heads the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation.
Since 1992, however, only 45 women have come forward.
"Some of them died abroad, some killed themselves for what they regarded as shame they have brought to their families, others dared not to let their family or relatives know what they had done before and chose to bury their pain and agony in their minds," Wang said.
She said the Japanese government "must apologise" to the victims and compensate them or their relatives.
"It (the Japanese government) has a moral as well as a legal responsibility," she said.
Now the case has been taken up by US Democratic congressman Michael Honda who is trying to push a motion through the House of Representatives calling on Japan to make a "formal" apology.
"These women have too long been denied their dignity and honour," he told the House in February. - AFP/yy
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