Comforting possibility

The visit of Japan’s monarchs, according to a statement from Malacañang, “underscores the abiding friendship between the Japanese and Filipino people” and marks the 60th year of diplomatic ties between two former adversaries.

But the visit of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko is much more than just a goodwill gesture meant to bury painful memories of war losses and grief. It is, most of all, an acknowledgment that in times of crisis, we need all the friends we can summon—from traditional allies like the United States (recently given “rotational” basing rights through a validated Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement) to potential partners who share common interests and see a common enemy.

With China aggressively flexing military muscle over disputed territories in Asia, the visit of Japan’s monarchs is a strong acknowledgment of geopolitics and the need for strategic alliances in maintaining sovereignty.

There is reason to hope, however, that the visit would go beyond ceremonial (but important) acts such as wreath-laying at the shrine of war heroes intended to atone for the brutality of Japan’s imperial army during World War II. Thousands of Filipino “comfort women”—young girls torn from their families during the war years and imprisoned in barracks to serve as sex slaves to “keep up the morale” of Japanese soldiers—may find possible comfort in recent developments.

Although Japan’s officials and its government had for the longest time denied the existence of wartime brothels, dismissing the women held there as “professional prostitutes,” Japan last month apologized to South Korea and agreed to pay about $8.3 million in compensation to Koreans forced or tricked into serving as comfort women. “Japan and South Korea are now entering a new era,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said of the landmark agreement. “We should not drag this problem into the next generation.”

The compensation will come directly from the Japanese government instead of private donors (as was the case previously) and represent a turnabout in the official position espoused by Abe, who had initially been reluctant to admit accountability for Japan’s wartime abuses.

While the agreement had met a mixed reception in South Korea, it inspired a similar demand in Taiwan, where officials called on Japan to grant the same measures to its aggrieved women. “South Korea is only the beginning and Japan should consider how to resolve the issue with the aging comfort women in Taiwan, China, the Philippines and Indonesia who expect an apology and compensation,” said Kang Shu-hua, director of the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation.

The Philippines should do no less and press for the same official apology and compensation long denied its comfort women, now mostly languishing in need in their twilight years. Lost amid the fulsome expression of mutual support is the issue of redress and restitution that both Japan and the Philippines have studiously avoided—during President Aquino’s state visit to Japan in 2014, and again, during this five-day imperial visit, if one were to go with the monarchs’ detailed itinerary. There is no mention of meeting the aggrieved women or their representative, no acknowledgement of their plight.

But perhaps it is not too late to correct this oversight. As allies and partners, Japan and the Philippines should necessarily stand on equal footing.

Japan’s apology to South Korea was simple and straightforward. “The issue of ‘comfort women’ was a matter which, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, severely injured the honor and dignity of many women,” the foreign minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, said as he read from the agreement at a news conference in Seoul in December. “In this regard, the government of Japan painfully acknowledges its responsibility.”

With the landmark agreement between Japan and South Korea, perhaps the Filipino comfort women’s petition rejected by the Supreme Court in 2010—that it compel the Philippine government to take up their cause of seeking a formal apology from the Japanese government for the wartime abuse they endured—can be refiled.

After all, with this festering issue standing between the two countries, how can the Philippines reach out and embrace the “strategic partnership” with Japan meant to bind us against a common foe?