When Sharon Silva, coordinator of the Philippines’ “Grandmothers’ Alliance,” speaks of the country’s surviving “comfort women,” she does so with the urgency of someone relaying a dying mandate rather than a petition. Over decades these women — known locally as “grandmothers” — have marched outside the Japanese embassy and the presidential palace, demanding acknowledgment, apology and compensation for crimes committed during the 1942–45 occupation.
Silva says archival estimates put the number of Filipino women conscripted as comfort women at roughly 1,000, though she and other campaigners suspect the true figure is higher. Some 174 victims have joined the alliance over the years, but only a handful remain alive today; many others, like the survivor Estrelita who was abducted at 14 in 1944 and died in 2024 aged 94, never lived to see what they called justice.
The story the grandmothers tell is not only one of sexual violence but also of lifelong marginalization. Victims were largely unable to complete education or enter formal employment; many never left their home provinces and spent their lives in poverty, their experiences hidden or shamed into silence until late in life.
Memory, and the fight over it, has become as important to activists as legal redress. Silva warns that political pressure and revisionist currents in Japan have eroded public acknowledgement of wartime atrocities. Campaigners point to the disappearance of a “comfort women” bronze statue on Manila Bay — removed, they allege, after diplomatic pressure — as emblematic of a broader contest over history.
The dispute over apologies and compensation has long shadowed East Asian diplomacy. Tokyo’s gestures since the 1990s — including statements of remorse, a controversial 2015 South Korea–Japan agreement, and various compensation schemes — have repeatedly been criticized as insufficient by survivors, their advocates and some regional governments. At the same time, successive Japanese governments have moved to normalize a more assertive defence posture and expand arms sales, prompting unease among neighbours who view such shifts in the context of historical memory.
For the Philippines, the issue sits at the intersection of human rights, national memory and geopolitical alignment. Manila has deepened security ties with Tokyo in recent decades, a development driven by concerns over China’s maritime assertiveness and a desire to diversify strategic partnerships. That pragmatism, activists warn, risks sidelining moral accountability and silencing victim voices.
With the survivors rapidly passing away, Silva and her colleagues frame their campaign as a duty to future generations. Preserving testimony, protecting memorials and ensuring that school curricula reflect the wartime record are, they say, essential to prevent recurrence. The broader implication is clear: unresolved historical grievances continue to shape domestic consciousness and international relations in Asia, even eighty years after the war.
The campaign is also a test for Tokyo’s soft power and regional credibility. An explicit, sustained apology and meaningful compensation would not only address a moral debt to victims and their families; it would also reduce the leverage of revisionist narratives that complicate Japan’s security partnerships. Conversely, continued denial or equivocation risks fueling resentment that can be mobilized politically within the Philippines and across Asia.