EXHIBITS
There Were Children on the Battleground: Japanese and Filipino Youth in the Second World War: Violence In the Philippines
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Violence in the Philippines
On the other side of the war, many Filipino youth vividly remember cruel acts of Japanese soldiers that occurred throughout the occupation. Romey Zapata was six years old when Japanese soldiers killed half of his family. They arrested and killed his father and then proceeded to bayonet three of Romey’s siblings all of whom were under ten years old. After the bloodshed, they then burned down the family’s house.[1] While these acts were not rare during Japan’s occupation, they escalated near at the end of the war.
The Memories of a Comfort Woman
Out of all Filipino youth, child and adolescent comfort women had some of the most harrowing experiences. Throughout the occupation, Japanese soldiers often kidnapped and sexually assaulted young women. Dolores Pasaring Molina was only fourteen years old when Japanese soldiers abducted her. She recalls:
“At first I resisted. I struggled with two grown Japanese soldiers. But they only slapped me as they dragged me along the dirt roads. They threw me into a classroom. They hung clothing like curtains to divide seven girls and women. There were three soldiers—an old one, a young man, and the other my mind will not recall…
I wasn’t awake with the third one.
Hours later, I woke up and found myself on the tiles of an unwashed bathroom floor, bleeding. Other female victims surrounded me. They soaked old rags in cool water, and they were bathing me. What I remember is the crying. They placed the rag there between my legs to bring the swelling down. Imagine, they just keep coming again and again, just as you are recovering from the previous assault. I think I was there for maybe one month.”[1]
Dolores Molina was highly traumatized by her captivity. After she escaped one month later, she reunited with her mother who did not recognize her. Hugging her mother, she told her “It’s me, your child!” to which her mother responded “You are nothing…I have lost my child. You are nothing.” Dolores explained that her mother had lost her mind after she was abducted, and she never regained her sanity even after the war was over.[2]
Many young adolescents and their parents were very aware of the sexual assaults of Japanese soldiers, so they discovered ways to combat it. There are several accounts that describe how parents would have their daughters purposely mess up their hair, not bathe, and cover their faces with ash so that they would not appear desirable.[3] Some parents even put their teenage daughters under “house arrest” to protect them.[4] Perhaps one of the most unusual ways Filipino adolescents made themselves undesirable was by smearing chicken blood on their skirts to imitate menstruation.[5]
Japanese and American Bombardment
Like Japanese youth, Filipino youth also experienced bombings, which occurred at the very beginning and very end of the occupation. During the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, the Japanese primarily targeted U.S. military centers such as Clark Airfield, which practically destroyed the U.S. Airforce in the Philippines, but they also bombed residential areas causing many Filipinos to evacuate the cities.[6] It was not until 1945 that the Philippines experienced bombings again, this time from the U.S. ‘liberators.’ Marcela Sayo Talusig was eight when the U.S. forces fought Japanese forces for control of Manilla. She recalls that “bombs fell all over the place” and that many of the houses, including her own, burned down.[7] It is not clear if these bombs came from artillery weapons or airplanes, but both occurred. Rogelio David was also eight when he experienced American bombs. He recalls “The Americans were hitting the highways, thinking that’s where the Japanese were, but they didn’t know that it was the civilians they were hitting.” Marcelo also explains that some of the bombs were parachute bombs, which starving Filipinos ran towards thinking they were a box of food.[8] In all of the chaos that ensued at the end of the occupation, U.S. shelling and bombs may have resulted in as much as 40% of Filipino civilian deaths during the Battle of Manilla, illustrating the complicated nature of liberation.[9]
Shell Shock
Unsurprisingly, some youth were extremely traumatized by the violence. After Japanese soldiers massacred his family Fernando Vasquez-Prada could not talk for two years. He recounts:
“One day, I was sitting on the stairs and cried and cried and then talked. But for seven years, a recurring nightmare was of me running down the street into a telephone booth and the Japanese would come in and kill me. When I was seven at La Salle, the year after I started schooling after I could talk again, they held a memorial mass every year on February 12, an open casket at the foot of the altar. The first two years of these annual masses, I fainted.”[10]
Even years after the war many adolescents became shell-shocked by their experiences during the war, some of which plagued them for the rest of their lives.
