Japan’s wartime past weighs on growing military role in Philippines

Philippine and Japanese aircraft patrol during a joint military exercise in February.

Photo: Armed Forces of the Philippines-Public Affairs Office / AFP As Japanese combat troops prepare to join war games in the Philippines next month – their first return to Philippine soil since 1945 – some Filipinos say the real issue is not only what Japan is doing now, but what it still has not fully reckoned with from the past.

For survivors, activists and historians, Tokyo’s expanding security role in the Philippines has revived what one campaigner called “the elephant in the room” – the absence, in their view, of a formal state apology and official reparations for Japan’s wartime atrocities, especially the abuse of Filipino “comfort women”, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.

For some, that unresolved history is reason enough to oppose Japan’s return in any military capacity. “We oppose the return of Japanese troops on Philippine soil,” Sharon Cabusao-Silva, executive director and coordinator of the Lila Pilipina group of former “comfort women”, told This Week in Asia on Sunday.

In 1993, 18 members of the group filed a lawsuit at the Tokyo District Court demanding an official apology and compensation from the Japanese government.

It failed.

Today, only 19 of the group’s original 200 members are alive.

A statue representing the “comfort women” in Manila, the Philippines, in 2017.

Photo: Xinhua Cabusao-Silva, a women’s rights activist, said Lila’s three demands remained: “a public, official apology from the government of Japan”; official reparations for the harm done; and “historical inclusion” of the “comfort women system” in students’ schoolbooks.

She argued that Tokyo’s Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) with Manila, ratified by the Diet last June, violated the peace clause of the Japanese constitution because it “allows the unhampered movement of Japanese troops and war material in the country, and even makes the country a recipient or storage for the missile systems Japan plans to develop”.

Cabusao-Silva also said many young Japanese were not educated on the full extent of wartime atrocities.

While some of Japan’s former leaders, including Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1983 and Junichiro Koizumi in 2003, had apologised for the atrocities, Cabusao-Silva said these were “personal apologies which do not carry the weight of official policy” and no measures were taken to “make the apology sincere”.

She pointed out that Japan in 2017, under

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