ITU BUKAN KEMAUAN SAYA

The images in the following video are taken from Eka Hindra’s (an independent Comfort Women researcher) documents of comfort women from Asia. The voice is that of Mardiyem when she was interviewed. Mardiyem was a young Javanese girl who was tricked into being a comfort woman when she was only 13 years of age. She was given the name Momoye when she was forced to serve as a sex slave for a number of years (1942 – 1945), in a brothel under the Japanese Imperial Army. She was only one of the 200,000 Comfort Women or Jugun Ianfu, who were sex slaves, either falsely recruited or kidnapped from Korea, China, Taiwan, Phillipines, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and Timor Leste, and placed in camps ran by the Japanese Military .

After the war, these Comfort Women had to live in shame, not daring to reveal their shameful and traumatic years as sex slaves, for fear of rejection from their families and society. Many of these war survivors are in states of poverty because they could not get decent jobs as they were stamped as ex-prostitutes (if they reveal their past). The trauma of having to service tens of soldiers a day, left physical as well as psychological marks on them.