Breaking the Silence on Forced Sexual Servitude
Katrin Figge
Australian Jan Ruff O’Herne grew up in Java during the final decades of the Dutch administration. When she was 19 years old, the Japanese invaded Java, and Jan and her family were brought to a prison camp. Later, Jan was separated from her family and was taken to a military brothel along with other young, unmarried women.
She is one of the so-called “comfort women,” victims of sexual violence during World War II, who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese military.
After years of silence, some of those women have finally come forth and told their stories. In Jakarta, a book launch and exhibition in 2010 at the Erasmus Huis was among the first forays into this dark chapter of World War II.
O’Herne is also profiled in a new book titled “Meetings With Remarkable Asian Women,” by Chris Ashton, who has been living and working in Asia since 1984.
In his book, Ashton introduces nine Asian women, or, as in O’Herne’s case, women who spent a significant amount of time in Asia. They are, as he writes, “classy women.”
“ ‘Classy’ of course means a well developed sense of personal integrity,” he says. “When identifying this group, I wasn’t looking for victims. I was looking for dynamic women with an essentially positive attitude. Women who wanted to contribute rather than just take. Women who could transcend their own suffering and look to the greater good.”
He first explored the idea this book after observing that women in the Western world who referred to themselves as feminists “were actually aping some of the worst traits of the men they professed to despise,” and that radical feminism had become somewhat destructive.
To find a counterpoint to his observation, Ashton began interviewing women in Asia.
“The ideas explored in these interviews deal with identity, self-reliance, justice and good positive attitude,” he writes. “Even though a number of these women are real victims, they have little of the sense of victimhood, instead they have risen above their own suffering and learned to nurture other people and the culture around them.”
The nine women in the book have lived in or hail from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and Tibet.
Ashton has written a short introduction to each chapter, but then lets the women speak for themselves, which gives the book a pressing authenticity, as the stories are told through the eyes of those who have lived them.
O’Herne is the first woman to lend her voice, and her experience is as heartbreaking as it is important.
Her detailed account of being raped night after night by Japanese military officers may be gruesome, but it is a story that needs to be told. The damage can never be repaired nor the torture ever be forgotten.
One of the reasons that these women have been silent for so long was the shame they felt. But after eventually speaking out, O’Herne has become one of the most outspoken campaigners for justice.
“I have a message to give to the world,” she wrote. “This is quite a wonderful thing to have that late in life. When other people think this is the end and they are going to retire, I feel that I am only just beginning and that I have a great task in front of me.”
Another woman profiled by Ashton is Vietnamese-American Le Ly Hayslip, whose life story was the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1993 movie “Heaven & Earth.”
She left her home country during the Vietnam War with her American husband and has returned to Vietnam many times since then to relentlessly heal the wounds the war left on herself and her people through her organization, the East Meets West Foundation.
She grew up in a small town that was soon shattered by war. At 14, she was tortured in a South Vietnamese government prison for “revolutionary sympathies.”
After her release, Hayslip was under suspicion of being a spy and was raped by Viet Cong soldiers. When she moved to the United States with her husband, she struggled to adapt to the foreign culture and was regarded a traitor by her own people.
“Even people I had expected to understand me, to be sympathetic to my ambitions, began to look down on me and called me names,” she said in the book.
Despite all the bad experiences she found a way past it all.
“If you have a bad experience, you let it go. You should feed on it; you should use its energy, don’t let it feed on you.”
Other women in the book include Riga Wangyal, who was born in Tibet when it was still an independent nation, but then became a refugee when the kingdom was invaded by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army; Evelyn Lip from Singapore, who grew up during the war in Malaya but is now a successful feng shui practitioner and writer; and Indonesian Ully Sigar Rusadi, a folk singer who is renowned for her environmental work and has set up a foundation that helps street children in Jakarta.
Even though they all have different stories and backgrounds, the women profiled in this book all have one thing in common: when facing tough challenges they decided to move forward and they never lose compassion.
The book itself is a compelling read but Ashton has also achieved something else: the reader is able to get a glimpse into Asia’s history, and how things have changed since World War II.
Meetings With Remarkable Asian Women
By Chris Ashton
Published by Quicksilver Books
183 pages
For more information, visit: www.remarkableasiawomen.org