‘Comfort Women’ survivors fight on

The Apology

You can almost feel the government of Japan running out the clock. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of females in occupied territories were forced into slavery as “comfort women,” to be raped by Japanese soldiers. Today, a handful of survivors, most in their 90s, continue to press the government for reparations and, more importantly, an apology.

This debut documentary from Toronto-based filmmaker Tiffany Hsiung examines the lives of three former comfort women, now given the honorific “grandmother.” They are Grandma Gil in South Korea, Grandma Cao from China, and Grandma Adela in the Philippines.

Each woman’s story contains heartbreaking details that include children born and killed during the war, adoptions later in life due to infertility and family members sometimes unaware of the grandmothers’ traumatic past. In Korea, a weekly protest in front of the Japanese embassy has been continuing since 1992 — even as the survivors dwindle, the crowds calling for justice continue to grow. And in the Philippines we visit a ruined building that once served as a “comfort station.”

Hsiung shot her film over several years, and wraps at the United Nations in Geneva, where several of the grandmothers travelled in 2014 to make their case, bolstered by thousands of signed petitions from around the world. (Alas, one of the three main subjects doesn’t live to see this.) It’s a powerful testimony, livened by a bit of gallows humour from the grandmothers themselves. “If we all die, who are they going to apologize to?” asks Adela at one point.

The documentary could benefit from a little more context — Japanese officials have in fact expressed regret many times over the years for the country’s wartime actions, and in late 2015 apologized — though, oddly, only to South Korea, and with wording still deemed insufficient by many victims’ representatives. And it would have been nice to hear a Japanese response in the film, aside from the civilians shouting down a street protest, and a young girl moved to tears by one grandmother’s story.

But Hsiung clearly wanted to focus on several specific individuals, whose good humour and perseverance shine through in The Apology. It is one thing to talk about thousands of victims; quite another to look into the eyes of just three. ★★★

A scene from the movie The Apology shows Grandma Gil being greeted by South Korean students.