Whatever Happened To ... The WW II Sex Slaves Fighting For Justice?
Oxygen tank at her side, Isabelita Vinuya, 88, struggles as she sits up in her bed, too weak to stand and too listless to talk about the cause that animated her life the past 25 years. She organized the "Malaya Lolas," women who endured the Japanese Imperial Army's system of sexual slavery during its occupation of the Philippines in World War II. NPR's radio and digital account of the survivors' stories — and their decades-long struggle to win reparations from Japan — was honored with the Edward R. Murrow Award by the Radio Television Digital News Association and named a finalist in the Online Journalism Awards for Excellence in Audio-Digital Storytelling. Here's an update on how the surviving Lolas are faring.
When we first met the survivors known as "Lolas," Filipino for grandmother, in the summer of 2019, they numbered only a few dozen. In their 80s and 90s, they were girls in the 1940s when soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army systematically raped and brutalized them. Historians estimate that some 200,000 women were victimized by Japanese soldiers in parts of Asia occupied by Japan. For 50 years the survivors in the Philippines buried the
