MANILA, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- Up to 30 Philippine activists took to the streets on Wednesday to condemn Japan's refusal to "repent for its wartime atrocities" 74 years after the end of World War II.
The protesters, led by Lila Pilipina (League of Filipino Women), said the Japanese government "has now in fact embarked on a brazen campaign to obliterate the world's memory of this historical fact by silencing all efforts to commemorate and by causing the removal of all memorials related to the issue."
Lila Pilipina is a Manila-based organization of Filipino victims of wartime sexual slavery and their sympathizers.
The rally was held to commemorate the international day honoring the memory of victims in Asian countries occupied by Japan during World War II.
"Many of (the victims) have since passed away without seeing the real justice they have long fought for," Lila Pilipina executive director Sharon Cabusao-Silva said, referring to the Asian women forced to work as sex slaves in Japanese military brothels during WWII.
During the war, the Japanese Imperial Army forced hundreds of thousands of women - euphemistically called comfort women - into military brothels.
At the rally, the protesters denounced Japan's "heightened bareness at censoring memorials and art events that commemorate Japanese wartime atrocities."
Silva said the Philippines "stands in solidarity" with the campaign against censorship in Japan as manifested by the recent closure of an exhibit that tackles the lives of Asian comfort women in Nagoya "due to threats from pro-government rightwing forces."
The art exhibit was held in Nagoya in Aichi prefecture, Japan. A section of the exhibit featured a girl of peace statue and photographs of comfort women from various Asian countries.
"The struggle for justice for the comfort women has thus branched out into a struggle for freedom of expression," Silva added.
In the Philippines, there are more than 200 who came out in the open in the 1990s to tell their harrowing experience with the Japanese military. There are only a few of them alive now, mostly in their 80s and sick.
Like the other Asian victims, the Filipino comfort women also demand an official apology from the Japanese government, compensation, and inclusion of the comfort women issue in Japan's historical accounts and textbooks.
