This is a work that I wish I picked up much sooner than I actually did. Galang does incredible work here providing these women a spotlight in which they can tell their stories to a world that unfortunately still vastly under-recognizes the trauma committed against them.

The galley was hard to follow. The information seemed to be incohesive and just dumped on the reader. What was done to these women was deplorable and a horrible injustice. The fact that Japan will not take responsibility for their soldiers horrific actions is abominable. The stories were triggering and infuriating. To know these women have been suffering in silence hurts. This book is necessary and should be taught in schools. We must never forget and we must honor these brave filipino women.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Highly recommended read! Thanks for providing through Net Galley. Five Stars *****

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. I enjoyed it very much!

During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army forced over 400,000 women into sexual slavery; though the Korean comfort women have been recognized for a long time, the survivors in the Philippines lived with the trauma and appalling social stigmatization for decades, unheard. Recently 173 of them, now very elderly, filed suit against the Japanese government. This collection includes interviews with 16 Filipina women whose lives were ruined by this atrocity. Thanks go to Net Galley and Northwestern University Press for the DRC, which I received early and free in exchange for this honest review. The collection is for sale now.

This is a rough read, hard to push through for the very thing that makes it valuable: it tells the women’s experiences in their own words. And they want to be heard. For decades, nobody, including their own families, has been willing to listen to them. After experiencing cruel, sadistic torture, they were greeted, upon the army’s departure, as social pariahs. Their countrymen let them know that nobody wants anything to do with a woman that’s been touched, penetrated, harmed in many unspeakable ways by the Japanese. They were called “Japanese leftovers.” Thus, their nightmare at the hands of the enemy was worsened by a subsequent nightmare at the hands of those they thought would console them.

And so as you can imagine, it’s not an enjoyable book. It isn’t intended to be.

Galang is also Filipina, and she weaves her own story in with that of her subjects. I would have preferred that she restrict herself to the topic; whereas including her own memoir may be cathartic, it also slows the pace. There are also snippets of untranslated Tagalog, and although this may resonate for those that are bilingual, context didn’t make the passages clear much of the time, and so I was left with the choice to either run to my desktop, type in the passages, translate them and return to the text, or just skip them and read on. It didn’t take me long to decide on the latter.

So as a general read for the lover of history, I can’t recommend this book, but for the researcher, it’s a gold mine. There is information here that you won’t find anywhere else. There are primary documents end to end here. I can imagine any number of thesis topics for which this work would be pivotal.

For the researcher, this is a four star read.

Honestly, this one is incredibly hard to read and I had to tackle it in chunks so as not to get too downhearted about the awful history involved here.

Lola's House tells the tales of a number of 'comfort women', girls and adult women abducted and brutalised by the Japanese during World War II. These women have, since first emerging to tell their tales in the relatively recent past, been fighting for recognition and apology from the Japanese government. They are now old and slowly passing away one by one.

The 'comfort women' who were interviewed for the stories presented in the book are portrayed exactly as they are and the legitimacy of those voices is key to telling stories like this. In this sense, the author has made an admirable representation of the women in question, and reduced her own participation to that of an observer. It means that the reader sees the tales in the voices of the women themselves. There is no sanitising their experiences and that makes this harder to read than other books which tackle such prevalent violence against women. As a result, it's a must-read for any person who seeks to understand the parts of war that are so rarely discussed, but which leave marks that last forever.

This book will break your heart hearing these women's stories. The fact that they relive their horror each time they tell their stories is unimaginable. They are so brave. This is an important piece of history

This is a very moving account of the author’s collection of first-person stories of Filipina women who were subject to sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War 2. The stories themselves takes a lot out of the reader, but the healing effect of having them heard after 60 years of being buried in their souls was so uplifting the experience. That the institutionalized brothels of “comfort women” by the Japanese military involved kidnapping, rape, and effective slavery for more than 200,000 women and girls throughout the Pacific theater of the war only came to light in the 90’s is deeply disturbing. Galang’s work contributes importantly to the efforts of survivors to get an official state apology, reparations, and inclusion of the policy and practice into the education provided for the public for the benefit of future generations.

Galang is a Filipina American who first heard some of the stories of abuse from the elderly lolas (grandmothers) when she came to Manila in 1998 on a project for her TV production work. Given the limited work on documenting testimonies from the victims, then in their 70s and 80s, she obtained a Fulbright fellowship to pursue this work in 2001-2002. Her method was slowly forge trust with the women who had held their secrets in shame for so long. Of the thousand or so women identified as victims, 124 came forward to various investigators to in some way reveal their experiences, and among these Galang worked in-depth with 14 of them. A building and center dedicated to such work under foundation funding served as a base of operations. Galang’s strategy was to bring teen-aged girls into listening circles with the lolas in order to make their accounts serve as a message across the generations. She travelled with the lolas to the communities of the Philippine islands where they lived at the time of their abduction and the sites where they were abused and slaved. Only when the women were ready did she subject them to a formal interview on camera.

The reader needs this slow process to be able to deal with their stories. The author’s initial difficulties with understanding their language buffered her somewhat from experiencing too directly much of their trauma herself, leading her to the healing power of communication by touch:

"Mostly, the experience of recording these testimonies was visceral. My Tagalog eventually straightened itself out and their English found meaning, but in the beginning we spoke with our hands. The kwentos [stories] of the lolas were written on the spines of their backs. Often, they guided my fingers to their wounds. I read them, slowly, tentatively, my touch light and respectful. Unlike broken sentences of English and Tagalog and Waray, the scars needed no translation.

I set my hand at the base of an old woman’s spine, or in the hollow between her breasts, or in the meat of a calf. The tips of my fingers examined the shape of a scar, the size of a bump, its density. A cigarette urn. A bayonet wound. A crooked finger. My skin absorbed the memory and I whispered 'Yes, Lola. I know, Lola'” Together we searched for her lost voice. Was it here in her chest, was it embedded in the thigh, was it stuck in the throat or weighed down in the belly? We strained to hear and we were hoping to set that calamity free, to stop it from happening again.."

Some women after the war found support and empathy from their families. But sadly, in many cases, their family and community failed to understand and held them blameworthy somehow for submitting to their abuse. One has to read between the lines to feel the horror of this muted account:
"When they found my mister, they brought him and the boy before me. He looked at me for a long time and I waited for him to embrace me, but he did not.
'I thought you had died,' he told me. I shook my head. I cried. I waited. Nothing. I explained to him what had happened and when he spoke, his voice was bitter.
…My mister took me home, but he did not forgive me.</i>

Eventually, Galang and the reader cross the threshold to the worst of the stories. In one, we hear of how a twelve-year old experienced a home invasion by soldiers, the skinning alive of her father, and the bayonetting of her infant siblings. It seems impossible she could still exist after this and then go on to being brutally raped and then be subject to months of being raped by dozens nightly and slave work, beatings, and near starvation by day. No one can really digest these words. Many of Galang’s translators quit. She herself was laid low by incorporating the stories into her being. Meditation, dancing, and song provided some mitigation. Marching with protesters for official government demands from Japan for formal acknowledgement and reparations was another outlet. We can only guess that the psychological burden on Galang might have something to do with why it took so long for this book to be completed. No wonder she herself was so shaken by the mysterious suicide of Iris Chang in 2004 in the aftermath of completing her book on the mass slaughter and raping in Shanghai in 1937-38:

"I cannot help myself. I mourn. She was a daughter of Chinese immigrants, an American writer who went abroad to document the narratives of those Chinese survivors of the Nanking Massacre for her book The Rape of Nanking. I can never know what happened, but I can only imagine how she felt. I know what it means to be born an American of immigrant parents, and to return to that homeland to hear the stories of wartime rape and torture on your elders, to feel the drive to right that wrong. To make a promise to see that justice done in the face of the impossible. Even if your only weapons are words, are testimonies, are stories.".

I render four stars instead of five only because of some limitations in the organization of the presentation and scope of its inquiry. You won’t get from the reading an examination of the origins and causes of war crimes against women as Chang provided in her “The Rape of Nanking.” Nor does the reader get a detailed perspective on the fruitful work of individuals and organizations to stop the sexual slavery of girls today, as was so effectively provided by Kristof and WuDunn in their “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.” But as a reader we do get the opportunity for the first step bearing witness to the individual tragedies that resulted from an otherwise faceless horrific policy:

"These women believed telling their stories would keep their daughters and granddaughters safe. They had faith that their fight for just compensation, an apology, and documentation in history books would keep this story from happening again.
That apology has yet to come. Government compensation to all “comfort women” has not been paid. And perhaps worst of all, the Japanese government has done its best to erase the women from our communal memory. Such stories repeat themselves even today. See it in Bosnia. See it in Syria. See it in the Congo.".

For more perspective on the history of “comfort women” throughout the Pacific region of Japanese occupation and the politics behind the progress toward official government recognition, I refer you to the excellent Wikipedia account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women . For a brief video of Galang engaging the prospective reader of the book, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=405m2pRdk6k.

I received an ARE of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest review.

We are immersed in paragraphs and passages which describe Filipino women's memories of their experience during the Second World War, when the Filipines was invaded by the Japanese.
We read of abductions into sexual slavery, the witnessing of atrocities against their family members, the witnessing of rape and torture of other women and young girls in the 'camps' set up by the invading Japanese army.

The author is a researcher and she mixes passages from the survivors, with her own impressions of them and of their lives currently at Lola's House, where the women meet after a campaign to 'out' the atrocities of the war, supported by the Filipino media and international women's organisations.
The author, herself with Filipino ancestry, is clearly moved by the women and their lives. When she first goes to interview the women, she takes with her several young American girls who befriend the survivors and we also see the reactions of these young girls. I found this mix riveting and we really experience the girls' view of the women.

The survivors accounts are horrific.
They are told by women now in the eighties and nineties, many of whom had never told their family members what they suffered. They kept their experiences a secret because of the shame piled on them by society after the war.
This was made more complicated (I understand) by the fact that many villagers fought as guerrillas and fled to the mountains, whereas the camps were in the cities and urban areas full of Japanese (therefore there were few actual Filipino witnesses who were not either imprisoned themselves or collaborators).

At the end of this book, I felt the most sadness over the fact that the women's hopes and campaigning for an official apology from the Japanese government, have not been realised - even after years of fighting for justice and with the backing of the US Senate.
The women are so old, there will be few left soon.

I found their courage in the telling of their stories deeply moving.
I was glad to be an honest witness to their experiences and felt the reading of the book to be an act of solidarity - in defiance of the lack of political will to recognise how terribly these women suffered at the time and then throughout their lives in the silence.

I also could not help thinking of the Japanese perpetrators and whether any of them are still alive. Since most of the women were abducted when they were young (12, 13, 14 years old...) and the soldiers were older then I suppose this is unlikely.

The photographs in the book make each of the women more real.
Congratulations to the author for her work in documenting these important stories.

I give this book 5 stars for the women's stories.

I dropped it to 4 stars because of the style of documenting, in which the experiences are mixed in with reflections, campaigning, visits to the women's home villages - but this was not done in a linear manner and made it a little difficult at times to follow the threads.

The women felt very real to me and this is a book that will stay in my mind for a long time.

This was a powerfully moving read. I had read a novel about Japanese comfort women previously, and was thus immediately interested in another nation's perspective. Part of a larger project by the author, the book weaves between the narrative of the project, the testimonies of the women, and other poignant moments throughout the history of the war and the women themselves. I was immediately drawn in to writing, and found it hard to put down even through the harsh realities that these women suffered through.

I enjoyed that the author left the testimonies somewhat untranslated, preserving the language of the lolas and the integrity of the stories. The most powerful piece for me was the tapestry hand-woven by one of the women, depicting the story of her life through textiles. Even in black and white, it was stunning.

The importance of this book, and these stories, cannot be overstated. There were so many moments of laughter and joy captured in the snapshots of their personalities ... and so many moments where I was SO ANGRY on behalf of these women for the way the governments in both the Philippines and Japan were dismissive of their trauma. Be prepared to laugh, and to cry, and to leave with a greater sense of empathy and anger over the injustices that so often go unacknowledged in this world.

I had only encountered M Evelina Galang's brilliant works of fiction but the revelation that is this culmination of her research on women's war wounds is meaningful and should be read by all!

Content Warning: This book contains explicit descriptions of rape and torture that could be triggering to some survivors.

Lolas' House is part history book, part memoir, and part biography. Eveline Galang interviews sixteen women who survived imprisonment as Japanese "comfort women" during World War II. These "women" were most often young girls, barely teenagers, stolen off the streets while running errands with siblings. They watched as parents, siblings, and spouses were tortured and murdered before they themselves are hauled away and forced into sexual slavery.

Galang mingles her own personal narrative with the testimonies of the survivors and the history of Filipino life during WWII. It is impossible to not be moved by the strength of these women. They have experienced the worst that humanity has to offer. Not only were they stolen from their homes as children but after daily rapes and slavery, many were rejected by their families upon their return. Yet, the women pushed on and now as very old women, they are fighting the Japanese government.

The only real issue with the book is that it immersed in the history and culture of the Filipino people. As someone outside of that circle, I would have liked a little more context around some of the traditions that are discussed. Likewise, there is some dialogue that is in the original languages of the women. This is noted in the author's introduction but it was difficult to understand the longer passages. However, this in no way diminishes the book for me -- it's still an exceptionally moving read.

Lolas' House comes at a pivotal moment. Many of the lolas express their desire to end war. They say over and over that they hope to keep other children safe from this fate. With the world poised on the edge of the cliff, I would behoove everyone to read Galang's book. It is an incredibly powerful testimony to the horrors of war and the power of the human spirit to persevere. We cannot let this happen again.