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Japan’s wartime past weighs on growing military role in Philippines

As Japanese combat troops prepare to join war games in the Philippines next month – their first return to Philippine soil since 1945 – some…

By Samantha Johnson / March 31, 2026
As Japanese combat troops prepare to join war games in the Philippines next month – their first return to Philippine soil since 1945 – some Filipinos say the real issue is not only what Japan is doing now, but what it still has not fully reckoned with from the past.

For survivors, activists and historians, Tokyo’s expanding security role in the Philippines has revived what one campaigner called “the elephant in the room” – the absence, in their view, of a formal state apology and official reparations for Japan’s wartime atrocities, especially the abuse of Filipino “comfort women”, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.

For some, that unresolved history is reason enough to oppose Japan’s return in any military capacity.

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“We oppose the return of Japanese troops on Philippine soil,” Sharon Cabusao-Silva, executive director and coordinator of the Lila Pilipina group of former “comfort women”, told This Week in Asia on Sunday.

In 1993, 18 members of the group filed a lawsuit at the Tokyo District Court demanding an official apology and compensation from the Japanese government.

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It failed. Today, only 19 of the group’s original 200 members are alive.

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