When the Japanese Imperial Forces occupied the Philippines in early 1942, Fernando Amorsolo’s subject matter, sketched or on canvas, altered considerably.

Countryside scenes in rich sunset hues, peasant women in native blouses holding baskets under luxuriant mango trees, farm girls with colorful bandanas ankle deep in rice planting, these and other scenes forming the staple of Amorsolo’s works of the 1930’s were suddenly replaced with the horrors of war.

Unable to venture to the countryside and often deprived of precious painting materials, Amorsolo sketched the people of Manila, fleeing the city on foot, pushing carts containing their most precious possessions. He sketched and painted burning buildings, bombed districts, pockmarked churches and ruined avenues.

Amorsolo metamorphosed from a painter of timeless, idyllic folk scenes to that of a documentary painter, capturing on canvas the destruction of landmark buildings like the Intendencia, the San Francisco Church, the Manila Cathedral, whole sections of debris laden Intramuros and various burned districts of Manila. In some instances, Amorsolo meticulously noted the time of day he painted a scene or noted the first names of people he sketched.

Amorsolo drew the lives and circumstances of many Filipina women subjected to the privations and sufferings of war. He sketched mothers clutching children fleeing burning ruins, painted a woman bayoneted by a Japanese soldier as her child cries on the ground, a grieving mother over her dead soldier son, and women and children scavenging for anything to eat. In many of these scenes, the woman raises her head to the sky, asking the heavens for succor and comfort.

Some of these scenes have been described as melodramatic, akin to illustration art. Alfredo Roces, in his biography of Amorsolo wrote "The Japanese occupation provided a fresh opportunity for a different development. Amorsolo painted his pictures of the war with no interest in pleasing his customers."

Amorsolo evidently depicted the grisly life of Filipinos in World War II to register his revulsion to the destruction of his beloved city and to the destitution and suffering of his countrymen. The quintessential painter of peaceful, graceful people in verdant tranquil settings was now the sober and pained recorder of tragedy and death.

It is in this context that this painting, depicting a man protecting a woman from a Japanese soldier’s lascivious intentions is placed. Japanese soldiers in World War II raped countless Filipino women. Long after the war, the subject of rape, among the many indignities Filipinos were subjected to was swept under the rug. The victims and a prudish society considered this subject too shameful and best left unspoken.

It has only been in recent years that women’s groups have raised the issue of rape both as a personal transgression and as an institutionalized procedure ("Comfort Women" as an example) by the Japanese forces here and in other occupied countries in Asia.

The initial response by the Japanese Government was to deny that such wanton, systematic rape occurred to service their army. But the persistent efforts of nongovernmental organizations and the personal testimonies of the remaining women alive has forced the Japanese Government in recent times to assume responsibility and make nominal financial compensation.

This Amorsolo painting becomes both an artistic statement and a pictorial testimony to a past which, for many years, was officially denied or emotionally buried.

Roces would write "Few artists of this period can prove their reaction to the trauma of war with actual artistic output." One could even say that there were few painters in the Japanese occupied territories of Southeast Asia that would paint the war and its barbaric effects as painfully rendered as that done by Fernando Amorsolo.

In this painting, a Japanese soldier had entered a house and begun to molest a young woman. A soldier’s hat, lying on the floor, a rumpled bed, and the woman’s torn clothing strongly suggests that molestation had occurred. A man, brandishing a bolo, interrupts the act, putting the woman between him and the soldier. The soldier is outside the canvas but, from the defiant looks of the man, is still inside the house.

An altar to the left with two lit candles suggests a devout household sharply contrasted with the malicious intentions of the soldier.

Symbolism abounds. A man representing the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement protects a young modest woman representing the Philippines. Amorsolo, ill with diabetes during the war, received vitally needed insulin from his guerrilla comrades and was grateful to them.

The exquisitely embroidered table cloth on the altar, the perfectly arranged vase of flowers between the two candles under a crucifix suggest order and an assurance of protection from the unseen but lurking menace on the opposite side of the canvas.

Painted in 1945, most probably around the time of the American liberation of the country, the painting is a rare piece portraying Filipino defiance to oppression. It is a marked contrast to the numerous drawings and paintings of mournful destruction and helpless destitution that pervaded most of Amorsolo’s works during World War II (end).