Submitted by admin on Wed, 2007-03-14 08:00. ::
TOKYO — Japan’s military did not force women into sexual slavery during the Second World War and the government should re-examine a 1993 apology to so-called comfort women, ruling party policy chief Shoichi Nakagawa says.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who drew angry regional responses for saying on March 1 that there was “no coercion” involved, has offered government assistance to a group of ruling Liberal Democratic Party legislators to reinvestigate the matter. The controversy comes as the US house of representatives considers a nonbinding resolution calling on Japan fully to acknowledge and apologise for forcing women into sexual slavery. Abe said his comments were misinterpreted.
On Monday, Abe reiterated his support for the 1993 statement by then-chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono that the military was involved in recruiting women in Asia and putting them in brothels “against their own will”. Japan “sincerely apologises”, Kono said.
Kono’s apology was not adopted by parliament and references to the matter were excised from eight Japanese school textbooks in 2005, prompting protests from South Korea.
Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki, in his 1995 book, Comfort Women, says as many as 200000 women from Korea, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and Burma served as sex slaves in 2000 enforced brothels across Asia.
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