Japanese historians slam sex-slave apology review
Print Edition
A group of Japanese historians yesterday stood behind their government’s 1993 apology over wartime sex slavery, slamming Tokyo’s possible move to revise it as “unforgivable.”
The landmark apology, known as the Kono Statement, acknowledged official complicity in the coercion of women from across Asia into a system of wartime brothels, an issue that draws particular resentment in neighboring South Korea.
Last Saturday, South Korean President Park Geun-Hye warned Japan that it would face “isolation” if it pushed ahead with a move to revisit the apology.
But conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has said evidence given by “comfort women” — a euphemism for those forced to work in military brothels — that forms the basis of the apology is to be re-examined.
Respected historians say up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea but also from China, Indonesia and the Philippines, were forced to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels.
However, a minority of right-wing Japanese insists that there was no official involvement by the country or the military and say the women were common prostitutes.
“It is unforgivable to retreat from the Kono Statement,” Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a professor of modern Japanese history at Chuo University, told academics and rights activists at a Tokyo conference.
“The latest historical documents can allow us to say that the military hurt the honor and dignity of many women.”
Hiroshi Hayashi, a politics professor at Kanto Gakuin University, said he and his fellow researchers discovered at least a dozen new documents proving that there was direct military involvement in the practice.
“There are many more, probably more than 6,000, undisclosed documents that had been stored by the Japanese government,” Hayashi pointed out.
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