ged Japan’s government on Friday to apologize amid an escalating international row over the fate of the so-called “comfort women.” Lee Yong-soo, who was kidnapped by Japanese troops at age 16, testified in Washington last month in support of a U.S. House of Representatives resolution asking Japan to apologize to “comfort women” — a Japanese euphemism for wartime sex slaves.
“Why did Japan have to take little girls, some only 14 or 15 years old, to give these horrific services?” 78-year-old Lee told a news conference, wiping away tears as she recalled her ordeal.
The proposed resolution sparked a war of words this week, with South Korea criticizing Japan’s handling of its wartime past, and some Japanese politicians denying that the army had ever forced women into prostitution.
Japan has publicly apologized to the 200,000 or so former sex slaves, but Lee said she demanded a personal letter of apology and compensation from the Japanese government.
A friend accompanied by a soldier lured Lee out of her parents’ house in Taegu, Korea, one night in 1944. She was beaten, threatened, dragged to the station and pushed onto a train, and after a long journey reached the Chinese port of Dalian, where she was transferred to a Japanese Imperial Army ship to Taiwan.
“There were 300 sailors and only five of us girls,” she said, her voice breaking up.
The girls were repeatedly raped on the ship, and when they arrived they were taken to a “comfort station” or army brothel in the Taiwanese town of Sinchu.
Japanese right-wing groups and several politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party have questioned the testimonies of former “comfort women” in Korea, China and Southeast Asia.
Some LDP lawmakers want to water down parts of an apology issued in 1993 — dubbed the Kono statement after the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yohei Kono — because it “damaged Japan’s image”, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has stood by the apology, disappointing some of his conservative supporters, but on Thursday he questioned the degree of the military’s involvement.
“There is no evidence to back up that there was coercion as defined initially,” he told reporters, apparently referring to charges that the Imperial Army had kidnapped women and put them in brothels.
Japan set up the Asian Women’s Fund in the 1990s to compensate former sex slaves, and 285 of the women who accepted payments of about US$20,000 each from that fund received personal apologies from the prime minister.
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