Japanese Prime Minister angers victims of wartime sex slavery

Once a week, anger and the call of the past drags Gil Won-ok from her bed in a suburb of Seoul to the Japanese embassy in the South Korean capital. The frail 78-year-old is haunted by memories of what happened to her as a teenage girl when she was raped daily by Japanese soldiers in a Second World War "comfort station". "I was in so much pain. Sometimes I didn't know if I was going to live or die."

For 15 years, the Korean "comfort women" have stood outside this embassy to demand recognition from the Japanese government. Now, instead of an apology, they have heard another official denial. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said last week there was "no evidence" to prove the women were coerced. The statement has enraged the women. "They can't make this go away by lying about it," Gil Won-ok said.

Yesterday Mr Abe said the government stood by a 1993 admission that Japan had forced women into sexual slavery. But he also suggested that it would "reinvestigate" the comfort-women issue, a demand from about 120 politicians on the right of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who demand the admission be reversed.

Elderly women across Asia tell stories similar to the treatment of the Seoul pensioner. In the Chinese province of Shanxi, Guo Xi-cui was just 15 when she held in a comfort station for 40 days. She said Japanese soldiers stood watching as "two or three men" held her legs. "They spread them until I was injured and then they raped me," she said. "When they sent me home I was not able to sit properly."

Jan Ruff-O'Herne, an Adelaide grandmother, and her friends were taken from a Japanese concentration camp in Java to a comfort station. "We were given flower names and they were pinned to our doors," she told Australian television. Then aged 21 and planning to become a nun, Ms O'Herne was raped by an officer.

According to Amnesty International, thousands of women from across Asia - some as young as 12 - were "enslaved against their will and repeatedly raped, tortured and brutalised for months and years" by the Japanese military. Thousands died in painful silence after a lifetime of torment until a group of Korean victims began to speak out in the early 1990s. Ms O'Herne remembers watching the women on television: "I thought, now is my time to speak out."

But the issue has galvanised the Japanese right, who deny government involvement. "The women were legal prostitutes in brothels," Nobukatsu Fujioka, a revisionist academic, said. He is one of the leading figures in a movement that aims to overturn much of the accepted wisdom about what took place during Japan's rampage across Asia in the 1930s and 40s.

Twelve out of 18 members of Japan's cabinet belong to a political forum that wants to "rethink" history education and backs many of Professor Fujioka's views. His Society for History Textbook Reform has sold 800,000 copies of a revisionist history book that denies war crimes such as the comfort women and the Rape of Nanjing. Before coming to power, Mr Abe was one of the society's supporters.

The revisionist denials are refuted by many Japanese historians. "The military decided when, where, and how 'comfort stations' were to be established," Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a professor of history at Tokyo's Chuo University, said.

Former Japanese soldiers have also testified to their involvement in the wartime rape of Asian women. Hajime Kondo, who was stationed in China from 1940-44, recalled kidnapping a woman in Shanxi Province and taking turns with his comrades in raping her. He said the thought that gang rape was wrong "never occurred" to him until he had his own family.

The deniers, however, have grown stronger since a 1993 statement by chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono that the military was directly involved. That statement has never been accepted by the right. Now, with the prospect of a US Congressional resolution calling on Tokyo to "formally apologise and accept historical responsibility" for the comfort women, a delegation of LDP politicians is to travel to the US to lobby for the resolution to be quashed.

Mr Abe's supporters say his plummeting approval ratingshave forced him to go for broke. "If he is true to his beliefs and says what he feels, his popularity will rise," Professor Fujioka said.

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