The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) Thursday strongly
condemned Japanese Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
Technology Minister Nariaki Nakayama on his remarks that "comfort
women" for the Japanese army had never existed.
"Education is an important field related to the future of a
country. Nakayama, as the minister of education, Japan's education
chief, should have taken the future of his country into
consideration in every case and should have been prudent in his
behavior, thinking of its relations with other countries," the KCNA
said in a commentary.
Nakayama said at a meeting in Shizuoka June 11 that "comfort
women" for the Imperial Japanese Army had not existed in World War
II at all, and "it was a problem that textbooks contained the words
'comfort women' for the Imperial Japanese Army."
"It was only the Imperial Army of Japan that lured and abducted
foreign women, took them to the battlefields in an organized manner
and enforced sexual slavery upon them to satisfy the carnal desires
of its soldiers. No one can refute such crimes committed by the
Japanese militarists during World War II, including the crimes
related to the sexual slavery," the commentary said.
The term "Comfort women" is a euphemism used in Japan to
describe women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese
Army in Japan's war of aggression against its Asian neighbors
before and during World War II.
Nakayama's denial of the existence of "comfort women" has been
strongly criticized and protested by South Korea, China and many
other Asian countries from which many women were forced to become
the sexual slaves of the Japanese aggression army during the
war.
According to a report issued by the United Nations Commission on
Human Rights in 1995, "as many as 200,000 girls and women were part
of the Japanese program of "comfort women." More than half of the
girls and women died as a direct result of the treatment they
received. Most women were raped 5-20 times a day. Most of them came
from Korea, the Philippines, China, Indonesia and Netherlands.
(Xinhua News Agency June 17, 2005)