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)