Yet another high-ranking Japanese government official has denied that coercion was employed in the recruitment of "comfort women" for the Japanese military during World War II. The official’s statements come amid fierce international criticism of Tokyo’s current administration after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earlier this month made the exact same statement. Abe has refused to take back his statement that there was no government coercion involved, though on March 26 offered a reserved apology for the program’s existence.
In a radio interview on Sunday, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hakubun Shimomura said that "while there were comfort women, the Japanese military was not involved."
"I do think there were instances where parents sold their daughters" to private contractors," he said, as if to say comfort women existed due to their parents’ desire for commercial gain.
Under the so-called comfort woman program, up to 200,000 foreign women were forced to become sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II. The apologies offered by Tokyo have so far come only from individual lawmakers rather than an official government statement.
On March 16, the Japanese cabinet issued a written statement in which it said it has been unable to find documentation describing direct involvement by the Japanese military at the time. The cabinet also said, however, that it continues to accept the validity of a statement issued on August 4, 1993 by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono. The "Kono Statement" says the Japanese military was both directly and indirectly involved in the establishment and management of "comfort women stations" and transport of comfort women.
Shimomura worked under current Prime Minister Abe in 1997, when the two were legislators and founding members of a conservative group in the Japanese Diet that today seeks to have the Kono Statement officially discarded.
On March 23, legislators in this conservative group decided to pursue, as an official project within the Liberal Democratic Party, a new inquiry into whether or not the Japanese military was involved in the manner described in the Kono Statement.
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