Koreans: Japan's troops forced us to be sex slaves

Lee Ok-sun points to a scar left by the bayonet of a Japanese soldier she says forced her to become a sex slave in the 1940s, and wonders how Japan's prime minister can possibly doubt that there was coercion.

"Now the Japanese are saying such things didn't happen and no one was taken forcefully," Lee said. "Their soldiers would stab girls in the arm if they didn't behave."

"I was out on an errand when I was 16 when I was kidnapped. People say Japanese are bad but there were bad Koreans too. Two people kidnapped me one Japanese and one Korean," she said.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, seeking to bolster support within his conservative base, has stirred anger in China, the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea by appearing to question the state's role in forcing women to be sex slaves for its soldiers during World War II.

Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 until the 1945 end of the war.

Lee, now 81, said she was taken to a frontline brothel run by Japan's Imperial Army in China. Abandoned after the war, she spent nearly 60 years in China and only recently returned to the Republic of Korea to find most of her family in Pusan had died.

Almost every week for more than 15 years, Korean women who were kept in the brothels have gathered outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to provide what they say is a living reminder of a dark chapter in Japan's past.

Lee Yong-soo, 79, has been one of the most active former sex slaves euphemistically called "comfort women" taking part in the protests.

"Abe is making absurd remarks," Lee said. "They made us become comfort women. I am living proof of what happened."

Lee said two women lured her out of her home when she was 16 and she was kidnapped by soldiers who were with them. She was then detained in a Japanese military brothel in Taiwan.

"Nothing has changed about me or what happened except for the fact that I got old. Abe is ignoring us completely," Lee said.

As each year passes, the number of the women declines.

Japan stands by apology

Among the tens of thousands from the Korean Peninsula, there are 123 surviving Korean sex slaves who have registered with the government, the Republic of Korea's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said.

Japan said yesterday that the government stood by a 1993 apology acknowledging coercion.

But Abe again denied that Japanese soldiers had kidnapped the mostly Asian women.

"I have said that I stand by the Kono statement and there is no change to that," Abe told reporters yesterday.

"There is a misunderstanding that there was coercion by the Japanese military police as though they were kidnappers.

"That is not the case, and I have stated that there has been nothing to back that up."

Source: China Daily/agencies