Coercion in the narrow sense

Prime Misister Abe, in seeming to retract the 1993 quasi-official apology for its procurement of sex-slaves in WW2, denied that the military used coercion to recruit the women. He claimed he meant in the narrow sense of the word. There were no documents which directly connected the Japanese military using force to this, according to Abe and other rightists.

Unfortunately for Abe and his supporters, new evidence has been produced by Japanese researchers which seems to provide documentary evidence, including testimony by Japanese soldiers, which Abe says does not exist. Unfortunately, they will not have any impact on Abe's mind. They are not Japanese documents, so therefore, they cannot be accurate. In addition, they were used in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, which is not accepted as valid justice by Japanese of Abe's leanings, even though Japan signed the 1951 San Francisco Treaty in which it said that it accepted the judgment of the tribunal. Obviously, this was what is known as tatemae.

"It is clear that the comfort women system was a system of sexual slavery,” said a group member, Hirofumi Hayashi, a history professor at Kanto Gakuin University. “However, the movement to openly deny this has grown stronger in the government and elsewhere.”

However, Japanese political analysts said the documents would not sway conservatives, who had stepped up efforts to deny the war tribunal’s conclusions, calling them victors’ justice.
From the New York Times here.

The Japan Times article is here.