A large majority of Japanese people disagree with Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto who said women forced to provide sex during World War II were a military necessity, polls issued Monday said.
Two surveys carried out over the weekend indicated that Hashimoto’s opinion is not shared by many, despite regular foreign criticism that the Japanese public has still failed to come to terms with the country’s bellicose past.
In a poll of 1,550 Japanese households conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, 71% of respondents said Hashimoto’s comments were “inappropriate” against 21% who said the comments were “appropriate”.
In a separate survey among 3,600 households by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, 75% of those who answered said the comments were “problematic”, while 20% said they had little or no problem with them.
Hashimoto says S Korean troops guilty of wartime sex abuse
South Korean soldiers were guilty of abusing women in wartime, Osaka’s mayor said in comments reported Tuesday, days after provoking a storm by labeling sex slaves a military necessity.
In a remark likely to fuel outrage and further stoke tensions in an already uneasy relationship, Toru Hashimoto said the South Korean military used women for sex to keep servicemen’s frustration in check in Vietnam.
Under military strongman Park Chung-Hee, the father of current President Park Geun-Hye, South Korea deployed more than 300,000 soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s to support U.S. forces.
There is no mainstream evidence that any modern military, other than Japan’s up to and during World War II, employed any system of sexual slavery.
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