Japanese lawmakers call for revision of wartime sex slavery apology

As Japan's Liberal Democratic Party settles into its second year upon its return to power in December 2012 the reality of its policies is coming to the fore.   Especially where history is involved.  Japan's nationalist's politicans are dertermined to revise history followed by complete denial of actual facts and events.  

Success  in revising the statement issued in 1993 by the Japanese government over its forced use of comfort women would place it a corner from which it maybe until to extricate   itself along with further reeforcing the paranoia of the South Korean and Chinese governments giving them further reasons to use their own  nationlist rhetoric as a cudgel  against Japan.

   Nationalist Japanese politicians urged the government on Monday to revise a 1993 apology over Asian women forced to serve in wartime brothels, saying accounts that tens of thousands of women were forcibly recruited were a “total lie”.

Any revision to the landmark apology by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono would enrage Japan’s neighbors, China and South Korea, from where most of the “comfort women” were drawn. Both accuse Japan of failing to atone fully for aggression before and during World War Two.

The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which wants to bolster the military and be less apologetic about the past, has said it will set up a team to review the testimony of South Korean comfort women. But officials have been careful to avoid any mention of revising or watering down the apology.

Nariaki Nakayama, a lawmaker from the nationalist Japan Restoration Party, which Abe’s government looks to for support, dismissed any notion of large-scale forced recruitment of women.

“The things Korea is saying ... that 200,000 were forcibly recruited, are a complete and total lie,” he told a cheering gathering jamming a 500-seat hall near the Diet.
Former air force chief of staff Toshio Tamogami, who resigned in 2008 for denying in an essay that Japan was the aggressor in the war, said Japan had to “transmit its views more strongly”.