The Japanese government once again denied the forceful recruitment of "comfort women" by the Japanese military before and during World War Two, despite a number of government archives brought into light recently that showed women were forced into sexual slavery.
"It was rather dishonest for the government to deny what has been said in its own documents," said Hirofumi Hayashi, a professor of politics at the Kanto Gakuin University and one of the discoverers of the documents stored in the National Archives of Japan.
DOCUMENTED CRIMES
"We brought about 200 women and girls as comfort women to Bali under the orders of the Okuyama unit (of the Japanese army)," said a former Japanese navy official in a testimony after the war.
Copies of the testimony and 181 other documents were submitted by the National Archives of Japan to the Japanese Cabinet Secretariat earlier this year at the request of local civil groups.
The documents were mainly records of the Tokyo Tribunal and trials on Class-B and Class-C war criminals, and have been stored at the National Archives of Japan from 1999.
"Many of the documents include specific descriptions that confirm women were coerced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the war," said Hayashi, discoverer of the majority of the 182 documents from the large amount of government archives.
In one such example, a ruling in the "Pontianak Trial No. 13 Case" reads "many women were violently threatened and forced."
Civil groups had requested the documents be submitted to the government in 2015 but were refused.
Another request was made this February and copies of the documents were then submitted to the Cabinet Secretariat.
DENYING FACTS
Regarding the documents, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda claimed at a press conference on Wednesday that the documents "could not prove the forceful recruitment of 'comfort women.'"
He went on and asserted that Japan has found no documents confirming that the "comfort women" were forcefully recruited by military or government authorities.
