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TOKYO : A former sex slave appealed Friday to Japan to make amends for its treatment of Asian women during World War II amid calls in the conservative government to retract a past apology.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has questioned whether Japan was involved in the sexual enslavement of thousands of Asian women, who are known euphemistically as "comfort women."
Former comfort woman Lee Yong-soo, 78, of South Korea has testified before the US Congress, which is considering a motion that would demand an apology by Japan.
"I want Japan and the Japanese prime minister to apologise," Lee told a news conference in Tokyo on her way back from Washington.
Lee said she was snatched as a teenager from her house in Korea, then a Japanese colony, and taken first to Pyongyang, then to Dalian and finally to Taiwan, where she was raped and tortured for around three years.
"I cried 'mother, mother,' but they never stopped. They used electric shocks to torture me. They kicked me. They cut me," she said tearfully in broken Japanese.
"After I returned home after the war, I did not tell anyone about what happened to me," she said.
She said she has been staging protests for 16 years outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to demand an apology.
"Japan forcibly took me away. I am a living witness. I will tell my story wherever," she said. "I demand the prime minister of Japan apologise."
Historians say at least 200,000 young women, mostly from Korea but also from China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan, were forced to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels.
But Abe, who is known for his conservative views on history despite his efforts to improve relations with Asian countries, on Thursday voiced doubts that Japan forced women into sexual slavery.
"The fact is that there is no evidence to support the claim of the coercion," Abe said late Thursday.
In 1993, Japan's top government spokesman issued a statement voicing "sincere apologies and remorse" and acknowledging that Japan's imperial army was involved "directly or indirectly" in sexual slavery.
A left-leaning government in 1995 set up a fund to compensate former comfort women. But it uses money collected by private donations, leading many victims to shun it.
A group of conservative lawmakers from Abe's Liberal Democratic Party have been pressing to revise the 1993 statement, charging that China and the two Koreas are using the comfort women issue for political ends.
Japan has also been lobbying against the US Congress passing a resolution on the issue, which is seen as more likely to succeed since the Democrats took control in January from President George W. Bush's Republicans.
The bill -- sponsored by Representative Mike Honda, a Democrat who spent part of his childhood in a wartime internment camp for Japanese-Americans -- demands an apology by Japan and outright recognition of its involvement.
John Negroponte, the US deputy secretary of state, trod gently on the issue during his visit to Tokyo.
"I think our view is that what happened during the war was most deplorable but as far as some kind of resolution of this issue, this is something that must be dealt with between Japan and the countries that were affected," Negroponte said.
He said that Japan and other Asian countries had "many, many very important opportunities and challenges."
"We want to move forward in a positive manner on these agendas, so to the extent that this issue disrupts our ability to do that, that's a cause for concern," he said.
Japan is reportedly seeking to keep comfort women off the agenda when Abe makes his first visit as premier to Washington in April.
- AFP /ls
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