We posted about the departure of Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, a while back but we just read that among the many other scandals of his time in office he denied Japan's role in forcing as many as 200,000 women in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines, into prostitution for the Japanese military. These "Comfort Women" are widely recognized by historians and the Japanese government has apologized for the WWII practice in the past.
While the Japanese government apologized in 1993 for its role in trafficking women during the war, it has refused to provide government compensation to victims. In June, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution aimed at urging Japan to take responsibility in "a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery."
This is big, folks. This is like if today the German president denied there was a Holocaust. "Comfort women" aren't just a rumor; their existence is an extremely well documented fact.
Like many things of this nature, it is believed he denied it because to this day the Japanese government has refused to pay these women - its victims - reparations. (The same thing is still kind of happening with the German government and the Romani or 'Gypsy' survivors of concentration camps from WWII.)
PS. The image above is from the Wikipedia article on the subject.
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