TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese conservative activists on Friday protested US congressional demands for a clear apology over wartime sexual slavery, saying the women were not slaves but just making money.
"If America keeps saying this is a human rights issue, then what were the indiscriminate bombings on Tokyo and other cities? What were the atomic bombings?" said Shoichi Watanabe, history professor emeritus at Tokyo's Sophia University.
"Those were planned to kill ordinary people, a holocaust. Compared with this human-rights issue, prostitution in battlefields is only a commercial act," he told a news conference after filing the protest with the US embassy.
A US House committee last month overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for an "unambiguous" apology from Japan for the up to 200,000 women who served in army brothels before and during World War II.
In their letter to be distributed to US members of Congress, the activists said they felt "anger and sadness because the resolution is based on wrong information."
"No sex slaves existed for Japanese military," the letter said.
"Professional camp followers were providing prostitution," it said.
"There were only business organisations and prostitutes to make money from soldiers."
"This is the indisputable historical fact," it said, urging US Congress members to reinvestigate and retract last month's resolution.
Kimindo Kusaka, a right-wing author, said women from Japan initially went to front-line brothels but a shortage made Koreans recruit women from the low classes in the peninsula.
"They paid when they recruited the girls -- as an advance payment, a loan to the fathers with their daughters held jointly liable," Kusaka told the news conference.
"It was probably a severe blow to the girls, but it was their dads who betrayed them. It was their mums who betrayed them."
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