The comfort women,many of whom were South Korean,have become a major source of contention between the Japanese and South Korean governments. Many Japanese conservatives say the women were simply prostitutes,while Seoul accuses Tokyo of trying to whitewash history.
Both governments have stepped up the volume in their efforts to sway international opinion,most recently with a Japanese attempt to get McGraw-Hill,the US publishing house,to remove two paragraphs about comfort women from a college textbook. The book,Traditions and Encounters:A Global Perspective on the Past,says the Japanese army"forcibly recruited,conscripted,and dragooned as many as 200,000 women aged 14 to 20 to serve in military brothels,called'comfort houses'."It also says that the Japanese imperial army"massacred large numbers of comfort women to cover up the operation".
A key part of the dispute over comfort women concerns the number of women forced into sexual slavery and the precise role the military played in their procurement.
Work by academics,especially Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi,has"rendered beyond dispute the essential features of a system that amounted to state-sponsored sexual slavery",the historians'letter says.