Yohei Kono, a retired liberal politician whose name is most often associated with the statement over wartime sex slavery he made in 1993 as the chief Cabinet secretary, has urged Japan to handle its delicate relations with China in a discreet and coolheaded manner to win Beijing's trust and mend ties.
Asked recently about hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's desire to apparently packpedal on the 1993 statement that acknowledged the Japanese military's responsibility in the forced recruitment of women and girls into sexual servitude and apologized to the victims, Kono only said that "historical facts should be acknowledged as such."
Meanwhile, he opposed Abe's call for lifting Japan's self-imposed ban on exercising the right to collective self-defense, warning such a move would change the fundamental principle of the Constitution and should first be OK'd by the public.