A set of official documents detailing how the wartime Japanese military carted off about 35 Dutch women from a prison camp in what is now Indonesia and made them provide sex as "comfort women" has been disclosed to a civic group at the National Archives of Japan in Tokyo, group members said Sunday.
The documents were part of the evidence behind a 1993 statement issued by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono in which Japan acknowledged and apologized for its military's involvement in the recruitment of women into sexual servitude, but only their existence and outline had been known.
Titled "Class-B and -C (re: Dutch tribunals) Batavia trials, case No. 106," the documents concern a provisional military tribunal set up by the Netherlands in Batavia, as Jakarta was known in the former Dutch East Indies, for Class-B and Class-C war criminals that had convicted five Japanese military officers and four civilians for rape and other crimes by 1949.