Police arrested a 64-year old man suspected of phoning in threats to a university in Hokkaido in connection with reports published by the daily Asahi Shimbun on the "comfort women" issue, sources said.

The suspect, Tsutomu Kamimura, is alleged to have made the call to pressure the school, Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo, into sacking a part-time lecturer who as a reporter for the major daily had written articles on the mostly Asian women who were forced to work at wartime brothels for the Japanese military.

In August, the newspaper retracted some of its articles on the sex slave issue from the 1980s and 1990s, saying one of its sources, Seiji Yoshida, had been discredited. Yoshida told the daily that women on the Korean resort island of Jeju had been forcibly and violently taken to the brothels.