A group of 187 scholars of Japanese and East Asian studies have called on Japan to accurately address its history of colonial rule and wartime actions, particularly the "comfort women" who were forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.

In a letter sent Monday to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the group, including Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower, and Ezra Vogel, professor emeritus of history at Harvard University and author of the 1979 best-seller "Japan As No. 1: Lessons for America," said the ability to celebrate 70 years of peace between Japan and its neighbors was being undermined by the comfort women issue.

"This issue has become so distorted by nationalist invective in Japan as well as in Korea and China that many scholars, along with journalists and politicians, have lost sight of the fundamental goal of historical inquiry, which should be to understand the human condition and aspire to improve it," the group, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, said.