More than 50 years after the end of World War II, the question of whether or not the Japanese government bears responsibility for forcing tens of thousands of mostly Korean teenagers into sexual slavery for the Imperial armed forces between 1932-1945 continues to cause controversy.
Japan's official policy of centralized recruiting and dispatching of "comfort women" to carefully administered comfort stations under military control has been bitterly disputed by reactionaries in Japan attempting to glorify, vindicate, mitigate and shift responsibility for the war onto others, and reimpose an exculpatory, sanctimonious narrative of Asia's shared past. Only grudging and hedged admission of responsibility has been made by the government, and proponents of the "pride by denial" school of history continue their efforts to suppress and minimize textbook coverage of the issue.
Fortunately, there are many Japanese who do not subscribe to this blinkered distortion of history and who are not willing to turn back the hands of the clock to a time when national history focused on Japan's victimization rather than its acts as victimizer. The rejection by school boards around the country of a new ultranationalist textbook inspired more by the dictates of parochial patriotism than sound scholarship indicates that these reactionaries are only a noisome minority, much like the rightwingers who pollute the capital with their black sound trucks spewing hatred and vapid slogans. It is all the more telling, and pathetic, that this textbook was imposed on schools for the handicapped over the protests of teachers and at the behest of officials more sympathetic to the plight of myopic historians than students.