Chiyo Nakazato, 71, a former nurse for the Imperial Japanese Navy, remembers that during the war, her male colleagues at the navy hospital on Hainan Island in the South China Sea were so anxious to go out at night they queued up by the door even before 6 p.m., when they were officially off duty.

Nakazato, then 19 years old, could not understand why the men were so excited about going out on the isolated island. But when she asked an older soldier where they were going, he smirked and said, "They are going out to a very nice place." That nice place, it turned out, was a "comfort station," where young women, mostly from Asian nations, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers.

Nakazato was one of four people who recounted their experiences involving wartime sex slaves at a Tokyo symposium on April 29. About 500 people participated in the event, which was jointly hosted by a citizens' group and a weekly magazine.

The former nurse is one of the very few Japanese women who have spoken out about their involvement in the practice of sexual slavery, said writer Rumiko Nishino, who introduced Nakazato at the symposium. Nakazato said she was present when some 100 sex slaves arrived in four trucks at the navy hospital for medical checkups. About 60 to 70 of the girls were Koreans, 25 Taiwanese and the rest Japanese.

Some of the women were suffering from severe cases of soft chancre and gonorrhea, but the military doctor ordered her to merely apply iodine solution to the affected area, she said. "There were two Korean girls as young as me," Nakazato said. "They came (to the hospital) four times, and every time their disease had become worse."

Nakazato also recalled that high-ranking military officers were allowed to have sex with Japanese "comfort women," while petty officers had sex with Taiwanese girls. Civilian employees of the military and the lowest-ranked soldiers were serviced by Korean girls.

"The girls' ethnic status was made clear by the rank of soldiers they were allowed to be with," Nakazato said. She also said Japanese sex slaves lived in a wooden apartment building where Japanese officers were serviced exclusively.

"The upper-level officers occupied the rooms and had girls who had sex with them only, because they were scared of contracting sexual diseases," she said. Rooms for Japanese sex slaves were nicely decorated with dolls. Houses for Korean sex slaves were built from the leaves of banana and palm trees, Nakazato recalled.