The government will provide documents to aid a new investigation by the Liberal Democratic Party into Japan's wartime sexual slavery, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday.
The move comes after Abe's denial last week that the Japanese military coerced the "comfort women," as Japan euphemistically called them, sparked a storm of criticism.
Earlier in the day, an LDP lawmaker quoted Abe as saying the government would open a new investigation into the issue. The remark was made at a meeting of LDP lawmakers who adopted a resolution claiming that neither the wartime government nor the Imperial Japanese Army was responsible for "forcibly bringing" women to frontline brothels in the 1930s and '40s. Abe was previously a director general of the LDP group.