Former education minister Nariaki Nakayama takes pride in an achievement he and about 130 fellow members of the Liberal Democratic Party took the past decade to accomplish: getting references to Japan's wartime sex slaves struck from most authorized history texts for junior high schools.
"Our campaign worked, and people outside the government also started raising their voices, creating a national trend," said the 63-year-old Lower House member from Miyazaki Prefecture, who also openly claims the 1937 Nanjing Massacre was a "pure fabrication."
Nakayama feels he and the LDP group he heads played a key role in getting the descriptions of the "comfort women," the euphemism Japan used for the wartime sex slaves for its army, deleted from most junior high school history books.