The government has asked the author of a U.N. report that accused Japan of wartime military sexual slavery to amend the document, the top government spokesman said Thursday.
It wants Radhika Coomaraswamy, former Special Rapporteur on violence against women at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, to revise the document she wrote in 1996 in light of the "comfort women" reports recently retracted by the daily Asahi Shimbun, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference.
In August, the newspaper retracted 16 articles from the 1980s and 1990s that quoted now discredited testimony by Seiji Yoshida, who claimed he had kidnapped hundreds of Korean women on Jeju Island and forced them into Japanese military brothels. These women, among others, later became known as the "ianfu," or comfort women — Japan's euphemism for the sex slaves.