Four former "comfort women" called on the Japanese government Friday to make a formal apology and offer compensation to fellow victims in other countries, while rejecting a December agreement between Japan and South Korea that was designed to permanently settle the issue.
The call came as a group of U.S. human rights activists, who were involved with getting San Francisco and the city of Glendale near Los Angeles to erect statues symbolizing the women who were forced into Japanese military brothels during the war, are visiting Osaka as part of trip to learn more about how the ianfu (comfort women) issue is seen in Japan.
At a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo, former comfort women from East Timor, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Korean Peninsula spoke of being taken away when they were as young as 14 and raped by Imperial Japanese soldiers. They insisted that the December 2015 agreement signed by Tokyo and Seoul did not settle the issue.