Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga on Feb. 28 told the Lower House Budget Committee that the Abe administration will start examining the process in which then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono's August 1993 statement on the issue of wartime "comfort women" was made.

Comfort women refer to those women who got caught up in the wartime institutionalization of sexual services provided to members of the Imperial Japanese armed forces.

The 1993 Kono statement, among other things, stated that "The Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women" and that "in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, "at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments. They lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere."