Japan's education minister said young people have rallied around him for his controversial view on wartime sex slaves, quoting one student saying the Asian women should be proud, a report said yesterday.
"My remark has drawn criticism but I also got encouragement from many young people," the Asahi Shimbun daily quoted Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama as telling a gathering in the southern city of Fukuoka on Sunday.
Nakayama said at a town meeting a month ago it was a good thing that a new Japanese history textbook no longer carried the word "comfort women" and argued such a word itself did not exist during World War II.
The government distanced itself from Nakayama, saying Japan recognized comfort women -- sex slaves who served Japanese troops -- and has apologized.
But the minister said Sunday he had been "moved" by support from young people and read out an e-mail sent from a Japanese student studying in Canada for about nine minutes, the liberal Asahi said on its Web site.
Nakayama said the student in her 20s wrote the term comfort women was "invented by a handful of masochistic Japanese," the report said.
"We should feel great sympathy for them but [being forced into prostitution] is not so different from the situation seen in Japanese farming villages in the old days," the minister quoted the student as writing.
"It can be said it was an occupation they could do with pride if you think they soothed the unstable minds of men on the battleground and provided them rest and a certain order."
Nakayama's office was unable to confirm what he reportedly said at the Fukuoka meeting but said scores of people, old and young, had sent words of encouragement to the minister mostly by telephone and e-mails.
On Aug. 4, 1993, almost half a century after its defeat in World War II, Japan admitted for the first time it had forced Asian women into working as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers.
Historians say 200,000 women, mostly Korean but also from Taiwan, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, were forced into prostitution.
The education ministry enraged China and South Korea in April by approving a textbook that makes no reference to comfort women and avoids the word "invasion" when describing Japanese wartime aggression.
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