JAPAN:Some Japanese persist in denying the systematic rape of captive women during wartime. David McNeillreports from Tokyo
Once a week, anger and the call of the past drag Gil Won-ok from her bed in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea to the Japanese embassy in the city.
The frail 78-year-old is haunted by memories of what happened to her as a teenage girl when she was raped daily by dozens of Japanese soldiers in a second World War "comfort station", a chilling military euphemism for a rape factory.
"I was in so much pain. Sometimes I didn't know if I was going to live or die."
Her fellow Korean survivor, Lee Ki-sun, was snatched by troops while on an errand for her father and raped daily for seven years, leaving her unable to have children. She was tied with a rope to three other women, forcing them to wash, sleep and go to the toilet together.
"At night all four of us were raped. Five men a night raped me. The soldiers alternated, so there were different men each night."
Week after week for 15 years, the Korean "comfort women" have stood with protesters outside this embassy to demand recognition from the Japanese government.
Now, instead of an apology, they have received another official denial.
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe says there is "no evidence" to prove that the women were coerced.
The denial - reversing the Japanese government's long-term official position - has enraged the women.
"The Japanese government is lying," said Gil Won-ok yesterday. "They can't make this go away by lying about it."
Elderly women all across Asia tell similar stories. In the Chinese province of Shanxi, Guo Xi-cui was just 15 when she was taken from her village and held in a comfort station for 40 days. She said Japanese soldiers stood watching as "two or three men" held her legs.
"They spread them until I was injured and then they raped me. When they sent me home I was not able to sit properly."
Her screaming nightmares regularly woke her family for years afterward.
Adelaide grandmother Jan Ruff-O'Herne and her friends were rounded up "like cattle" from a Japanese concentration camp in Java and taken to a comfort station. "We were given flower names and they were pinned to our doors," she told Australian TV recently.
According to Amnesty International, thousands of women from China, Taiwan, Korea and other parts of Asia - most under 20 and some as young as 12 - were "enslaved against their will and repeatedly raped, tortured and brutalised for months and years" by the Japanese wartime military.
Thousands died in painful, unrecorded silence after a lifetime of torment until a small group of Korean victims began to speak out in the early 1990s, starting a tide of testimonies.
Ms O'Herne remembers watching the women on TV. "I thought, now is my time to speak out."
The issue of "comfort women", however, has galvanised the Japanese right, which denies government involvement in the women's enslavement. "The women were legal prostitutes in brothels who were earning money for their families," says revisionist academic Nobukatsu Fujioka.
Prof Fujioka is one of the leading figures in a burgeoning Japanese revisionist movement that embraces academia, popular culture and much of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The project that unites them is in effect a conservative revolution: an attempt to overturn much of the accepted wisdom about what took place during Japan's rampage across Asia in the 1930s and '40s.
Twelve out of 18 members of Japan's current cabinet belong to a political forum that wants to "rethink" Japan's history education and backs many of Prof Fujioka's views.
About 120 lawmakers want Japan's official position on the "comfort women" issue reversed.
The Society for History Textbook Reform, an organisation Prof Fujioka helped set up in 1997, has sold 800,000 copies of a revisionist high school history book that denies well-documented war crimes like the enslavement of the "comfort women" and the Rape of Nanjing. Before coming to power, current prime minister Shinzo Abe was one of the society's better known supporters.
The revisionist denials are flatly rejected by many Japanese historians, who insist the military command organised Asia's network of comfort stations. "The military decided when, where, and how 'comfort stations' were to be established," says Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a professor of history at Tokyo's Chuo University. "[ They] implemented these decisions, providing buildings, setting regulations and fees, and controlling the management of the stations."
Former Japanese soldiers have also testified to their involvement in mass wartime rape of Asian women.
Hajime Kondo, who was stationed in China from 1940-1944, recalls kidnapping a woman in Shanxi Province and taking turns with his colleagues in raping her. "They raped her in the order of length of service, so my commander said: 'It's your turn next,' he says. 'So I did it. The woman's clothes were ripped off and her eyes were just staring. They were blank."
He says the thought that gang rape was wrong "never occurred" to him until he had his own family. "I wondered then how I could have done such a thing 40 years ago."
The deniers, however, have grown in strength since a landmark 1993 statement by then chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono, during a period of relative weakness for the LDP, that the military was directly involved in setting up the stations and enslaving women.
That statement has never been accepted by the right, which has campaigned relentlessly to have it reversed.
Now, with the prospect of a US congressional resolution calling on Tokyo to "formally acknowledge, apologise and accept historical responsibility" for the comfort women, they have sprung into action again. A delegation of LDP politicians is due to travel to the US to seek to have the resolution quashed.
Mr Abe's blunt denial has surprised and embarrassed some of Japan's powerful US friends: John Negroponte, US deputy secretary of state, did little to hide his unhappiness in a trip to Tokyo last week, calling the treatment of the sex slaves "most deplorable".
But the prime minister's supporters in Japan, who have been waiting since his election last year for him to fly the nationalist flag, are heartened.
Some say his plummeting approval ratings at home following a series of political blunders have convinced him to go for broke, with key elections looming next month. "If he is true to his beliefs and says what he feels his popularity will rise," says Mr Fujioka. "He should show which side he is on."