Korean women were not forcibly taken as sex slaves during war says Japanese lawmaker

Japanese lawmaker Nariyaki Nakayama has said that Korean women were not forcibly taken as sex slaves during wartime.

Nakayama, an ultra conservative lower house lawmaker of the Japan Restoration Party, questioned Koreans whether they were 'cowards' to allow their women to be forcibly taken as sex slaves during war.

According to The Japan Times, Nakayama defended the remarks made by his party's co- leader Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto who had earlier said that 'comfort women' were necessary to maintain discipline in the Imperial Japanese Army during the WWII.

During Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, thousands of girls and women were believed rounded up to serve as sex slaves in the wartime military brothels.

Nakayama said that the population of the Korean peninsula was 20 million at that time and if 2,00,000 women, as claimed, were forcibly taken as sex slaves; it would mean one in every hundred women was forced into sexual servitude.

The lawmaker further called on South Korea to stop making such claims, as they would be only maligning the Japanese and their own ancestors, the report added.