Comfort women were just 'wartime prostitutes', says Japanese delegation

A group of Japanese "patriots" are travelling to the United Nations in Geneva to demand that the UN Commission on Human Rights admits that comfort women were nothing more than prostitutes, and to insist that the organisation stops using the term "sex slaves".

The delegation, from Japanese Women for Justice and Peace and the Alliance for Truth About Comfort Women, plan to observe proceedings of the Committee of Civil and Political Rights over three days from Monday.

The group will also host a reception at the four-star Hotel Bristol to get their message across to delegates at the UN event.

"We are not nationalists, but patriots," Yumiko Yamamoto, president of Japanese Women for Justice and Peace, said in Tokyo yesterday. "We do not discriminate against other people, but we love Japan very much."

Yamamoto's organisation was set up to counter what it sees as racist and discriminatory depictions of the comfort women as being forced to serve as sex slaves by the Japanese military in the second world war, primarily by groups and the government in South Korea but also by China.

She suggested that if South Korea believed Japan had a case to answer it should take it to the International Court of Justice. China, she said, had only stepped into the argument in the last year and cannot take the moral high ground as it "is the world's worst violator of human rights".

"Comfort women were not sex slaves but wartime prostitutes who enjoyed spending time freely and who worked under contract in exchange for highly paid monetary reward for that time," Yamamoto said.