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Former sex slave still fighting for apology

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Yuan Zhulin - a sex slave for Japanese soldiers for three years in Hubei province during the anti-Japanese war - yesterday said Japan still owed her an apology.

'My wish is that Japan apologises to me and admits its mistake and gives me proper compensation,' Ms Yuan, 84, said at a press conference in Hong Kong to announce a seminar on Japan's war history this Saturday at the City University.

She said that even though a Japanese court had ruled against her in 2000, she had not given up hope.

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Historians generally agree that more than 200,000 Chinese women were forced to become Japanese soldiers' sex slaves from 1931 to 1945. Women who survived the war have in recent years filed lawsuits in Japan demanding apologies and compensation from the Japanese government.

Yesterday Ms Yuan recalled how she was forced to become what the Japanese called a 'comfort woman' when she left her family in Hankou to work at a Japanese hostel in Echeng in July 1940.

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'Like all the young women there, I was locked up in a small room and raped numerous times by Japanese soldiers day and night,' she said in a statement.

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