[Japan Focus introduction: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo recently added another entry to the long, sorry chapter of official Japanese war-crime denials when he said that there was no coercion of the so-called comfort-women by the imperial military “in the narrow sense of the word.” On March 1, an historic day in the history of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, he said: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”

Liberal Democratic Party power broker Nakayama Nariaki further insulted the dwindling group of surviving women when he compared government involvement in the brothels that enslaved them to college canteens. “Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies,” he said.

In the furor that followed and in the lead-up to a potentially booby-trapped visit to Washington, Abe backpedaled and issued a series of unsatisfying but politically expedient mea culpas, saying he stood by the famous1993 statement by Kono Yohei, acknowledging state involvement in the brothels and culminating in an expression of sympathy during his stateside trip that sought to lay the matter to rest.

In a one-hour meeting with US politicians arranged by Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and hosted by Sen. Nancy Pelosi, Abe was reported to have expressed sympathy for the victims: “As an individual, and the prime minister, I sympathize from the bottom of my heart with the former comfort women who experienced this extreme hardship. I'm deeply sorry about the situation in which they were placed.”

Calling such remarks an apology—to the US President not the comfort women—George Bush sought to lay the issue to rest in order to get on to the important issues of redefining the US-Japan military relationship. But the problem is unlikely to end there. On close analysis, the Abe statement is a model of the equivocation that has long characterized many official pronouncements on Japanese war crimes. It managed, for example, to douse the fires in Washington caused by his original denial while still conceding nothing on the key issue of coercion.