The mayor of Japan’s third largest city, Osaka, has apologised for saying that US troops should patronise legal adult entertainment businesses as a way to reduce rapes and other assaults. Toru Hashimoto, 43, who is also the co-head of an emerging nationalistic party, said on Monday that his remarks two weeks ago rose from a “sense of crisis” about cases of sexual assaults by US military personnel on Japanese civilians in Okinawa, where a large number of US troops are based.
“I understand that my remark could be construed as an insult to the US forces and to the American people’’ and was inappropriate, he said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Tokyo. Hashimoto had created another uproar when he said that Japan’s wartime practice of forcing Asian women, mostly from South Korea and China, to work in frontline brothels was necessary to maintain discipline and provide relaxation for soldiers. He did not apologise for those comments, but he did call the use of so-called comfort women an “inexcusable act that violated the dignity and human rights of the women, in which large numbers of Korean and Japanese were included”. In explaining his ealier statement, Hashimoto said: “I happen to have used the word ‘necessity’ but it doesn’t mean I personally meant it was necessary … I mean that it is a historical truth that soldiers were using women. Was it not necessary for them?”
