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strong>May 14, Online/AP

An outspoken nationalist mayor said the Japanese military's forced prostitution of Asian women before and during World War II was necessary to 'maintain discipline' in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle.

The comments made on Monday are already raising ire in neighboring countries that bore the brunt of Japan's wartime aggression and that have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone for wartime atrocities.

Toru Hashimoto, the young, brash mayor of Osaka who is also co-leader of an emerging conservative political party, also told reporters that there wasn't clear evidence that the Japanese military coerced women to become what are euphemistically called 'comfort women'.

Your comments:

No need to be a racist and sexist. No one deserved to be raped. This person is trying to sentimentalize institutionalized rape across the continent. Japanese soldiers did 'risk their lives' mutilating Chinese civilians, years before Pearl Harbor.

Japan only has itself to blame for the Pacific War. The Treaty of Versailles could justify the Twenty-One Demands made by Japan to China. The Great Depression can explain the Rape of Nanking.

For decades, Germany apologized for World War II, Nazis and the Holocaust.

Japan has never truly apologized for the Pacific War, fascism or the comfort women system.

I volunteered at an anti-nuclear Japanese NGO years ago. I met Japanese women who were also passionate about the comfort women issue.

I wish there were more Japanese like them to stop imbeciles like Hashimoto and Ishihara from gaining more influence.

Mario Rustan
Bandung