Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said Japan committed indescribable wrongdoings by forcing women from South Korea and elsewhere to serve as sex slaves to its wartime troops, former Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama said yesterday. Murayama, who as prime minister issued an apology in 1995 for Japan's wartime aggression, said that it was time for Tokyo to finally resolve the issue of the so-called "comfort women" who were drafted into military brothels.

Ties between Japan and South Korea have been strained by a range of feuds, including one over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to a Tokyo shrine for the war dead which Seoul, like China, sees as a symbol of Japan's past militarism. Jun Byung-hun, a spokesman for South Korea's ruling Uri Party, said on Sunday. Kishi immediately appealed in the Tokyo High Court. The two sides have been unable to set a date for a regular summit meeting between Koizumi and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, which they had agreed to hold by the end of June.

Four Japanese basketball players have been sent home from the Asian Games for allegedly paying prostitutes for sex, the Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) said on Monday. Japan apologized again on Monday for the suffering of women who served as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II, a day after comments by a cabinet minister drew an angry reaction in South Korea. A comic book which depicts genitalia and sexual acts in two thirds of its content was ruled obscene in a landmark court case which has sparked a debate on freedom of expression in Japan.

The penal code article itself does not clearly define obscenity but the legal precedent was set by a 1957 Supreme Court ruling over a Japanese translation of D.H. Japan's top government spokesman sought to contain any further damage, saying Tokyo was sorry for the sex slaves. South Korean politicians and media blasted Nakayama, who caused a stir last November by praising history textbooks that played down what he termed "excessive descriptions" of Japanese wartime wrongdoing.

In addition to a territorial row over two tiny islands, many South Koreans feel Japan has not squarely faced its wartime past, including the brutal 1910-1945 rule of the Korean peninsula. The Tokyo District Court found Monotori Kishi, a 54-year-old publisher, guilty of distributing obscene printed material and handed him a one-year prison term suspended for three years. It was the first Japanese court trial in which a comic book stood accused of being obscene and the first in 20 years dealing with printed pornography, despite the presence of a huge amount of pornographic cartoons, A片 photographs and videos on bookstands and on the Internet in Japan In a bid to narrow the gap over history, the two governments launched a joint study four years ago, but a report on its results issued on Friday showed the two sides were sharply at odds on many subjects, including the sex slaves issue.

ĺ?洲美女 Historians estimate that as many as 200,000 women, mostly Korean, were forced into sexual slavery in Japanese military brothels during World War II.