A Japanese newspaper has criticized an American publishing company for its passages on comfort women and called on the Japanese government to revise the apologetic Kono statement about the issue.
 
In an editorial on Wednesday, The Yomiuri Shimbun said that McGraw-Hill Education disregarded facts in passages from a history textbook that state the Imperial Japanese Army forced up to 200-thousand women aged 14 to 20 to work as sexual slaves during World War II.
 
In December, the Japanese government requested McGraw-Hill Education change the description, but the American publishing company refused.
 
Yomiuri claimed that the recruitment of women at Japan’s military brothels was done mainly by the private sector and that a Japanese government survey did not find any evidence of forced enslavement by the military.
 
It said that the 1993 Kono Statement, which indicated that the recruitment was forced, inevitably needs to be revised.
 
Yomiuri, a conservative newspaper, is the most-widely circulated newspaper in Japan. On August 27 of last year, the paper urged the Japanese government to announce a new statement to replace the Kono Statement.