At U.S. hearing, WW2 sex slaves spurn Japan apologies

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three women who were forced into sexual servitude by Japan in World War Two on Thursday told the U.S. Congress harrowing tales of abuse and said they rejected Japanese official apologies as an insult.

The now elderly "comfort women" -- a Japanese euphemism for the estimated 200,000 mostly Asian women forced to provide sex for Japan's soldiers -- testified in a debate on a House of Representatives resolution calling on Japan to apologize for that practice.

The women, two South Koreans and a Dutch-born Australian, said Tokyo's efforts to atone for their ordeal were insufficient because official apologies were not accompanied by offers of government compensation.

"A real apology to me is one that is followed by action," Jan Ruff O'Herne, 84, who was snatched by Japanese officers from a sugar plantation in 1942 in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony where here family had lived for three generations.

She told the Asia-Pacific subcommittee of the HouseCommittee on Foreign Affairs that she lost her virginity to a sword-wielding Japanese officer, the first rape in a three-year nightmare that led to miscarriages later in life.

"Even the Japanese doctor raped me each time he examined me for venereal disease," O'Herne said.

The devout Catholic woman said she had forgiven the Japanese but rejected a payment from Tokyo's Asian Women's Fund in 1995 as "an insult to comfort women" because the money was from private donations -- a formula that she felt skirted Japanese state responsibility.

"I will only take money if it comes from the government," O'Herne told the hearing.

CRITICIZING A U.S. ALLY

Japan in 1993 acknowledged a state role in the wartime brothel program and later issued apologies and set up the Asian Women's Fund. About 285 of the women who accepted payments of about $20,000 from that fund received personal apologies from Japan's prime minister.

A Japanese official in Washington said Tokyo was monitoring the debate since Rep. Michael Honda, a California Democrat, introduced the nonbinding resolution on February 1, but did not wish "to make this a big public issue" in U.S.-Japan ties.

Lee Yong-soo and Kim Koon-ja told similar tales of abduction from villages in Korea and deployment to military brothels, followed by ostracism and hardship after the war.

"If you don't officially apologize or make compensation, then give me back my youth," said Kim, 81, repeating statements she made to the Japanese parliament more than a decade ago.

Honda urged the committee to move urgently to pass his measure because "these women are aging and their numbers dwindling with each passing day."

Honda, one of a handful of U.S. lawmakers of Japanese descent, said he was alarmed at efforts by some conservatives in Japan to withdraw or revise the government's earlier admission of a state role in the brothel system.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, criticized the resolution, saying "Japan has already apologized many, many times." Japan today was a U.S. ally and a "major force for decency and humane standards", he added in comments that drew angry condemnation from Korean witness Lee.