At 15, Kim Sang Hee was plucked by the Japanese Imperial Army from her home in Taegu and transported to a "comfort station," the euphemism for one of the military brothels at which more than 100,000 women--from Korea, China and other Asian nations--were forced to provide sex for Japan's overseas soldiers during World War II. For eight years, until the war's end in 1945, she granted her so-called comforts on command, and a half-century later is demanding a different kind of comfort in return: both compensation and an apology from a Japanese government that claims to be contrite.

But Kim, now a fragile 73, received scant satisfaction last week when Japanese Diet member Tadashi Itagaki, himself a war veteran, accused her in a face-to-face encounter in Tokyo of exaggerating her claim of being a sex slave. The unsympathetic legislator, the son of a war minister whom many hold responsible for stepping up the comfort-woman program in the late 1930s, challenged her: "You weren't paid anything in your eight years?" Retorted an angry Kim: "How can you ask someone who's been through life and death if what she says is true or not? After you defiled my body on the battlefield, are you trying to defile my soul 50 years later? I was never paid anything!"

That exchange wound up on the pages of Japanese newspapers and on South Korean television, demonstrating anew the tortures Japan suffers--and is willing to inflict--in its ambivalent attempt to own up to its wartime past. The government has organized compensation packages for some of the former "comfort women," money raised entirely from private sources, and the modest amounts were announced on the day of Kim's encounter with Itagaki. Earlier on the same day, 116 legislators from the Liberal Democratic Party, the dominant coalition partner, formed a league to criticize school textbooks that portray the army negatively, specifically calling for the deletion of all references to the comfort women. The group's chairman, former Cabinet minister Seisuke Okuno, told a press conference that the women in question were just plain laborers in the world's oldest profession. "The Japanese forces may have arranged to transfer them to their jobs on the war front," suggested Okuno, "but didn't force them to go."

The records don't back up Okuno; nor do ordinary Japanese, many of whom were dismayed by the week's events. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto was caught between public opinion and his conservative party. Just hours before he released details on compensation packages for comfort women, Okuno announced the formation of his group, and the timing was a message: the rightists are against government payments and, more important, any kind of apology. "They want everyone to know that they are opposed," says Chuo University historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who in 1992 disclosed the first documentary evidence of comfort women.

Neither the tenuous government of Hashimoto nor the tens of thousands of elderly and often impoverished former sex slaves can expect an early or satisfactory conclusion to a controversy that has inflamed Asia for four years. China's foreign ministry expressed its "strong indignation." In South Korea, which two weeks ago was named co-host of the 2002 World Cup soccer finals along with Japan, Prime Minister Lee Soo Sung said, "They would never have made such absurd remarks if their children had been victimized." Shim Mi Ja, 72, a former comfort woman in Seoul, seethed at the news. "It's not possible. The entire world knows it happened, and yet they deny it." Pondered a fellow wartime victim, Kim Soon Duk: "I don't know if it's because the Japanese don't have a conscience or because they're just being stubborn."

Confronting wartime misdeeds has been a difficult process for Japan, although polls over recent years have consistently shown that more than half the population believes the country owes Asia an apology for Japanese atrocities. But Japan is also being undeniably stubborn in the case of the comfort women. Yoshimi first broke the scandal in 1992 with documents discovered in files of the Self Defense Agency, and for the next 18 months the government halfheartedly looked for more evidence. In August 1993 it finally offered a tepid admission that "in many cases" women had been coerced into sex work and "at times" the military had been involved in rounding them up. Yoshimi and other independent researchers estimate that 100,000 to 200,000 women had been enslaved in the trade, including Koreans, Chinese, Filipinas, Indonesians, Malaysians, Vietnamese, Burmese and Dutch colonials.

By the mid-1970s, however, Japan had settled most of its scores with those countries in wartime-reparation agreements. Decades later, officials fear that any government payments to the widely scattered comfort women would ignite a chain reaction of lawsuits from other Asians exploited during the war, such as slave laborers. The government's first proposal was a 10-year "peace initiative," in which it would finance historical research, vocational training and youth exchanges between Japan and the rest of Asia. The comfort women swiftly rejected that offer. Last year the government headed by pacifist Tomiichi Murayama launched a national fund to raise $9.5 million for the women, to be collected entirely from private donations.

The plan has two problems. First, the government failed to persuade Big Business to join in, and the fund currently totals only $3.2 million. Last week payments of $19,000 each were announced for about 300 certified former comfort women in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. The fund's directors refused to make that announcement, however, until the Prime Minister assured them a letter of apology would be included. He did so, although the letter has yet to be delivered, and there is much speculation as to how strong or clear the apology will be. In May Hashimoto said he was willing to express official remorse, "because the greatest indignity possible was inflicted on these women. At the same time, I must be certain that the content of the letter does not lead to the filing of individual lawsuits."

The second problem is that many of the women are demanding official money or none at all. "I'd rather take 10,000 won from the Japanese government than 10 million won from the private fund," insists Shim Mi Ja, 72, now living with a friend in Seoul. "I want them to recognize what they did as war crimes and admit what happened were human-rights violations." But with a rearguard action being waged by the Diet's rightists, women like Shim are unlikely to find comfort--or justice--anytime soon.

--Reported by Irene M. Kunii and Hiroko Tashiro/Tokyo and Shin Na/Seoul

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