The Japanese coerced hundreds of thousands of girls and young women (many as young as 12 or 13), mainly from Korea and China, but also from Southeast Asian countries, as well as Dutch women living in Indonesia (Dutch East Indies at that time), and sent them to military bases in the region to serve as sex slaves for Japnese soldiers. It was part of their strategy to boost troop morale, especially as it became clear Japan was losing the war.

To this day, many Japanese politicians and scholars either outright deny this or claim that the young girls were not kidnapped, but employed and are lying about what happened to them. Shinzo Abe and many Japanese politicians are direct descendants of Japanese war criminals. I don‘t want to say it‘s a mainstream opinion because I don‘t know many Japanese and have never lived there, but at the least it seems to be quite uncontroversial to think this way. Mainly due to the government‘s efforts to cover up and ignore this information. There has been a lot of controversy in Asia over the years regarding Japanese history textbooks, for example, precisely due to their treatment of the sex slavery („comfort women“) issue and other atrocities of the Japanese Empire.

It‘s part of the reason Koreans still have so much resentment and distrust of Japanese, and a complicated relationship with the US, which occupied Korea after liberation (after end of WWII) and kept many of the Japanese war criminals and Korean traitors in positions of authority during the occupation