Their insistence is based on the "fact”that hardly any evidence is found to support victims' assertions that they were recruited into sexual slavery against their will.

Their challenge not only insults "comfort women”one more time but also betrays their ignorance or wanton intention, as it is not based on documented historical facts.

As the latest move to frustrate their insistence, a Japanese photographer presented evidence which shows that Japanese used coercive methods to recruit "comfort women" in Asia.

According to depositions written by 45 Japanese in a 1956 war crime trial in China, Suzuki Hiraku, a former senior Japanese military officer admitted having abducted some 140 Chinese and Korean women to force them to provide sex to Japanese servicemen during World War II.

Suzuki, a lieutenant general of the old Japanese imperial army in 1945, also confessed to ordering his subordinates three times to set up frontline brothels to shelter the women, in his depositions.

The documents, obtained by photographer Arai Toshio, with special permission from the Fushun War Criminal Detention Center in Liaoning Province, will be released in three serials by the Japanese monthly magazine Sekai from its May issue.

Since early 1990s, materials which help establish a general view on sexual slavery issue, have been regularly unearthed by victims' supporters.

For example, a 1942 document issued by the Japanese Policy-Planning Board was discovered in 1992 at the U.S. Congress Library on Capitol Hill by the Fact-Finding Team on the Truth about Forced Korean Laborers (KRC). The document suggests the Japanese Cabinet Councilors' 1942 decision to recruit Chinese women for service at "comfort houses” in Japan.

If anyone is to blame for the "lack of evidence," it must be the Japanese government which, since World War II, has consistently refused to open most of the war-related documents on the pretext of protection of privacy.

Among a total of 430,000 volumes of official documents, about 280,000 volumes or 65% of them have not yet been allowed public access, according to the KRC.

Of them, few of those issued by the wartime Home Ministry have been made open. The ministry controlled Japanese police and local administrative bodies in Korea and Taiwan during WWII, and it is believed that these administrative organizations were involved in recruiting "comfort women” and planning, organizing and managing "comfort stations.” They are preserved in the present Home Affairs Ministry.

It must be brazen-faced and unscrupulous for anybody to cite the "lack of evidence" and put blame on the victims' side.