By Jun Ji-hye



A senior Japanese diplomat has claimed the victims of Japan's wartime sex slavery were "paid prostitutes" in a recent interview with a local newspaper in Atlanta.



During the interview with the Reporter Newspapers, Takashi Shinozuka, the Japanese consul general in Atlanta, also urged the Brookhaven City Council to reverse its decision to set up a "comfort women" memorial that honors those who were forced to work as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II.



"They were not sex slaves, and they were not taken by force," Shinozuka said, adding rather that the women were paid prostitutes.



The remarks were a refutation of a statement from the Atlanta Comfort Women Memorial Task Force that up to 200,000 women were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military.



Shinozuka said there was "no evidence" that the women were sexually enslaved, calling the memorial a "symbol of hatred and resentment against Japan."



Shinozuka has been reportedly lobbying the Brookhaven City Council to reverse the decision about the memorial.



The taskforce strongly denounced Shinozuka's remarks, saying they run counter to what the Japanese government has said so far. It also raised questions whether Japan no longer believes there were sexual slavery victims despite its signing of a deal in 2015 with the Korean government in which the country vowed to help victims.



Phyllis Kim, executive director at the Korean American Forum of California, who has been working to raise awareness about the sexual slavery victims, said, "One has to wonder, why does it have to be so difficult for Japan, or rather Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to admit squarely the wrong in the past to prevent the same atrocity against women from happening again."



Ed Royce, chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, also called the Japanese government, Monday, to look straight at history and teach its past wrongdoings to the young people of the country.



