REUTERS / Kyodo Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto listens to a question during a press conference in Tokyo Monday.

TOKYO – Well, I guess it’s back to cold showers for the Marines on Okinawa.

Conservative leader Toru Hashimoto apologized Monday and retracted his earlier suggestion that Marines use the “legally accepted adult entertainment industry” on Okinawa to prevent troops from committing sex crimes there. He called for better discipline, instead.

Hashimoto’s proposal irritated the Americans and infuriated Okinawans — as if the former would consider paid-for sex a fine alternative to crime, or that the latter would happily engage in that kind of commerce.

Still, it was only one of several gaffes in recent weeks that revealed the distance between Japan’s conservative leaders and darned near everyone else over issues related to Japan’s war legacy. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was forced to concede last week that Japan had committed “aggression” during its wartime and colonial period, after waffling on the issue during a Diet session.

Nor is it clear that Hashimoto’s appearance Monday will bridge the gap.

Hashimoto angered Japan’s neighbors by seeming to suggest earlier this month that the wartime “comfort women” system was a necessary measure to ensure good order and discipline among Japanese imperial troops. By some estimates, as many as 200,000 women, mostly Korean and Chinese, were coerced into providing sexual services for occupying forces.

Hashimoto, 43, is leader of the Restoration Party and mayor of Osaka, one of Japan’s largest cities. Until recently he was considered a rising star of Japanese politics. But his comments were denounced by the U.S. State Department last week. And two former comfort women who had traveled from South Korea to meet with him abruptly cancelled the meeting this weekend; they voiced concern that Hashimoto would use the meeting for his own ends.