A few days ago, two South Korean women, both in their eighties, cancelled a meeting with Toru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka. They had asked to speak with him more than a year ago, but now, the timing seemed not only wrong but painful: “We don’t need to be trampled on again,” the women, Kim Bok-dong and Kil Won-ok, said in a statement. When Kim was fifteen and Kil was thirteen, in Japan-occupied Korea, they went to work in factories; then, they were taken and put in what the Japanese called “comfort stations” and what are often referred to as military brothels in China. Even that is a euphemism. Kim and Kil were children—though “comfort women” were many ages—who were, with force, made sexually available to Japanese soldiers. Kim remembers there being fifteen soldiers a day, more on weekends, according to an A.P. report. Tens of thousands of women were trafficked by the Japanese military and its agents; some historians estimate there were as many as two hundred thousand in total.

And that, Hashimoto said in a speech earlier this month, was “necessary”: “When soldiers are risking their lives by running through storms of bullets, and you want to give these emotionally charged soldiers a rest somewhere, it’s clear that you need a comfort-women system,” he told reporters. “Anyone can understand that.” (Not everyone, actually.) Japan’s obligation, he said, is “to politely offer kind words to the comfort women”—as if they are to be pitied, prostitutes for whom politeness would be a prize; as if they had been lowered, rather than the Japanese military debased.

The issue of the comfort women is an open wound between South Korea and Japan—a practical part of the problem aside issues of historical justice and moral reckoning. Japan apologized formally in 1993, but nationalist politicians like Hashimoto, who is a leader in the Japanese Restoration Party, have been increasingly grudging and hedging toward the question of regret. Hashimoto compounded that built-in controversy by suggesting that other countries might not only understand but emulate the Japanese experience—that the United States might do so immediately at its bases in Japan: “We can’t control the sexual energy of these brave Marines … They must make more use of adult entertainers.”

By this week, Hashimoto had been condemned by everyone from the South Korean and Chinese governments to the New York State Assemblyman representing Flushing, Queens. (“When a powerful country like Japan puts out an anti-women’s rights message, it can take us back decades,” the assemblyman, Ron Kim, said. “My community is appalled, horrified, and hurt.”) A State Department spokeswoman called the remarks “outrageous and offensive,” and characterized the trafficking of comfort women as “a grave human-rights violation of enormous proportions.”

And so, on Tuesday, Hashimoto came out to apologize—sort of. He said that he hadn’t quite meant his words to sound as they had; the treatment of the women was “inexcusable”—“I am totally aware that their great pain and deep hurt were beyond description.” But in his remarks to reporters, he continued to depict the experiences of women like Kim and Kil as just one of those things that happens. War was hard on everybody, he argued; there was “no evidence” that the Japanese government had been culpable in an organized way, as though the fog of fighting and the free market had simply lifted teenagers from Korea (as well as from Indonesia and the Philippines) to the battlefields of China. (There is, in fact, ample historical documentation of the military’s role.) The organizing force he described was one of circumstance rather than of political decision-making or command and culpability.

Lots of countries at war acted this way, Hashimoto said: “It is not a fair attitude to blame only Japan, as if the violation of human rights of women by soldiers were a problem unique to the Japanese soldiers.” As for the remarks about Marines, he was sorry if they were insulting, but “my real intention was to prevent a mere handful of U.S. soldiers from committing crimes and strengthen the Japan-U.S. alliance and the relations of trust between the two nations.” On Thursday, Hashimoto survived a censure vote in the municipal legislature largely by threatening to quit if it passed. “If I caused misunderstanding, I’m sorry. But I don’t think what I’m saying is wrong. I still believe what I’m saying is right,” he said, according to the A.P.

Sexual violence in wartime is not unique to Japan. But that is no dispensation, especially when the comfort-women question is bound to concerns of militarism and creeping forgetfulness. Japan does have a special obligation, and Koreans have a complaint that requires an answer. So do individual women like Kim and Kil, who are now very old.

Beyond that, what needs to be challenged is a basic complacency about linking soldiers and sexual violence. This is an issue that afflicts many war zones and militaries, including ours, where there is an unresolved crisis of sexual assault. There is also something telling in Hashimoto’s muddling of wartime sexual servitude, prostitution, peacetime assaults on the streets of Okinawa, and “adult entertainment.” Rape, as should have long been clear, is an act of violence, not desire. The blurring of boundaries in wartime is not an excuse to forget this, but a reason to use peace to remember it.

Photograph by Kyodo/Reuters