China lawyers reveal more Japan war sex slave claims

BEIJING, July 3 (Reuters) Chinese lawyers said today they had identified more women forced to work as wartime sex slaves for Japanese occupying troops, possibly opening the way for fresh compensation claims.

The All China Lawyers Association, a government-sponsored organisation, published the results of an investigation that uncovered 17 Chinese women who claimed they had been coerced into serving as ''comfort women'' for Japanese Imperial forces, who controlled much of the country in the 1930s and 1940s.

''There have been legal cases about comfort women for over a decade but we wanted to get a broader overview of how many there were and how many are still alive,'' Kang Jian, one of the lawyers behind the investigation, told Reuters.

The youngest survivor found was just 12 years old when she was forced into a Japanese military brothel, said the report on the association's Web site (www.acla.org.cn). All but one of the newly identified women came from Shanxi province in the north.

The women had no firm plans to sue the Japanese government, but the inquiry could pave the way for such claims, said Kang, who has been involved in comfort women cases since 1995.

''This may lead there but we have to wait and see,'' she said.

''We did the investigations in a way that the documentation can help a court case.'' After years of hostility, Beijing and Tokyo recently began rebuilding ties strained by repeated visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine by then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. China and other Asian nations say the shrine symbolises Japan's past militarism.

But the sex slavery inquiry was another reminder that wartime memories remain potent in China and could unsettle relations with Koizumi's successor, Shinzo Abe.

Abe has avoided going to the shrine as prime minister but in March he questioned whether, as is generally believed, Japanese authorities had really forced women to work in wartime brothels.

Faced with international protests, he later repeatedly apologised for the suffering of the victims.

Tokyo has refused to pay direct compensation to any of the estimated 200,000 mostly Asian women forced to work in its military brothels before and during World War Two, saying all claims were settled by subsequent peace treaties.

In April, Japan's top court rejected damages claims by two Chinese women forced into military brothels.

Last week, the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist Party, criticised Japan's handling of its legacy of wartime prostitution.

''On the comfort women issue, Japanese right-wing forces and some politicians have always blundered by trying to be too smart, only making their misdeeds more obvious by trying to hide them,'' the paper said.

REUTERS GL VC0938