Victim, rights group demand Japanese PM to apologize for WWII sex crimes

Yong Soo Lee, an 87-year-old South Korean victim surviving the World War II, on Thursday urged Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to apologize for his country's wartime sex crimes.

"Abe is lying and denying all the history of truth," an emotional Lee said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "I want to stand before him as a living witness of history."

Abe, whose attitude toward history has drawn strong criticism from countries including China and South Korea, is to visit the United States next week.

"I am an honorable daughter of Korea and I am not a comfort woman," Lee, who was tortured and almost killed by Japanese soldiers during the World War II, said through an interpreter.

There are only 53 known surviving victims of Japan's sex crimes in South Korea and their request for an apology from Tokyo has not been realized, said Jungsil Lee, president of Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW), a rights group that organized the press conference.

She called on Abe to "acknowledge the historical facts in its entirety and offer an official apology" rather than acting "as if he is an innocent bystander without any guilt or responsibility."

Dennis Halpin, a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute of Johns Hopkins University, also warned against what he called " historical amnesia."

Countries that do not remember history have no souls, Halpin said, adding that Japan's wartime crimes are "indisputable" and " there is no way to deny that history." Endite