Conflict over Japan's wartime past spilling into U.S.

TOKYO, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- Japan and South Korea are planning another round of talks tackling the issue of Korean "comfort women," but conflict is brewing between Japanese scholars and U.S. textbook publisher McGraw-Hill over a book that addresses Japan's wartime past.

Seoul's Foreign Ministry said Friday the two sides are to meet next week in the 11th session of formal negotiations that began April 2014, Yonhap reported.

South Korea is seeking a government apology from Japan for the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Korean women forced to serve in military brothels during World War II.

Japan, however, has said it met its legal responsibility for the colonization of the Korean peninsula in 1965, when Seoul and Tokyo normalized relations, and Japan donated financial assistance as part of the exchange.

Historical issues continue to hound relations between the two neighbors, and the fight over Japan's militaristic past is spilling over to the United States.

The Japan Times reported Friday a group of 50 Japanese academics have signed a petition urging the revision of a U.S. textbook containing what they claim are "factual errors."

The letter is also a rebuttal to a petition signed by a global group of academics that are urging for scholarly freedom in Japan and an end to the denial of a "proven international history — the brutal mid-20th century system of state-sponsored sexual slavery throughout the Empire of Japan," according to Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.

Eiji Yamashita, a professor at Osaka City University and a signatory to the petition defending Japan's history, said the U.S. textbook, published by McGraw-Hill, contains eight mistakes. Yamashita said the group challenges the notion the Japanese army was presented "comfort women" as a gift from the emperor, and does not agree with the statement that Japanese soldiers murdered large numbers of the women to cover up the operation.

But Dudden sees things differently.

"There are 46 remaining registered South Korean survivors of the Empire of Japan's state sponsorship of an egregious human rights crime: sexual slavery," Dudden said.

"These women are not ghosts; rather, they are human beings who bear physical witnesses to the history they endured."