This issue is stupid because all language is inherently faulty, vague and even when clarified its intentions can be questioned or its sincerity scrutinized by completely subjective standards.
The major issue in Japan isn't that Comfort women existed or not. This is a huge misconception. Because People read "Japan denies it forced comfort women to work for them" it's not denying it had comfort women, it's denying that it FORCED comfort woman to work for them.
The key word is work.
And while I'm no specialist on the matter, I reckon the truth is, as it always seems to be, somewhere in the middle, like always. I'm fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and honesty for every 1 Japnese nationalist there's 10 very emotional Koreans a and unfortunately amongst them also a supreme Exaggerator that 99% is saying the truth but severely disabled the strength of her claim because of both poor memory and blatant exaggerations.
It's also not the first time Korea went through the trouble of falsifying witnesses.
I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that Japan did not do anything wrong. What im saying is that in a bid to make Japan feel bad, Korea has more than once or twice, brought up witnesses who's statements completely contradicted well known facts. One women in fact changed her age during testimonies because she would have been 9 years old when she was "drafted" into the Japanese Army comfort women system.
I love Asian culture and language but I'm sorry, there is no country in East Asia that doesn't have its shit together with their history.
It's not one countries fault, because for every historian that just wants the damn truth, there's 20 politicians in each nation hat can't handle it. They want the history that best suits their current world view.
Let's not forget that Koreans weren't allowed to be drafted into the Japanese military. They called this discrimination and 10s of thousands of them volunteered to join, since conscription wasn't allowed. Many of them fought all over Asia. Some even got promoted to extremely high Officer positions.
But we never hear about anything unless it's mainstream black and white because everybody wants a clean easy to eat version of history when history in any world or nation is anything but