"Our campaign worked, and people outside government also started raising their voices.", "It is good that expressions such as comfort women and forced labor have decreased in history textbooks" He also declared that he agreed with an e-mail sent to him saying that the "victimized women in Asia should be proud of being comfort women". "Those women deserve much sympathy, but (being forced to provide sex) is not so much different from what was commonly seen in poor rural Japanese communities in the past, where women were sold to brothels. It could be said that the occupation was something they could have pride in, given their existence soothed distraught feelings of men in the battlefield and provided a certain respite and order." In November, he said, In June, he denied the term "comfort women" existed during the wartime years.
