In a March 13, 1946, document unearthed last year by Kanto Gakuin University historian Hirofumi Hayashi, Dutch prosecutors quote an Imperial Navy employee as saying women in occupied Indonesia were rounded up on phony charges so they could be forced into brothels.

"I admit to have slapped these women with the flat of my hand; I also ordered them to undress," the document quotes Shuichi Hayashi as saying. "I do not think these women were actually punishable, but their arrest ... was only a pretext to put them in a brothel."

The main verdict at the Tokyo tribunal -- accepted by Japan's government in the peace treaty between Japan and the Allied Powers that took effect in 1952 -- says Japan's military forced women to have sex with troops.

"These are clear cases of women being coerced into brothels," Hayashi said at a news conference attended by other historians. "These documents have been long known to the Japanese government. I don't know how they can ignore these."

Historians say hundreds of thousands of women, mainly from Korea, the Philippines and China, were forced into Japanese front-line brothels in the 1930s and '40s.

After decades of denial, the Japanese government acknowledged its role in wartime prostitution after another historian, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, discovered documents showing government involvement.

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