One reason why the "comfort women" issue is so soul-searing in China and Korea is not because it posits the existence of prostitutes in times of war, but because girls and women who were anything but prostitutes were taken from their homes and coerced to serve in Japanese military brothels known as "comfort stations" during Japan's conquest of the Asian mainland.

When historical revisionists claim, against ample evidence to the contrary, that comfort women were not coerced, they not only make a mockery of military-inflicted suffering and trauma, but they imply that the victims of rape were prostitutes.

If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then calling a woman who is not a prostitute a whore has to be one of the world's oldest insults. That many of the World War II sex-slaves _ euphemistically known as comfort women _ were non-Japanese adds a racial dimension to this unacceptable slander.

Even the deepest wounds may be healed if reconciliation is part of the process. But if soul-scarring injury is denied, mocked or trivialised, painful old wounds are re-opened afresh and historic closure is thwarted.

The systemic, serial raping of the comfort women is revisited every time a prominent Japanese politician decides to deny or belittle this ugly chapter of Japan's wartime history.

Motivations for denial range from a legalistic stance based on an unwillingness to offer serious compensation to the intellectually dishonest pretence that Japan is not capable of such brutality. The hurt is not so much a matter of Japan's failure to compensate as the failure to atone documented wrongs.

Six decades after war's end, European leaders are sufficiently cognisant of history's hard lessens to pass motions criminalising Holocaust denial and trivialisation of mass suffering. Why then does Japan's current government, which prides itself on being as advanced as Europe in terms of its democratic system, free press and defence of human rights seem hell-bent on going in quite the opposite direction, denying history and hurting its historic victims anew?

Given the rising rates of crime and social apathy in Japan, the revisionist intent is said to be grounded in an understandable, albeit ill-conceived programme to promote national unity through love of country, but this does not give adequate consideration to how self-serving deletions, denials, revisions and endless quibbling, all in the name of enhancing the Japanese government's stature in the eyes of its own citizens, serves to cancel out past apologies and take away what vestiges of dignity might be left to Japan's victims.

Denying the facts regarding comfort women is not a matter of ancient history or an abstract issue but the slander of real-life victims, such as the hapless girls snatched from the streets and placed in brothels by Japan's Special Naval Police, as documented by the Tokyo-based Centre for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility.

And there are pressing humanitarian considerations, for some of the former comfort women are still alive, and all of them left behind families broken and scarred by war. To deny the reality of those who grievously suffered in order to make wartime Japan look better than the facts bear out, is to elevate the status of victimisers at the expense of victims, to make a hero of one's battle-scarred grandfather by making a whore of someone else's grandmother.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will soon visit Washington where he will be received with the protocol and respect as one of America's most steadfast allies, but he needs to clarify his government's drift away from the core tenets of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and Japan's Peace Constitution, two key documents upon which Japan-US amity and Japan's relations with the rest of the world are based. If the current revisionist campaign goes unchecked, it threatens to upend the peace treaty and thrust the entire post-WWII political order represented by the Allied defeat of fascism into question.

Before assuming power, Mr Abe was well-known for his hyper-nationalism, whether it be revising textbooks, pushing to abandon the peace constitution, commemorating war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine or dismissing the plight of comfort women. If as prime minister, he continues to promote this hardline revisionist plank with the symbolic power of the Japanese flag and instruments of the state behind him, then Japan will find itself dangerously isolated not just in East Asia where historic tensions remain palpable, but with the rest of the world which has long since put World War Two fascism in the history bin where it belongs.

The way Japan's right-wing media has vilified US congressman Mike Honda for trying to clear up the comfort woman issue reveals the choke-hold which belligerent revisionism has upon political narrative in Japan.

When hyper-nationalists stir the pot with racist sophistry, textbook white-washing, Nanjing massacre denials and blanket refutation of documented fact, they set Japan apart not only with former victim nations such as Korea and China, but victor nations such as Britain and America.

Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara, thrice victorious in the polls, has mocked foreigners, most especially Chinese and Koreans, with racial epithets pungent enough to get an American radio shock jockey like Don Imus fired. And members of Mr Abe's cabinet have out-done one another in recent months with foot-in-the-mouth quips such as "women are child-bearing machines," "Japan belongs to the Yamato race," "Korea was better off under Japanese rule," and the general vilification of foreigners as criminals.

To say, as Mr Abe did recently, that the sex slaves known as comfort women were "not coerced" is to engage in subtle chauvinistic sophistry that cuts close to the history-denying hate speech that is becoming a regular feature of Japanese political discourse.

It's as if the losers of the last war have regrouped to fight it again, a revisionist fantasy that has been obsessively explored in Japanese pulp fiction, film and manga.

Taken as a whole, the history-denying campaign of Japan's xenophobic right brings to mind Holocaust denial; it is not just hateful and hurtful, it is plain wrong.

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