CRI听力:Abe's Speech Triggered Strong Opposition

During his address to the joint session of the U.S. Congress, visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he will uphold the views of previous leaders on his country's World War II history.

However, many have been left disappointed by his statement, saying it has steered-clear of the thorny issues.

Congressman Mike Honda says Abe had an opportunity to make history by acknowledging and expressing remorse over Japan's wartime atrocities.

"This is utterly shameful and shocking that Prime Minister Abe continues to evade his government's responsibility of systematic atrocity that was perpetrated by the Japanese imperial army against the so-called comfort women."

Estimates are some 200-thousand women across Asia were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War II.

Today, only around one-hundred of the so-called "comfort women" survive.

One of them, an 87-year-old woman from South Korea, sat in the Gallery during Abe's speech, waiting for an apology from the Japanese Prime Minister.

At the same time, a 95-year-old U.S. veteran who endured the Bataan Death March in the Philippines at the hands of the Japanese military, was also left without the apology he had been hoping for.

Jan Thompson, President of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, says if only one line or one sentence was mentioned in Abe's lengthy speech, it would have brought some comfort to the old man and his family.

"The Prime Minister says history is harsh. We agree with the Prime Minister that history is harsh. But we offer the caution that history is ultimately harsher on those that deny it."

Grace Han Wolf, the first Korean-American woman elected to the town council in northern Virginia, says the Prime Minister is trying to portrait Japan as a world leader of the future.

However, she says his speech is just a re-packaging of the same old thing.

"A country that wishes to take the stage as a leader of the future, but will not acknowledge and recognize and earn up to its past. And I think going to be impossible for Japan to really be perceived as a world leader until they do take an active and direct role for recognizing their past."

The speech by Abe before the US Congress comes just weeks ahead of his much more widely-anticipated speech to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.