TATEYAMA, Japan - Sister Michiko Amaha leads the way down into the basement of a little hilltop chapel overlooking the grounds of a shelter for women who, for one reason or another, can't live on their own.
Sister Michiko Amaha looks at a photograph of a woman who is known by her pen name Suzuko Shirota at the basement of a little chapel in Tateyama, east of Tokyo, May 24, 2007. [AP]Over the years, dozens of women have spent their final days here. Their ashes are stored behind stone markers under a simple altar. Amaha takes the black-and-white photograph of one down from the wall in the ossuary, places it on the altar and lights a few candles.
The woman in the photo is smiling a bright smile, with bangs hanging down over her forehead like a little girl.
Her name - or the name she is known by - was Suzuko Shirota.
Sold by her father into prostitution at age 17, she followed Japan's troops around the Pacific during World War II. After Japan's surrender, she returned and US troops became her clientele. She became a drug addict, was destitute and institutionalized for decades.
Though historians believe there were perhaps tens of thousands more Japanese like her, Shirota is the only Japanese "comfort woman" to have come forward and tell her story.
Now, Japan's government is subtly trying to revise that story.
Sixty-two years after Japan's surrender in 1945 brought an end to the official sanction of thousands of frontline brothels - a tragedy that has been called one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has questioned a key element of an apology Tokyo offered the women in 1993.
Abe and many Japanese conservatives claim that, "in the narrow sense," the women weren't coerced.
No one, for example, held a gun to Shirota's head.
But, then again, no one needed to.
Shirota lived a relatively quiet life until she was 14 and her mother died, in 1935. Her family bakery went bankrupt, and her father began gambling. To pay off his debts, he sold her to a brothel.
Prostitution was legal back then in Japan, and Shirota's was a common fate. With no other choice, she accepted it with resignation.
At first, Shirota worked as an assistant, helping the older women with their clothes and makeup. But gradually, she was brought into the reality of the brothel. When she was 18, she was ordered to serve her first customer. Locked in a room, she was raped. She was bedridden for days, and underwent treatment for syphilis.
Her father continued to gamble, and took out loans from the brothel.
A broker in Yokohama sold her to another brothel in Taiwan. By then, Japan was well down its path toward all-out war in Asia. Taiwan and Korea were colonies, and the Japanese empire was spreading rapidly throughout the region.
So was forced prostitution. Japan established its first "comfort stations" in China in 1932 to serve as a steam valve for the troops, preventing rapes that would generate local resentment and resistance, and to slow the spread of venereal diseases through medical supervision of the brothels.
The women - she recalls taking a boat to Taiwan with Koreans, Okinawan and other Japanese - were closely controlled.
In Taiwan, Shirota was kept under lock and key. Though privately run, her brothel served Japan's military and the government was closely involved in keeping the women from escaping. Papers were required to leave her brothel, and police kept tabs on her movement.
"I became, in name and reality, a slave," she wrote in her little-known memoir, "In Praise of Mary." "On Saturdays and Sundays, there would be a line and men would compete to get in. It was a meat market, with no feeling or emotion. Each woman would have to take 10 or 15 men."
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