JRP to expel lawmaker on improper comment

OSAKA - A leader of Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party, or JRP) announced Friday that the party will expel one member of its lawmakers who had earlier expressed public messages that apparently insult South Korean people, following recent reports of Toru Hashimoto, the party's co-leader and mayor of Osaka, and his opinion of the "comfort women".

The Osaka-based political party's Secretary General and Governor of Osaka, Ichiro Matsui, told reporters in his prefectural government office on Friday that he would delete the name of the lawmaker Shingo Nishimura from the party. Nishimura earlier in the day said at a meeting joined by other members of parliament plus news reporters that he would suggest the attendees to say "comfort woman" when you can see South Korean nationals in entertainment districts in central Osaka, according to the daily Yomiuri Shimbun.

During the meeting, Nishimura also stressed that foreign media started to fabricate, by particularly using the words such as "sex slave", co-leader Hashimoto's recent remarks on "comfort women".

Hashimoto said on Monday that the system to recruit women into sexual servitude was "necessary to maintain discipline" in the Japanese military during World War II, while proposing US troops to make "more" legal use of the local sex industry to help reduce rapes and other assaults that have often been reported in the southern Japanese prefecture of Okinawa.

The report added the final decision to expel the 64-year-old lawmaker will be made within days after the secretary general holds a meeting with co-leaders of the JRP, Hashimoto and Shintaro Ishihara.