The so-called ‘comfort women’ were women (including teenagers) taken by force and treated as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during the Second World War. The Asian Women’s Fund, as an extension of the Japanese government, is an institutional device for political apology regarding the ‘comfort women’ issue. As an initial step to consider postwar history cognition in Japan, this article examines some of the web pages on the Asian Women’s Fund website, analyzing the lexical items, the rhetoric, and the defining/summarizing/quoting strategies with corpora evidence. By examining related details, the article uncovers how ‘facts’ and ‘history’ were presented in the discourse, and thus uncovers the infelicity of the apology.
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