"Comfort Women" Cancel Meeting With Japanese Mayor Toru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka, spoke to the press on Friday. Earlier on Friday, the cabinet of Japan's conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, passed a resolution to support a 1993 apology that Japan issued to women forced into sexual servitude during the war. The motion was apparently intended to appease other Asian nations angered that Japanese leaders seemed to be seeking to whitewash the country's past. Those concerns were also apparently shared by the two women who canceled the meeting, Kim Bok-dong and Kil Won-ok. Both women, now in their 80s, had hoped to explain how they and thousands of other so-called comfort women were forced to work in the brothels against their will, rebutting claims by Japanese nationalists that they were common prostitutes. However, the two decided that the mayor, Toru Hashimoto of the western city of Osaka, was just trying to use the planned meeting to repair his image and was not seriously showing remorse, the women said in a statement. Mr. Hashimoto, 43, who is also a leader of a populist party, angered South Korea and other Asian nations by saying last week that the comfort women were necessary to provide relief to soldiers who faced the dangers of enemy fire. The comments seemed to confirm fears of many in the region that Japanese political leaders were shifting to the right with a revisionist agenda. Seeking to control the diplomatic damage, Mr. Abe quickly distanced his government from the mayor's comments, which angered many Japanese voters, particularly women. The resolution by Mr. Abe's cabinet on Friday formally embraced the 1993 Kono Statement, which recognized that the Japanese military played a role, either directly or indirectly, in forcing the women into providing sex. Before becoming prime minister in December, Mr. Abe had openly disputed whether the military played a role. Faced with mounting criticism at home and abroad, Mr. Hashimoto also appeared to back away from the original comments by saying he merely meant that people at the time saw the brothels as necessary. But he also tried to deflect criticism by reiterating a view long held view by Japanese nationalists: that their nation has been unfairly singled out for criticism by the wartime victors, including the United States, which he said also ran or at least tacitly allowed brothels for its own soldiers. Mr. Hashimoto also angered American officials last week when he said United States troops stationed on the island of Okinawa should patronize the island's thriving sex industry to prevent them from raping local women. The mayor later said the comment had been inappropriate. On Friday, Ms. Kim and Ms. Kil, the two former comfort women, said in a statement that it was comments like that by Mr. Hashimoto that led them to cancel the meeting, which was supposed to take place later in the day. The women, who did not appear in public, said in the statement that they were heartbroken by the mayor's "outrageous comments," according to The Associated Press. "We cannot compromise our painful past as victims and the reality that we still live today for Mayor Hashimoto's apology performance," the statement said, according to The A.P. The women also demanded that Mr. Hashimoto apologize and resign as mayor.