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The last known Taiwanese “comfort woman” from World War Two has died aged 92, says a Taipei anti-sex trafficking group.

“Comfort women” refers to those forced to work in the Japanese army’s wartime brothels between 1932 and 1945.

Activists estimate 200,000 people from the occupied territories were forced into sexual slavery, including about 2,000 women in Taiwan.

The woman, who did not wish to be named, died on 10 May said activists.

The Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation said her family had permitted the news of her death to be known after a private funeral.

Women forced into Imperial Japan’s WW2 sexual slavery came from its occupied territories in Korea, China, Taiwan and the Philippines among other areas.

The Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation said located 59 of them locally after setting up a hotline in 1992.

“We will continue to keep records of the comfort women and hope the truth about the sexual violence does not disappear with their deaths,” the foundation said in a statement.

“We will continue to demand that the Japanese government apologise and compensate these women and their families,” it added.

Taiwan was colonised by Japan from 1895 to 1945. While there are numerous memorials dedicated to the Japanese contribution to the island during the colonial period, it was not until 2018 that the first memorial to “comfort women” was erected in the southern city of Tainan.

Protests ensued when a Japanese right-wing activist was filmed kicking the statue. This came two years after Taiwan opened a museum dedicated to “comfort women” in the capital Taipei.

The historical grievance has long been a sore point in Japan’s relations with its neighbours.

Thousands of “comfort women” were drawn from Korea, and the issue has long driven a political wedge between Tokyo and Seoul.

In 2015, the two governments came to an agreement in which Fumio Kishida, then Japan’s foreign minister, apologised for the “grave affront to the honour and dignity of large numbers of women”.

However a few weeks later the the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to walk back the apology. He told the Japanese parliament: “There was no document found that the comfort women were forcibly taken away”.

South Korea also accepted Japan’s compensation offer of 1b yen ($7.2m; £5.8m). However it was criticised by victims as being insufficient.

Japan has minimised the topic of comfort women in its post-WW2 narrative, says Professor Mary McCarthy of Drake University, who specialises in Japan’s domestic and foreign policies.

There is currently no consensus within Japan about the facts of the comfort women: who they were, how they were recruited, what the roles of the Japanese military and government were, and what should be done today, she said.

“They were undermined by removal of the issue from Japanese school textbooks, Japanese politicians denying the issue, and active insistence by the government and individual politicians that memorials to the comfort women around the world be removed.”

Prof McCarthy told the BBC the issue has polarised public discourse since the 1980s, becoming a “political symbol” of ideological preferences and worldviews.

The government and opposition have been trading barbs over the inauguration of India’s new parliament building.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to inaugurate it on on 28 May.

Opposition leaders have accused the government of “constitutional impropriety” by not requesting the president to open the building.

They have also criticised the government’s choice of date which is also the birth anniversary of Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar.

Opposition parties consider Savarkar as a divisive figure, while the ruling BJP hails him as a hero.

Leaders from opposition parties said the choice of the inauguration date was an “insult” to India’s founding fathers.

Congress MP Jairam Ramesh criticised the government’s decision to inaugurate the new parliament building “on the birth anniversary of the man who opposed Mahatma Gandhi vehemently all his life”.

The BJP has defended the decision, saying the new building was a matter of pride for Indians.

Work on the new parliament began in January 2021.

The four-storey building – designed by HCP Design, Planning and Management and constructed by Tata Projects – has increased seating capacity and is built at at an estimated cost of 9.7bn rupees ($117.1m, £94.2m).

The existing colonial-era parliament building will continue to be used.

As plans for the inauguration of the new building were announced last week, several opposition parties criticised the government’s exclusion of Indian President Draupadi Murmu – the head of state – from the event.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that the building should be inaugurated by her.

“The parliament of India is the supreme legislative body of the Republic of India, and the President of India is its highest constitutional authority. She alone represents government, opposition, and every citizen alike,” Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge wrote on Twitter. “Inauguration of the new parliament building by her will symbolise [the] government’s commitment to democratic values and constitutional propriety,” his tweet read.

Gaurav Bhatia, a spokesperson of the BJP, dismissed the criticism as “chest-beating” by the Congress party.

He also said Mr Gandhi was “a bad omen during auspicious times” who could not welcome the “historic moment”.

Reports say the Congress is now considering a boycott of the event. It was among several opposition parties that did not attend the foundation-laying ceremony for the building in 2020 as it came in during the coronavirus pandemic.

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