This article examines criticism of The Asahi Shimbun’s review of its reporting on the comfort women issue, focusing on its January 11, 1992 front-page report on “military involvement,” its timing immediately before Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s visit to South Korea, the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, the explanation given for retracting articles, and the logical contradiction involved in invoking similar reporting by other newspapers.

August 18, 2020
This article records a discussion concerning The Asahi Shimbun’s review of its reporting on the comfort women issue.
The central issues are the publication of the January 11, 1992 front-page article titled “Documents Showing Military Involvement in Comfort Stations” immediately before Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s visit to South Korea; criticism that the page presentation created an impression linking “military involvement” with forcible recruitment; the handling of Seiji Yoshida’s testimony and the subsequent retraction of articles; and the logical inconsistency said to arise when The Asahi Shimbun itself pointed to similar reporting by other newspapers.
The original discussion follows.

The Fatal Logical Breakdown in The Asahi Shimbun’s Review of Its Comfort Women Reporting

Sakurai: That is precisely what one might call one of The Asahi’s “underhanded techniques.” Its latest review of its reporting on the comfort women issue is also extremely cunning. Let us look at the article that appeared on the front page of the January 11, 1992 morning edition under the headline, “Documents Showing Military Involvement in Comfort Stations.”
In its review, The Asahi emphasizes that it did not intend to turn the matter into a political issue by publishing the story immediately before “Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s visit to South Korea.” But the timing was immediately before the visit. I still remember it. It was the top story on the front page, with a huge, heavy black headline saying that “documents showing military involvement had been found.”
Abiru: There were as many as six headlines on the front page.
Kadota: It was extraordinary.
Abiru: You normally never see an article that large.
Sakurai: Yet when you read carefully what “military involvement” actually meant, the documents concerned matters such as requiring attention to hygiene and cracking down on unscrupulous operators.
Abiru: As Tsutomu Nishioka often says, it was “benevolent involvement.”
Sakurai: Ikuhiko Hata has also said, “This was beneficial involvement.” Without this kind of involvement, the comfort stations could not have been managed. Yet when you look at the actual newspaper page, it was written in a way that caused the image of such involvement to overlap with forcible recruitment.
Abiru: That is right. Near the bottom of the front page that day there was an explanatory passage headed “What Were Military Comfort Women?” It stated that they were “mainly Korean women, numbering somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000 … forcibly taken away under the name of the Women’s Volunteer Corps.” In a short piece of barely more than ten lines, there are three or four errors.
Sakurai: But in its review, The Asahi says that the government already knew of the existence of the documents before The Asahi’s report. In other words, The Asahi argues that it was not the first to inform the government that the military had been involved, and that because the Japanese government already knew such documents existed, it was not The Asahi’s reporting that caused Mr. Miyazawa to become shaken and apologize eight times when he went to South Korea. I think this is an extremely evasive way of escaping responsibility.
Abiru: If you read the documents of the Cabinet Office for External Affairs at the time, they contain descriptions saying that The Asahi’s report threw the government into turmoil, as though a hornet’s nest had been stirred up. Some people within the government may have regarded documents of that kind as perfectly ordinary facts that they already knew about, but there is no doubt that the way The Asahi wrote the article caused tremendous turmoil.
Sakurai: With regard to Seiji Yoshida, who claimed that women had been “taken away on Jeju Island,” The Asahi wrote that it had investigated the matter on Jeju Island but had been unable to obtain corroboration, and that there was no conclusive proof at the time that Yoshida’s testimony was false. It says, “Therefore, we described the truth or falsity of the account as unconfirmed.” But if not a single local resident says, “Yes, such a thing happened,” regarding the events Yoshida described, that itself is evidence that his testimony was not true. They may not have explicitly said, “What Seiji Yoshida said was a lie,” but they did say that there was no such story of women being taken away, of people arriving in trucks and forcibly seizing 200 women.
That means that what Seiji Yoshida wrote did not happen, and therefore it was false. Yet here again The Asahi offers the strained explanation that “at the time there was no conclusive proof that Seiji Yoshida’s testimony was false.” At the same time, it now says that it has concluded the testimony was false and will retract the articles. Then when did they decide that it was false? If it was not on August 5, was it several years earlier? Decades earlier? What were they doing during all that time? There is no explanation whatsoever, and we are left completely in the dark.
Abiru: What is also evasive about this article is that although they say they wrote at least sixteen articles and are retracting them, there is almost no description of exactly which articles are being withdrawn. Readers today are left unable to understand what The Asahi actually reported, what is being retracted, and what is being left standing. In effect, the retractions are being made quietly, in a form that readers cannot clearly see.
Sakurai: You can sense a desire to prevent their own mistakes from becoming widely known and to conceal them as much as possible.
Kadota: One characteristic of The Asahi Shimbun is that it works very hard when reporting something that can be presented as showing that Japan alone was at fault. Yet, for example, when 122 former comfort women associated with U.S. forces filed suit against the South Korean government on June 25—something I regard as a very significant development—the coverage was small.
Institutions resembling comfort women systems have existed historically in connection with the armed forces of various countries. They have existed across many eras and regions; it is even said that groups of prostitutes accompanied the Crusades. Yet the reporting encouraged readers to think that this was something unique to Japan and that Japan alone was at fault.
Abiru: But in this special feature, The Asahi has fallen into a fatal logical contradiction. What is that contradiction? Until now, in its editorials on the comfort women issue, it has argued that even if similar cases existed in other countries, the fact that those countries had not apologized did not mean Japan could therefore avoid responsibility. Yet this time, in a section titled “Reporting by Other Newspapers,” it deliberately lined up the reports of other papers, as if to say, “We weren’t the only ones.”
Kadota: So in this special feature, they are saying, “It wasn’t just me.”
Abiru: Exactly. Until now, they themselves have argued in their editorials that the logic of “It wasn’t just me” does not work, but when it comes to their own mistakes, they are effectively saying, “It wasn’t just me.”