Published on May 9, 2019.
Taking as its point of departure the lecture by Asahi Shimbun reporter Toyo Hidekazu, this essay clarifies the original political and ideological context of the term “historical revisionism” and examines the danger of using it as a label of denunciation.
It sharply criticizes the Asahi Shimbun’s shifting logic over the comfort women reporting issue and the deception involved in importing left-wing jargon into general public discourse.

2019-05-09
Therefore, to harbor doubt toward that absolute “right,” or to advocate another “right,” is denounced as revisionism and treated as a crime. Naturally, in order to make them correct their thinking, they are sent to political detention camps or labor reeducation camps.
The following is, further, an article concerning Toyo Hidekazu. It is the chapter I published on October 18, 2015, under the title “The following is from.”
Emphasis in the body, other than the headings, is mine.
The Shameless Lecture of Asahi Shimbun’s Toyo Hidekazu.
A reporter named Toyo Hidekazu of the Asahi Shimbun went shamelessly all the way to South Korea
and gave a lecture at a seminar hosted by the Institute of Asian Studies at Seoul National University titled “The Comfort Women Issue and Postwar Japan.”
There, as ever…
it became clear that the Asahi Shimbun has not reflected at all on the “fabrication issue of comfort women.”
According to Toyo…
“While internationally there emerged a trend to view the comfort women issue as wartime sexual violence
and to recognize it as a women’s human rights issue,
within Japan historical revisionist tendencies grew stronger.”
To begin with, was it not the Asahi Shimbun, driven into a corner after its fabrication was exposed,
that first substituted the “comfort women issue” with a “women’s human rights issue”?
Even the internal third-party committee that examined the Asahi Shimbun’s comfort women reporting
called it “a substitution of logic.”
The starting point of the comfort women issue was whether there had been coercion
such as “forced roundup.”
And that…
the Asahi Shimbun merely shifted from “narrowly defined coercion” to “broadly defined coercion” and then to “a women’s human rights issue.”
And yet…
for him to say that “a trend emerged to recognize it as a women’s human rights issue” leaves one speechless.
He also says that “historical revisionist tendencies grew stronger within Japan,” but is not the Asahi Shimbun itself the true headquarters and origin of “historical revisionism”?
It is nothing but astonishing.
Furthermore, he says that “on the internet, false rumors spread that the comfort women issue was a fabrication by the Asahi Shimbun.”
To call that a false rumor is incredible.
It is one statement proving that the Asahi Shimbun has not reflected at all on its comfort women reporting!!!
It broadcast as fact the lying stories of Seiji Yoshida…
wrote endless impressionistic articles based on them…
and completed the Asahi Shimbun’s fabrication of comfort women with Takashi Uemura’s article saying that they were “taken to the battlefield as volunteer corps.”
At last, it became impossible to keep evading the issue…
so in August of last year it published a miserable verification article…
and there insisted that it was “a women’s human rights issue”…
and even at the September press conference Kimura and Sugiura in the same way…
spent the entire time making laughable excuses, a sight pitiful beyond words.
If the Asahi Shimbun says it is “a women’s human rights issue”…
then why does it not verify and report on Korean comfort women during the Korean War?
Why does it not conduct investigative reporting on wartime sexual violence by the South Korean military during the Vietnam War?
What does Toyo think about this matter???
Well…
it is the Asahi Shimbun that does not consider such double standards shameful.
Toyo ought to recognize
that the Asahi Shimbun itself is the principal cause obstructing genuine Japan-Korea relations.
The Asahi Shimbun, and its reporters, appear not to know the word “shame.”
Nor do they possess the “self-purifying function” they so often demand of others.
I am already sick of their absurd words.
If they cannot truly reflect and start over…
then collapse quickly!!!!!
Regarding the above statement by Asahi Shimbun reporter Toyo, “While internationally there emerged a trend to view the comfort women issue as wartime sexual violence and to recognize it as a women’s human rights issue, within Japan historical revisionist tendencies grew stronger,”
there is a chapter in Kaji Nobuyuki’s excellent book that makes clear that, to begin with, he is mistaken in his use of terminology.
The Label “Historical Revisionism” Is a Tool of Power Struggle.
Lately the word “historical revisionism” catches the eye.
In many cases where it is used, this is what is going on.
It is being affixed as a label of denunciation when people are criticized for supposedly trying to alter matters in history that have already been settled.
Let me give a concrete example.
Conservatives criticize the historical view of the left as a masochistic view of history, and the left in turn denounces that as historical revisionism.
It is a foolish matter.
The reason is that, to begin with, the word “revisionism” is originally insider jargon among communists and socialists, and not a general term.
Long ago, after Marxism emerged as a political force, Eduard Bernstein of the German Social Democratic Party sought, while making use of the parliamentary system that already existed, to incorporate those Marxist policies that had practical reality, such as social security systems. His position was called revisionist socialism, abbreviated as revisionism.
One might call it a softer Marxism.
Against this, hardline Marxists, doctrinaires, and those afflicted with the left-wing infantile disease, criticized it as an outrageous error.
Since then, the insulting word “revisionist” has been used with the feeling of calling someone a traitor.
In short, it became a term for the internal quarrels of Marxists.
For example, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong reigned as dictator, but fell from power after the failure of the Great Leap Forward.
After that, he launched the Cultural Revolution and came back.
At that time, the slogan used to drag down the supreme leader Liu Shaoqi was “Down with the revisionists.”
In fact, Mao Zedong was a believer in communism, while Liu Shaoqi was realistic and revisionist-socialist in orientation.
As one can see from this, it is, after all, also a term of power struggle.
That is to say, somewhere there exists an absolute “right,” or rather one is forcibly fabricated, and before it one must prostrate oneself without complaint.
Therefore, to harbor doubt toward that absolute “right,” or to advocate another “right,” is denounced as revisionism and treated as a crime.
Naturally, in order to make them correct their thinking, they are sent to political detention camps or labor reeducation camps.
And of course, what lies ahead is nothing but miserable days of forced labor, thought reform, and finally a lonely death.
The actual conditions of North Korea tell that story more than sufficiently.
Now then, leaping ahead to contemporary Japan.
Whether they know these circumstances or not, I do not know, but they have brought Marxist insider jargon into general language, and moreover attached “history” to it and begun using it as “historical revisionism.”
They are ignorant of the world.
In history, for some reason, there appears to be such a thing as “correct history,” which must be defended, and anything else is no good. There are people who raise objections in this way.
They thunder, “We will not permit it, we will not permit historical revisionism.”
That being so, two problems arise.
First.
Revisionism, and by extension historical revisionism, is not a general term.
Communists and socialists are free to make Marxism their absolute “right,” but it has no general validity.
Therefore, first of all, in order to determine that absolute “right,” let the communists, socialists, and others in the leftist industry fight among themselves to their hearts’ content.
That is the proper course.
And yet, to turn the point of attack toward conservatives is entirely misdirected.
To put it in the style of Ken Takakura, who recently returned to his native soil, “You leftists, aren’t you making a mistake? I’ll have to ask you to die. The red flag on your back is crying. And in the end, Abashiri, the outlaw land.”
The other point is the word “revision” itself.
If one is to step into general society, it must be usable as a general term.
But “revision” carries the sense of “to correct a mistaken act,” “to put oneself in order and become correct,” “to cultivate and acquire the proper way of being,” that is, of putting right what is bad and making it better.
That means it is exactly the opposite of what the leftists intend.
If they dislike that, should they not call it not “revision” but “distortion” or “deterioration”?
But then, the moment one expresses it as “historical deteriorationism,” it collapses of itself.
Why? Because it becomes a declaration of fascism that specifies and fixes history and denies the freedom of research, interpretation, and commentary on history, and by extension the freedom of scholarship and thought.
As the ancients said, prosperity has decline before it, life changes into death, such is Heaven’s allotment.
Ahead of prosperity there is decline, and life changes into death. That is Heaven’s allotment, the law of nature.
Yanzi Chunqiu, Outer Chapters II.