This essay documents a request from Bungeishunju to investigate the sudden emergence of the comfort women issue, revealing ethical problems in Asahi Shimbun’s reporting and the deep anger felt by those who lived through the war.

June 28, 2016
The following is a continuation of the section beginning with “Asahi Shimbun further ran a front-page headline article dated January 11, 1992.”
For details, including the compensation issues sought by former comfort women, Japanese and Korean activist groups, and the media, I defer to “Comfort Women and the Volunteer Corps” (p.128), reprinted in this special expanded issue.

Anger of the Generation That Knew the War

The anger of the generation that knew the war.
I received a consultation from the editorial department of Bungeishunju about reporting in South Korea while I was still writing “Comfort Women and the Volunteer Corps.”
The editors had learned that reporter Uemura had married the daughter of a senior member of an organization that had filed a lawsuit demanding apologies and compensation from the Japanese government (the Association of Bereaved Families of Pacific War Victims).
This meant that Uemura, despite being a party with a vested interest as a relative of a leader of the plaintiff organization, wrote articles that effectively supported the lawsuit.
This is an ethical problem for the media.
I had also received information that the postwar compensation lawsuit filed by Kim Hak-sun and others had actually begun when a housewife from Oita Prefecture distributed flyers in South Korea to gather plaintiffs.
“There are far too many unclear points. We want you to investigate why the comfort women issue suddenly emerged,” was the request.
However, as mentioned earlier, both Japan and South Korea were filled with an atmosphere of “the Japanese government must apologize to the comfort women.”
Under such circumstances, criticizing the former comfort women side required resolve.
The editor-in-chief of Bungeishunju even said, “Let us pursue the truth prepared to be called utterly evil inhuman beings by society—both you, Nishioka, and myself.”
Meanwhile, around this time, the editorial office of Gendai Korea, a magazine specializing in Korean issues where I was the editor-in-chief, was flooded with letters and messages saying “Korea is lying” and “I hate Korea.”
This could be called the beginning of today’s “anti-Korean” sentiment, but those who sent such messages were elderly Japanese, in other words, people who knew the time of the war.
They were trembling with anger, saying, “The Women’s Volunteer Corps and comfort women are different things. Yet they claim they were ‘forcibly mobilized under the name of the Volunteer Corps.’ Isn’t that a lie?”
It was not only Gendai Korea.
I was shown part of the materials at the editorial office of Seiron, which planned this special expanded issue and reviewed comfort women–related essays published in the 1990s.
There were many essays written by people who were not specialists contributing to intellectual magazines like Seiron, such as former Japanese soldiers and family members of military doctors who had conducted venereal disease examinations on comfort women.
Although only a small portion of them could be reprinted this time, it is clear that people who knew the realities of the prewar and wartime period felt strong discomfort, believing that the “forced mobilization of comfort women” promoted by Asahi Shimbun in the Yoshida Seiji style was groundless, and that people born after the war were being deceived, and thus brought their unfamiliar manuscripts to the editorial office.
Seiron had become a refuge for such people.
Returning to the situation in 1992.
While an atmosphere of sympathy for comfort women prevailed, seeing the growing anger among those who knew the realities of the war, I became worried that if this continued, Japan–South Korea relations would deteriorate, and in particular that Japanese sentiment toward South Korea would decisively worsen.
This essay continues.