This essay examines why many Japanese uncritically accepted the false narrative of “forced comfort women recruitment,” tracing its roots to decades of historical framing and guilt conditioning promoted by the Asahi Shimbun.

June 30, 2016
The following is a reprint of the latter half of the previous chapter.
The terror of historical falsification.
It is also necessary to consider why there were so many Japanese who did not resist the fabrication of “forced comfort women recruitment” and instead came to believe it.
I believe that the presence of the Asahi Shimbun also lay in the background.
In the 1970s, the Asahi Shimbun published Honda Katsuichi’s Road to China and reported that the Japanese military had committed atrocities throughout the Chinese mainland, beginning with the “Nanjing Massacre.”
The exposure of the Japanese military’s “evil deeds” continued thereafter, imprinting upon the postwar generation, who did not know the actual circumstances, the idea that “Japanese soldiers were people who committed massacres and acts of brutality.”
As a result, it is hardly surprising that those trapped in a masochistic view of history and a sense of guilt as Japanese came to believe that “if Japanese soldiers were that cruel and inhumane, it would not be strange if they had engaged in ‘woman hunting.’”
In this way, did not many Japanese uncritically accept the false tale of “forced comfort women recruitment”?
Because I had contact with people who knew the circumstances of the time, I was able to notice the fabrication of “forced comfort women recruitment” relatively early.
To be continued.