By closely reading an Asahi Shimbun article on the comfort women issue, this essay argues that reporting blatant falsehood as truth helped spread distortion internationally, halted civilizational progress, and contributed to today’s unstable world, identifying the newspapers responsible.

2016-09-24

If I add further notes to the previous chapter… *the following is me.
The reason this situation came about is that in 1983 Seiji Yoshida published false confession books such as My War Crimes, claiming that during the war he made Korean women into comfort women on Jeju Island. The Asahi Shimbun repeatedly featured this content, and although reporter Takashi Uemura knew it was not factual, it repeatedly ran false reports that Kim Hak-sun, described as a former comfort woman, had been “taken to the battlefield under the name of the Women’s Volunteer Corps.” Furthermore, in an evening column on January 23, 1992, Kiyotai Kitabatake, an editorial writer at Asahi’s Osaka headquarters, published an article titled “Comfort Women,” which became the cause of reporting military forced abduction and sexual slavery. To quote it,
“In my memory, what pains my heart most is the forced abduction of comfort women accompanying the troops. Mr. Yoshida and his subordinates, ten or fifteen men, go on a trip to the Korean Peninsula. Together with fifty, or perhaps one hundred policemen of the Government-General, they surround a village and drive the women out onto the road. They swing wooden swords to beat and kick young women and cram them into trucks. They take three, ten women from a village at a time, put them into police detention cells, and when the planned number of one hundred or two hundred is reached, they transport them to Shimonoseki. The women are handed over to civilian employees of the army in an army compound and sent to the front lines. The number of women taken away by Mr. Yoshida and his men was at least nine hundred and fifty. ‘The state power used the police to kidnap colonial women in a condition from which they could never escape, carried them to the battlefield, confined them for one or two years, gang-raped them, and when the Japanese army retreated, abandoned them on the battlefield. I think that of the Koreans I forcibly abducted, half of the men and all of the women died.’”
That is what it wrote.
If a country’s major newspaper Asahi continues to write such articles, people in any country will come to believe that “Japan once forcibly took 200,000 comfort women from Korea and made them sex slaves.”
*Today, many people must have learned the true nature of the Asahi Shimbun by reading in detail for the first time the above Asahi Shimbun article. Even I feel that it may have been the first time I read in detail an article written by a journalist who had been a leading figure of the Asahi Shimbun.
The Asahi Shimbun company deserves to be shut down, and the so-called cultural figures who have aligned with it, led by Kenzaburo Oe, would, for example, all be beheaded or forced to commit seppuku if this were the era of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu.
Newspapers that have reported such nonsense as truth, halted the progress of the civilization turntable, and created the extremely dangerous and unstable world of today exist nowhere else in the world, apart from the Asahi Shimbun, Chinese newspapers, South Korean newspapers, the two Okinawan papers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and certain journalists of The New York Times.