Tracing the money trail from support payments for Koreans remaining on Sakhalin to the Karafuto lawsuits, the comfort-women lawsuits, and the Asian Women’s Fund, this piece argues that “postwar compensation” became a rent-seeking scheme after the Soviet Union’s decline.
It links the framing of “forced abduction,” Diet-stage amplification in the 1990s, the ex-Socialist Party’s legal network, and Asahi Shimbun’s media role through Uemura’s reporting and subsequent document handoffs.

2019-01-04

It is said that Mr. Takagi was, at the time, counsel to the former Socialist Party, and had his law office in the same tenant building that housed Ms. Takako Doi’s office.
The following continues from the previous chapter.
*From * to * is mine.
“Comfort women” and “Karafuto” share the same root.
Otaka.
As a result, the Japanese government disbursed more than 8 billion yen from the national treasury for the issue of repatriating Koreans who remained on Sakhalin.
Moreover, this “Sakhalin support money” is still being paid, and even last year a budget of about 100 million yen was allocated.
Like me, most Japanese citizens should be learning this fact for the first time.
Then, two years after the “Karafuto lawsuit” concluded, in 1991, comfort-women lawsuits suddenly began, and in the “Asian Women’s Fund,” launched in 1995 after the Murayama Cabinet was formed, about 4.8 billion yen was disbursed from the national treasury until the fund was dissolved in 2007.
In short, enormous sums of money moved in both the Karafuto lawsuit and the comfort-women issue.
Behind this series of lawsuits lay the weakening and collapse of the former Soviet Union, which had been a funding source for leftist forces such as the former Socialist Party.
No longer able to expect support from the Soviet Union, they leapt at the rent of postwar compensation and likely conceived the idea of extracting money from Japan.
In other words, was the comfort-women issue something prepared as the next method by those involved in the “Karafuto lawsuit,” in order to draw postwar compensation from the Japanese government.
The comfort-women issue runs through the Sakhalin issue, and it would not be wrong to say that Mr. Yoshida was being used at will by people swarming around “postwar-compensation rents.”
After the Soviet Union established effective control over Sakhalin, many Koreans ended up remaining there.
To fabricate this as the responsibility of the Japanese government, Mr. Takagi and others—such as Yasuaki Onuma (deceased, Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo), who established the Asian Women’s Fund—are thought to have raised the issue by using the concept of “forced abduction.”
Ōkoshi, who studied at the University of Tokyo under such good-for-nothings, commented with conviction while anchoring the 9 p.m. news that forced abduction had existed… Only NHK employees pretend that NHK is not a state broadcaster. And not only do they repeatedly commit every kind of crime, from indecency to embezzlement, but Ikeda Eriko, for example, may be said—without exaggeration—to openly fulfill the role of a North Korean agent.
Takayama.
In reality, wouldn’t Koreans have settled there on their own.
Otaka.
That’s right.
Once the 1990s began, Socialist Party lawmakers persistently took up forced conscription and comfort women in the Diet and tried to turn them into issues by sheer force.
If you read the Diet records from that time, it is obvious at a glance.
According to Ms. Sawako Arai, author of “Why Couldn’t the Koreans on Sakhalin Return?” (Soshisha), Mr. Takagi was then counsel to the former Socialist Party and had his law office in the tenant building that housed Ms. Takako Doi’s office.
Asahi’s retaliation.
Takayama.
Speaking of the 1990s, in 1991, Asahi reporter Takashi Uemura interviewed former comfort woman Kim Hak-sun and wrote that during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, under the name “Women’s Volunteer Corps,” she had been taken to the battlefield and forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers, and that one of the “Korean wartime comfort women” was found to be living in Seoul, and that the “Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan” (Yoon Chung-ok, co-representative; 16 groups, about 300,000 members) had begun hearings—yes, that article.
Come to think of it, he sued Yoshiko Sakurai for defamation, claiming there was fabrication in the series of Uemura articles, but the Sapporo District Court dismissed Uemura’s claim.
In short, Uemura lost.
And then in 1992, Central University Professor Emeritus Yoshiaki Yoshimi copied documents on comfort women that he viewed at the Defense Agency’s National Institute for Defense Studies library and handed them to Asahi reporter Tetsuro Tatsuno, and it became a front-page article.
To be continued.