This article analyzes how a key Japanese figure, acting as a licensed lawyer, helped transform the comfort women controversy into a series of lawsuits against the Japanese government once North Korea–aligned South Korean groups became involved. It traces the agitation of former prostitutes into plaintiffs seeking compensation, the political ascent of the individual to party leadership, and the ideological formation rooted in Asahi-style thinking.

What the scene in the previous chapter demonstrates is that when North Korea–aligned groups in South Korea finally latched onto the comfort women uproar that had been created by a housewife from Oita, manipulated by the resident Korean Song Du-hoe, she stepped forward as the principal Japanese figure on their side, fully exercising her qualifications as a lawyer.

These prostitutes, who followed the age-old tradition of the Chinese cultural sphere, engaged in prostitution as a business with the Japanese military as their clients while being protected by the Japanese military, and earned enormous sums of money far beyond the salaries of even commissioned officers. After the war, however, they were likely impoverished as they were exploited and stripped of their earnings by relatives and others.

She agitated these women no less than the aforementioned organizations did, urged them to file lawsuits against the Japanese government, and attempted to have the government pay them money.

This woman, who later rose to become leader of the Japan Socialist Party and later the Social Democratic Party — which has long ceased to function as a genuine political party — is also a typical example of someone who was raised on the Asahi Shimbun.

Readers around the world, if they were to look her up on Wikipedia, would for the first time come to understand the type of people who shaped postwar Japanese public opinion.

For the purpose of writing this article, I personally verified her background, and it proved the correctness of my argument one hundred percent.

To be continued.