This essay introduces to Japan and the world a seminal editorial by Professor Nishioka Tsutomu, tracing how Asahi Shimbun’s reporting on comfort women created a lasting international distortion.

June 27, 2016
My close friend, an avid reader of considerable breadth, was reading the July issue of Seiron when he noticed an advertisement for the December 2014 special extra issue of Seiron and contacted a Sankei Shimbun sales office to subscribe to it.
This volume is filled with essays that every Japanese citizen should read.
Needless to say, the people of the world should read them as well.
Therefore, I thought that I must first convey the following opening editorial essay to Japan and to the world.
The Original Sin of Asahi Shimbun
The Fiction of the Forced Mobilization of Comfort Women
Why Was Japan Captured by It
Professor at Tokyo Christian University, Nishioka Tsutomu
What I Raised in Seiron and Bungei Shunju
I became involved in the comfort women issue twenty-two years ago, in 1992.
In the Asahi Shimbun (Osaka headquarters edition) dated August 11, 1991, an article was published stating that “among the ‘Korean comfort women who accompanied the Japanese military,’ who were taken to battlefields under the name of the ‘Women’s Volunteer Corps’ during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II and were forced to engage in prostitution with Japanese soldiers, it was discovered that one person was still alive in Seoul, and the ‘Korean Council for the Women’s Volunteer Corps Issue’ (omitted) had begun interviews.”
The author of this article was reporter Uemura Takashi.
This article became a major catalyst, and from around the autumn of 1991 through 1992, the domestic media, centered on Asahi Shimbun, launched an intensive campaign of reporting on the comfort women issue.
It was a major, unified campaign by all media outlets asserting that “the Japanese government should apologize to and compensate the comfort women.”
Alongside this, private movements were mobilized, and in December 1991, former comfort women such as Kim Hak-sun, who had been introduced anonymously in the Uemura article, filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government seeking compensation and an apology, with the support of attorney Takagi Kenichi and others.
Based on my reporting in Seoul, I concluded that the Uemura article that triggered the comfort women uproar was fabricated, and I criticized reporter Uemura by name in the April 1992 issue of Bungei Shunju.
In fact, in the April issue of the monthly Seiron released just before that issue of Bungei Shunju, I also wrote “Comfort Women and the Women’s Volunteer Corps,” which is reprinted in this special extra issue.
This essay continues.