This essay examines how Asahi Shimbun’s January 11, 1992 front-page report shaped public opinion in Japan, inflamed Korean sentiment, and laid the foundation for the global comfort women narrative.

June 27, 2016
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
This was my first essay related to the comfort women issue.
Although it was not based on full-scale investigation and reporting like the Bungei Shunju essay, the core arguments were the same: first, the confusion between “comfort women” and the “Women’s Volunteer Corps,” second, the possibility that there was no forced mobilization of comfort women, and third, that South Korea could not demand compensation from the Japanese government.
At the time, when the dominant tone was to condemn the Japanese government with calls for “apology and compensation” over the comfort women issue, I recall that there were almost no other voices in the intellectual world that challenged this view, but I believe that the arguments raised in these two essays were later proven correct through subsequent debates with those forces that sought to condemn Japan over the comfort women issue.
At the time, many Japanese believed that “if there really had been forced mobilization like the ‘slave hunts’ described by Yoshida Seiji, then it would make some sense to demand compensation and apologies.”
“Yoshida Seiji’s ‘slave hunts’” were lies that Asahi Shimbun repeatedly reported from 1982 onward and finally acknowledged as false in its own “verification” article on comfort women reporting published on August 5 of this year.
There were obvious contradictions in Yoshida Seiji’s testimony at the level of common sense.
He claimed from his own experience that he had “rounded up Korean women as comfort women under the name of the ‘Imperial Army Women’s Volunteer Corps,’” but the work of the Volunteer Corps was labor service and had absolutely nothing to do with comfort women.
This was known from direct experience by Japanese who lived through the war, and also by Koreans who had experienced Japanese rule, and even postwar-born Japanese knew this as historical knowledge if they had studied history.
However, Asahi’s Uemura article wrote that “one of the ‘Korean comfort women’ who had been taken away under the name of the Women’s Volunteer Corps had come forward.”
As a result, the entire country came to believe that “since the person who was supposedly hunted had come forward herself, Yoshida’s testimony must have been true.”
Asahi Shimbun further reported in a front-page headline article dated January 11, 1992, that documents had been found showing that “the Japanese military supervised and controlled the establishment of comfort stations and the recruitment of comfort women,”
and regarding “comfort women accompanying the military,” it wrote that “after the outbreak of the Pacific War, primarily Korean women were forcibly mobilized under the name of the Volunteer Corps, and their number is said to be anywhere from 80,000 to 200,000.”
This explanation is the prototype of the inscription condemning Japan that is engraved on comfort women monuments being erected across the United States today, stating that “200,000 people were forcibly mobilized as sex slaves,”
and as a result of this reporting, Korean public opinion was inflamed, and Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi, who visited South Korea shortly thereafter, repeatedly apologized and expressed remorse eight times without even investigating the facts, such as whether forced mobilization had actually occurred.
Among the public as well, voices calling for “apologizing to the comfort women” grew louder, as if under a kind of mass hypnosis.
I too was momentarily inclined to believe such reporting, but as soon as I began investigating, I realized that the women who came forward claiming to have been comfort women were in fact not saying that they had been forcibly mobilized.
This essay continues.