An examination of the structural link between the Sakhalin Korean repatriation issue, postwar compensation lawsuits, and the comfort women controversy. This analysis explores political networks, legal strategies, and the large-scale financial outflows from Japan associated with postwar compensation claims.

2019-01-04

It is said that Mr. Takagi was at the time a legal advisor to the former Socialist Party and maintained his law office in the same tenant building that housed Ms. Takako Doi’s office.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
＊Sections between ＊～＊ are mine.
“Comfort women” and “Sakhalin” share a common structure.
Otaka.
As a result, the Japanese government spent more than eight billion yen from the national treasury on the issue of repatriating Koreans remaining in Sakhalin.
Moreover, this “Sakhalin support fund” is still being paid, with approximately one hundred million yen budgeted even last year.
＊This is a fact that, like myself, most Japanese citizens are likely learning for the first time＊
Then, two years after the “Sakhalin lawsuits” concluded, comfort women lawsuits suddenly began in 1991.
With the establishment of the Murayama Cabinet, the “Asian Women’s Fund” launched in 1995 disbursed approximately 4.8 billion yen from the national treasury until its dissolution in 2007.
In any case, enormous sums of money moved in both the Sakhalin lawsuits and the comfort women issue.
Behind this series of lawsuits lies the weakening and collapse of the former Soviet Union, which had been a financial source for left-wing forces such as the former Socialist Party.
Having lost Soviet support, they likely seized upon the “postwar compensation” scheme as a vested interest and devised a way to extract money from Japan.
In other words, the comfort women issue may have been prepared as the next method by those involved in the Sakhalin lawsuits to extract postwar compensation from the Japanese government.
The comfort women issue shares structural continuity with the Sakhalin issue, and it can be said that Mr. Yoshida was conveniently used by those flocking to postwar compensation interests.
After the Soviet Union established effective control over Sakhalin, many Koreans were forced to remain there.
To fabricate this as the responsibility of the Japanese government, Mr. Takagi and others such as Professor Yasuaki Onuma (deceased, Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo), who established the Asian Women’s Fund, likely raised the issue using the concept of “forced mobilization.”
Takayama.
In reality, weren’t Koreans simply settlers who entered of their own accord.
Otaka.
Exactly.
Entering the 1990s, Socialist Party lawmakers persistently raised the issues of forced labor and comfort women in the Diet, attempting to turn them into problems by force.
This becomes clear at a glance if one reads the Diet records of the time.
According to Sawako Arai, author of “Why Couldn’t Koreans in Sakhalin Return?” (Sōshisha), Mr. Takagi was then a legal advisor to the former Socialist Party and maintained his office in the same tenant building as Ms. Takako Doi’s office.
Asahi’s retaliation.
Takayama.
Speaking of the 1990s, in 1991 Takashi Uemura, then a reporter for Asahi, interviewed former comfort woman Kim Hak-sun and wrote an article stating that during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II she had been taken to battlefields under the name “Women’s Volunteer Corps” and forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers.
He reported that one such “Korean wartime comfort woman” was still alive in Seoul, prompting the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan to begin interviews.
Come to think of it, Uemura sued Yoshiko Sakurai for defamation after she claimed fabrication in his series of articles, but the Sapporo District Court dismissed Uemura’s claim.
In short, Uemura lost.
In 1992, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, professor emeritus at Chuo University, provided copies of documents on comfort women that he had viewed at the Defense Agency’s Defense Research Institute Library to Asahi reporter Tetsuro Tatsuno, and these were published as front-page articles.