This essay examines the formation of narratives surrounding the “comfort women” issue and questions the role of media and intellectuals in shaping them. It explores how misinformation can exert long-term influence on national reputation and historical perception.

January 2, 2019
If you have money to spend, and yet do not subscribe monthly to the magazines I refer to, you cannot truly be called a person of the 21st century, nor can you know the truth.
The chapter I published on March 15, 2017, titled “This Man, Who Dropped Out of Nihon University and Joined the Mainichi Shimbun, Brought Such Great Calamity Upon Japan,” is one that all Japanese citizens should reread.
Yesterday I wrote that the fabrication of the so-called “comfort women” issue began with a resident Korean who had long remained illegally at Kyoto University’s Kumano Dormitory and a housewife in Oita who had been incited by this man, but I realized that this must be corrected.
Since August three years ago, I came to know the name Natsumitsu Senda.
I noticed it because I had seen his name in the latest issue of Rekishitsu.
In the first place, it was the fabricated “hundred-man killing contest” article written by Mainichi Shimbun reporter Kazuo Asami that forced Japan into providing what became the largest financial and technological assistance in human history to China.
Before this man — truly a traitor — could reveal the truth, China invited his family to Beijing and treated them lavishly. …In other words, they permanently deprived him of any opportunity to speak the truth.
The Japanese people have never been informed how thorough Communist propaganda operations have been…*
Masayuki Takayama told me how his daughter entered Peking University and other such details.
This Natsumitsu Senda, too, had been a Mainichi Shimbun reporter.
It goes without saying that people who were not even top-tier talents but rather representative of second-rate performers found employment in the media and brought such great calamities upon the nation.
That tradition continues today among opposition parties, media such as Asahi, intellectuals who sympathize with them, and so-called human-rights lawyers — something made evident by daily reporting and daily parliamentary proceedings.

Natsumitsu Senda (born Sadaharu Senda, August 28, 1924 – December 22, 2000).
Born in Dalian, now in the People’s Republic of China, as the great-grandson of Satsuma domain samurai and House of Peers member Sadaaki Senda. After dropping out of Nihon University, he joined the Mainichi Shimbun and later became a freelance writer in 1957.
In 1964, while editing a Mainichi-published photo collection on Japan’s war record, he discovered a mysterious photograph of a woman and claimed that while pursuing her identity he first learned of the existence of so-called “comfort women.” In 1973 he published Comfort Women: Main Volume, in which he used the term “military comfort women” for the first time in postwar documentation.
Thereafter, his work exerted major influence on the comfort-women issue in Japan and South Korea.
[Omitted passages]
In the book he claimed to have interviewed former Kwantung Army staff officer Zenshiro Hara and extracted testimony that 8,000 comfort women had been taken.
However, discrepancies in Hara’s military career led Seiron and Shokun! magazines to question whether such a meeting had ever taken place.
In 1996, regarding implications that army doctor Tetsuo Aso had been responsible for the creation of comfort stations, Aso’s daughter Iku Amako stated that Senda apologized, admitting these writings were mistaken and promising not to produce misleading descriptions in the future.
Many people reportedly visited Amako, treating her and her family as criminals and demanding apology, believing Aso had devised the comfort-women system.
The “200,000 forcibly recruited Korean comfort women” theory.
In his 1973 book he wrote that women gathered under the name of “volunteer corps” numbered 200,000, of whom 50,000 to 70,000 became comfort women.
According to researcher Kim Yong-dal, this claim stemmed from Senda’s misreading of an August 14, 1970 Seoul Shimbun article stating that around 200,000 women from Japan and Korea had been mobilized into volunteer corps, of whom 50,000 to 70,000 were Korean.
The basis for that estimate was unclear, and reliable materials suggest that even at most, the number of mobilized women without coercion from the Korean Peninsula was around 4,000.
[Omitted passages]
In 1991, Asahi Shimbun reported that comfort women were “taken to battlefields under the name of volunteer corps,” spreading a mistaken narrative derived from Senda’s work.
Korean historian Kang Man-gil also expressed doubt about organizations conflating comfort women and volunteer corps in eliminating distinctions.
[End excerpt from Wikipedia. Emphasis mine.]
Having dropped out of Nihon University and joined the Mainichi Shimbun, this man brought such great calamity upon Japan; he was an unbelievable fool.
The Japanese people must know the depth of the sin committed by those in the world of words, whose fabrications continue to bring calamity upon the nation even now.
Nor is this a time to spend money on novels guided by media and agents of Korea or China.
If you have money to spend, and yet do not subscribe to the monthly magazines I refer to, you cannot be called a person of the 21st century, nor can you know the truth.