This essay revisits a chapter first published on January 4, 2019, examining the structure of “postwar compensation interests” behind the issue of ethnic Koreans left behind in Sakhalin and the comfort women issue.
By pointing to the fact that the Japanese government paid more than 8 billion yen from the national treasury in Sakhalin support payments and about 4.8 billion yen through the Asian Women’s Fund, it critically traces the links among former Socialist Party networks, lawsuits, Asahi Shimbun reporting, and the Takashi Uemura case.

2019-03-23
As a result, the Japanese government paid out more than 8 billion yen from the national treasury on the issue of repatriation for ethnic Koreans left behind in Sakhalin….
These payments are still continuing even now, and last year again approximately 100 million yen was allocated in the budget.

I am reposting here the chapter I published on 2019-01-04 under the title,
The comfort women issue is fundamentally connected to the Sakhalin issue, and it may well be said that Mr. Yoshida was conveniently used by those swarming around the “postwar compensation interests.”
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The passages between asterisks are my own words.
“Comfort Women” and “Karafuto” are fundamentally connected.
Otaka.
As a result, the Japanese government paid out more than 8 billion yen from the national treasury on the issue of repatriation for ethnic Koreans left behind in Sakhalin.
Moreover, these “Sakhalin support payments” are still continuing even now, and last year again approximately 100 million yen was allocated in the budget.
Just like me, almost all Japanese citizens are surely learning this fact for the first time.
And then, two years after the “Karafuto lawsuit” ended, in 1991, comfort women lawsuits suddenly began, and in the “Asian Women’s Fund,” established in 1995 after the Murayama Cabinet was formed, about 4.8 billion yen was paid out from the national treasury by the time of its dissolution in 2007.
In any case, enormous sums of money moved in both the Karafuto lawsuit and the comfort women issue.
Behind this whole series of lawsuits lay the weakening and collapse of the former Soviet Union, which had been the source of funds for leftist forces such as the former Socialist Party.
Once they could no longer hope for support from the former Soviet Union, they probably seized upon the vested interests of postwar compensation and came up with the idea of drawing money out of Japan.
In other words, was not the comfort women issue something prepared as the next means by the people involved in the “Karafuto lawsuit” in order to extract postwar compensation from the Japanese government.
The comfort women issue is fundamentally connected to the Sakhalin issue, and it may well be said that Mr. Yoshida was conveniently used by those swarming around the “postwar compensation interests.”
After the Soviet Union established effective control over Sakhalin, many Koreans ended up remaining there as they were.
In order to fabricate this as the responsibility of the Japanese government, I think that Mr. Takagi and Mr. Yasuaki Onuma, the late Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo who established the “Asian Women’s Fund,” raised the issue by using the concept of “forced relocation.”
Takayama.
But in reality, had the Koreans not settled there of their own accord.
Otaka.
That is exactly right.
Once the 1990s began, Socialist Party lawmakers persistently raised the issues of forced labor conscription and comfort women in the Diet, trying to turn them into issues by sheer force.
If one reads the Diet records of the time, it is obvious at a glance.
According to Sawako Arai, author of Why Could the Koreans of Sakhalin Not Return? (Soshisha), Mr. Takagi was at that time an adviser lawyer to the former Socialist Party, and had his law office in the tenant building where Ms. Takako Doi’s office was located.
Asahi’s retaliation.
Takayama.
Speaking of the 1990s, in 1991 Takashi Uemura, then a reporter for the Asahi, interviewed former comfort woman Kim Hak-sun and wrote that during the Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, one of the “Korean wartime comfort women” who had been taken to the battlefield under the name of the “Women’s Volunteer Corps” and forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers was found to be living in Seoul, and that the “Korean Council for the Women’s Volunteer Corps Problem” (co-chaired by Yun Chung-ok, 16 organizations, about 300,000 people) had begun taking testimony.
That was the article.
Come to think of it, he had sued Yoshiko Sakurai for defamation for saying that there was fabrication in the series of Uemura articles, but the Sapporo District Court dismissed Uemura’s claim.
In short, Uemura lost.
And then, in 1992, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Professor Emeritus of Chuo University, copied materials on comfort women that he had viewed at the library of the National Institute for Defense Studies under the Defense Agency and handed them to Asahi reporter Tetsuro Tatsuno, and that became a front-page article….
This article will continue.