Written on May 13, 2019, this essay critically traces the interlinked structure of anti-Japan forces surrounding postwar compensation interests through the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, the Sakhalin lawsuit, the comfort women lawsuits, the Asian Women’s Fund, and the involvement of the former Socialist Party and the Asahi Shimbun.

2019-05-13
It seems that at the time Mr. Takagi was a legal adviser to the former Socialist Party, and had his law office in the tenant building that also housed Takako Doi’s office.
This is the chapter I published on 2019-01-04 under the title, “Extortion and Blackmail, the Entire Nation of Japan in an Anti-Korea Wave!! Ugly Anti-Japan Japanese Who Taught Foolish Korea How to Scheme.”
The following is from a featured dialogue article in the previous month’s issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, under the title, “Extortion and Blackmail, the Entire Nation of Japan in an Anti-Korea Wave!! Ugly Anti-Japan Japanese Who Taught Foolish Korea How to Scheme,” between Masayuki Takayama, journalist, and Miki Otaka, journalist…
It is essential reading for every Japanese citizen and for people all over the world.
Sakhalin lawsuits → comfort women → wartime laborers…
One extortion-like situation after another.
And behind it were anti-Japan Japanese.
Could there even have been kickbacks from the compensation money!?
Seiji Yoshida Was Used
Takayama
Oh, here appears a former Miss Japan.
Otaka
How embarrassing（笑）.
Takayama
No, no, you are as beautiful as ever.
To begin right away, in your 2017 book I Will Remove My Father’s Apology Monument: The Eldest Son’s Confession on Seiji Yoshida, the Origin of the Comfort Women Issue (Sankei Shimbun Publications), you pursued without omission the entire course of Yoshida Seiji’s life, from his upbringing to his false testimony.
Otaka
Yes.
Takayama
And now South Korea has once again done something outrageous with the wartime labor ruling.
Otaka
In 1983, Seiji Yoshida erected on “Hill of Longing” in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, South Korea, a monument apologizing for forced mobilization.
At the unveiling ceremony he prostrated himself, but nothing about comfort women is written on that monument.
That is because at that point comfort women had not yet become an issue.
I think the purpose was that people connected with Sakhalin used Yoshida’s testimony as groundwork for inscribing the forced mobilization of Koreans on a stone monument and drawing money from the Japanese government forever into the future.
Takayama
I see.
So that means the existence of wartime laborers had already been talked about from quite an early stage.
Otaka
Yes.
I think it began with the issue of how Koreans left behind in Sakhalin during and after the war were treated.
Takayama
When Japan governed the Korean Peninsula, Koreans with Japanese nationality migrated together with Japanese as laborers to Sakhalin, either as migrant workers or through mobilization, didn’t they.
Otaka
The year before Yoshida’s book My War Crimes: The Forced Mobilization of Koreans, which described in detail the hunting of comfort women on Jeju Island, was published, Yoshida spoke at a lecture meeting about the hunting of comfort women.
In September and November of that same year, in the lawsuit over the repatriation of Koreans and Chosen people left behind in Sakhalin, the so-called “Sakhalin lawsuit,” he took the witness stand twice, the first time testifying about the hunting of Korean men for Sakhalin, and the second time about the hunting of comfort women on Jeju Island.
Some readers may not immediately grasp how Yoshida and the “Sakhalin lawsuit” are connected, but unless one understands the circumstances around this, one cannot see the essence of the comfort women issue either.
The “Sakhalin lawsuit” was a lawsuit brought against the Japanese government with the involvement of Kozo Igarashi, who later became Chief Cabinet Secretary in the former Socialist Party, and with attorney Kenichi Takagi, involved in South Korea’s comfort women lawsuits, serving as secretary-general of the plaintiffs’ legal team.
The legal team argued, “Japan forcibly took as many as 43,000 Koreans to Sa‘rin, and after the war abandoned only the Koreans there.
The Japanese government must take responsibility for this.”
The Koreans living in Sakhalin had gone there of their own accord in search of better pay, but if that were acknowledged, Japan would bear no responsibility to compensate them, so they needed at all costs an after-the-fact rationale that they had been “forcibly taken” by Japan.
That is why Yoshida was brought out as a witness to forced mobilization.
Takayama
I see, so that was the connection.
And then Asahi turned that testimony into an article.
The passages between the asterisks are mine.
“Comfort Women” and “Sakhalin” Share the Same Roots
Otaka
As a result, the Japanese government contributed more than 8 billion yen from the national treasury to the issue of repatriating South Koreans left behind in Sakhalin.
Moreover, this “Sakhalin support money” is still being paid, and about 100 million yen was budgeted even last year.
On this fact, almost all Japanese citizens, like myself, will surely be learning it for the first time.
Then, two years after the “Sakhalin lawsuit” came to an end, in 1991, comfort women lawsuits suddenly began, and in the “Asian Women’s Fund,” launched in 1995 after the formation of the Murayama Cabinet, approximately 4.8 billion yen was contributed from the national treasury by the time it was dissolved in 2007.
In any case, enormous sums of money moved both in the Sakhalin lawsuit and in the comfort women issue.
Behind this series of lawsuits lay the weakening and collapse of the former Soviet Union, which had been a source of funds for leftist forces such as the former Socialist Party.
If even the Socialist Party as a public political party received Soviet money, then there is no way China, which is aiming to invade the Senkaku Islands and further to separate Okinawa from Japan, while gratefully upholding the ultimate Japan-weakening constitution forced on Japan by the GHQ, saying we will have no military, we will not attack, we will not possess nuclear weapons… the exact opposite of what China does as a matter of course… and which, in military-strategic terms, is plotting to weaken Japan completely and seize hegemony in Asia and ultimately the world… would fail to notice the Okinawa Times and the Ryukyu Shimpo, which dominate Okinawa Prefecture as the Asahi Shimbun dominated Japan until August five years ago.
To say that one-party communist dictatorship, or the Communist Party, has no philosophy other than propaganda is no exaggeration at all…
They are utterly unrelated to art or culture, and are, so to speak, people whose minds revolve only around money and women, spending day and night in propaganda.
Having become unable to hope for support from the former Soviet Union, they seized upon the vested interest called postwar compensation and came up with the idea of extracting money from Japan.
In other words, was not the comfort women issue prepared by the people connected with the “Sakhalin lawsuit” as the next means of drawing postwar compensation from the Japanese government?
The comfort women issue runs on the same line as the Sakhalin issue, and it would be fair to say that Yoshida was used as they pleased by the people swarming around the “postwar compensation vested interests.”
After the Soviet Union established effective control over Sakhalin, many Koreans ended up remaining there.
In order to fabricate this as the responsibility of the Japanese government, I think that Mr. Takagi and Yasuaki Onuma, the now-deceased professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo who established the “Asian Women’s Fund,” raised the issue using the concept of “forced mobilization.”
Ōkoshi, who studied at the University of Tokyo under such scoundrels, commented with conviction while anchoring the 9 o’clock news that forced mobilization had indeed existed…
The only people trying to conceal the fact that NHK is a state broadcaster are NHK’s own employees.
And not only do they repeat every kind of criminal act from indecency offenses to embezzlement, but in the case of Eriko Ikeda, it is no exaggeration to say that she openly plays the role of a North Korean agent.
Takayama
But in reality, weren’t the Koreans simply settling there on their own?
Otaka
That is exactly right.
Once the 1990s began, Socialist Party lawmakers persistently brought up forced conscription and comfort women in the Diet, trying to turn them into issues by force.
If you read 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 the time a legal adviser to the former Socialist Party, and had his law office in the tenant building that also housed 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 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” (Yoon Chung-ok, co-representative, 16 organizations, about 300,000 people) had begun hearing testimony from her.
That one.
Come to think of it, Yoshiko Sakurai had been sued for defamation over saying that there were fabrications in that series of Uemura articles, but the Sapporo District Court dismissed Uemura’s claim.
In short, Uemura lost.
And then, in 1992, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, emeritus professor at Chuo University, copied materials concerning comfort women that he had viewed at the library of the Defense Agency’s National Institute for Defense Studies and handed them to Asahi reporter Tetsuro Tatsuno, and that became a front-page article…
This essay will continue.