Historian Nishioka Tsutomu reviews 30 years of debate over the comfort women issue, showing how scholars in Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.—including Lee Young-hoon, Joo Ik-jong, and Harvard’s J. Mark Ramseyer—are dismantling the forced-abduction and sex-slavery narrative through primary sources. He argues that Japanese researchers like Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who constructed the false narrative, must now answer honestly to the evidence.

Below is an essay by Nishioka Tsutomu, published in the Sankei Shimbun on June 12.
He, too, is one of the “national treasures” as defined by Saichō, among the highest treasures of the nation.
It is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for readers around the world.

The Day When the Comfort Women Issue Born from Lies Will End
Reitaku University Distinguished Professor
Nishioka Tsutomu
The Honor of Our Nation and Our Ancestors Has Been Harmed

I have been engaged in the debate over the comfort women issue since 1991, consistently arguing that the theories of forced abduction and sex slavery are not factual.
My position was that while comfort women existed in a certain historical period, the “comfort women issue” — meaning an unresolved problem — did not exist.
In other words, the “comfort women issue” in the sense of having unresolved tasks was created only after the Asahi Shimbun in 1991 launched a massive campaign mixing in fabricated reports, and Japanese anti-Japan scholars, lawyers, and activists filed lawsuits.
This then spread to South Korea and rapidly escalated into a diplomatic dispute.
Even now, the baseless theories of forced abduction and sex slavery continue to spread and grievously damage the honor of our country and our forebears.
Therefore, to widely disseminate the truth and clear this stain is what I consider to be the present “comfort women issue.”

In 2014, when the Asahi Shimbun partially admitted errors in its comfort women reporting, deleted past articles, and apologized, the domestic debate in Japan was largely settled.
Currently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asserts on its website that expressions such as “forced abduction,” “sex slavery,” and claims that the number of comfort women was “200,000” or “hundreds of thousands” are “difficult to consider as being based on historical facts,” and it has issued rebuttals.
In addition, through a Cabinet decision under the Suga administration, the use of the terms “military comfort women” and “forced abduction of comfort women” came to violate textbook screening standards.

However, in South Korea, the United States, and other parts of the international community, the forced abduction and sex slavery narratives still prevail.
To break through that situation, courageous scholars and activists in Japan, South Korea, and the United States are now making powerful efforts.

In South Korea, a group led by Lee Young-hoon, former professor at Seoul National University, published the seminal work Anti-Japanese Tribalism in 2019, and it became a bestseller exceeding 100,000 copies (over 400,000 in Japanese translation).
Thanks to this book, many Koreans learned that the forced abduction and sex slavery claims were false.

Corrective movements in South Korea and the United States as well

Dr. Lee Woo-yeon, one of the co-authors, translated and published my own book Understanding the Comfort Women Issue, as well as The Comfort Women and Sex in the Battlefield by Hata Ikuhiko, a classic in the field, into Korean.
Since December 2019, Lee Woo-yeon and conservative activist Kim Byung-heon have held weekly demonstrations calling for the removal of comfort women statues.
They have been holding these demonstrations every week at the same time and near the same location as the anti-Japan groups that erected the statue in front of the Japanese Embassy.

In 2020, Harvard University Professor John Mark Ramseyer published an academic article arguing that the comfort women system was not sex slavery but a contractual indenture arrangement.
Korean-American scholars and left-wing academics in the U.S. reacted with fierce opposition, and Korean media attacked him daily.
However, Professor Ramseyer did not yield to these unjust attacks and, in January this year, published an English academic book titled The Comfort Women Hoax co-authored with Reitaku University Associate Professor Jason Morgan.

Then, in December last year, Dr. Joo Ik-jong, another co-author of Anti-Japanese Tribalism, published Inside Out of the Japanese Military Comfort Women in South Korea.
Dr. Joo could not overlook the baseless personal attacks against Professor Ramseyer by the Korean media and academic circles in both Korea and the U.S.
He delivered 32 YouTube lectures, during which he collected every possible previous study from Japan, South Korea, and the U.S., as well as primary sources on the comfort women and prostitution systems and testimonies of former comfort women, conducting meticulous research as a scholar.
He compiled the results into a single-volume work.

Ahead of the publication of the definitive new book

The Japanese translation of this work, which may be called the definitive study on the comfort women issue, titled Anti-Japanese Tribalism: The Final Conclusion on the Comfort Women Issue, will soon be published in Japan.
To commemorate the publication, the Japan Institute for Historical Issues, of which I serve as chairman, is inviting Dr. Joo to deliver special lectures in Tokyo on June 15 and Osaka on June 16 (details on our website).
Dr. Joo writes the following in the afterword of the Japanese edition:

“During World War II, the Japanese military mobilized women across many countries and regions of East Asia as military comfort women, but the people who pursued the Japanese government the most persistently and for the longest time over this issue were Koreans.”

“A group of Japanese intellectuals helped these Korean comfort women activists…
they unearthed and analyzed various documents, established the narrative that ‘the Japanese military forcibly mobilized women as sex slaves,’
and the Korean activists, supported by them, attacked the Japanese government.”

“There was almost a division of labor: ‘research in Japan, activism in Korea.’”

“However, if one examines the very documents unearthed and analyzed by these Japanese researchers, the narrative of comfort women as forcibly mobilized sex slaves cannot stand.”

“Those Japanese researchers, such as Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who manufactured the false comfort women narrative until now, must respond sincerely to this book.”

The forces of truth in Japan, South Korea, and the United States are now, each in their respective places, exposing the lies.
The day when the comfort women issue ends is drawing near.