An examination of A Testament to the Japanese People, revealing what is missing from the comfort women debate—shame, historical perspective, and responsibility—and how distorted narratives spread globally.

2016-02-25

The dialogue collection A Testament to the Japanese People by Shōichi Watanabe and Kōjin Kusaka (Tokuma Shoten, ¥1,300), introduced below, is essential reading for every Japanese citizen.

This is because the two authors did not choose the word “testament” lightly.

All emphasis within the text, except for the title, is mine.

[Earlier text omitted]

Nevertheless, newspapers that continued to claim that the Japanese military forcibly abducted 200,000 Korean women as “sex slaves” are unforgivable—no matter how many times this must be said.

What Is Missing from the Comfort Women Debate: A Sense of “Shame” and the Male Perspective

Kusaka
The “Asian Women’s Fund,” established in 1995 under the Murayama (Tomiichi) Cabinet, was a national disgrace.
When the fund distributed English-language pamphlets worldwide on the comfort women issue and used the term “sex slave,” I immediately wrote that this was unacceptable.
That essay was titled “The Mystery of the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue” in the magazine Voice.
I believe that all the core issues of the comfort women debate were fully addressed there, and even now I would like to have it translated into English and distributed worldwide.

After all, when people hear “slave,” they inevitably recall practices that existed across Asia until about fifty years ago and think, “Ah, that sort of thing.”
Yet, as the late Shichihei Yamamoto pointed out, nothing of the kind existed in Japan even if one goes back a thousand years.

What came to mind then was an episode involving a Korean woman.
It was a true story reported in an Osaka newspaper.
In the Meiji era, there was a Japanese diplomatic mission in Busan.
A Korean woman who worked there was accused of having relations with a Japanese diplomat and was stoned to death in a public square.
Such a cruel punishment apparently existed under Korean law at the time.

According to the Japanese journalist who witnessed the execution, the woman said:
“From the day I was born until today, there has not been a single day of happiness. I have suffered terribly. But while I was employed by the Japanese and worked at the mission, it felt like heaven. Therefore, even if I am beaten to death by stones now, I will die saying ‘thank you’ to the Japanese.”

Stories like this can be gathered endlessly if one chooses to look for them.
Yet the Asahi Shimbun paid no attention to such accounts and instead sought only material to vilify Japan.
That is why the former reporter Takashi Uemura, who persistently condemned the Japanese military under the theme of “forced abduction of comfort women,” must have had a particular agenda.

Watanabe
It appears that his spouse is a Korean woman, and I have also heard that her mother served as a standing director of the “Association of Bereaved Families of Pacific War Victims” in South Korea and filed—unsuccessfully—a compensation lawsuit against the Japanese government.

False reporting written by an Asahi Shimbun reporter who became the son-in-law of such a woman was reprinted by various Korean newspapers, instantly igniting the comfort women issue.
When Asahi Shimbun writes something, Koreans respond with immediate momentum.
Since it would look bad for the Korean government not to protest Japan when Asahi Shimbun had reported it, the monstrous notion of “military comfort women” was thrust into the spotlight.

Doesn’t this man lack the concept of “shame” as a Japanese?

Adding newly revealed information from late November, after leaving Asahi Shimbun, he served as a part-time lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo, but is reportedly leaving that position next March to move to South Korea and assume a post as an invited professor at the Catholic University of Korea.
Leaving Japan, where criticism has been severe, and moving to South Korea—does this not make his position unmistakably clear?

To be continued.