Primary records—from U.S. military interviews to Burma front documents—contradict the abduction narrative.
Findings by Ikuhiko Hata and contemporaneous records reveal regulated systems and repatriation after debt repayment.
By avoiding these facts while platforming figures like Mike Honda, the Asahi Shimbun forfeits credibility.

2016-04-01
The following continues from the previous chapter.
All emphasis within the text, except for headings, is mine.
A newspaper that cannot write the truth should close.
One person who understood the characteristically Japanese consideration—sending wagons to the battlefield to preserve, at minimum, the dignity of the other people—was Kim Wan-seop.
His book An Apology to the Pro-Japanese praises this aspect.
Ikuhiko Hata has shown that the number of comfort women was about 20,000, half of whom were Japanese.
The abduction of Koreans that the Asahi spread in tandem with Seiji Yoshida was denied by Koreans themselves.
The U.S. military also conducted interviews with the comfort women, and documents from the Burma front record that Korean operators who exploited prostitutes were expelled, that one day of rest and venereal-disease checks were mandatory each week, and that Korean prostitutes sold due to parental debt repaid what they owed and returned home.
After April 1, the Asahi Shimbun covered the comfort women issue in a new format, declaring it would stop lying.
While the content was unusually free of falsehoods, despite interviewing Mike Honda, it did not ask why he lied, nor did it point out the sloppiness of his data.
This is hardly more than a child’s errand—deeply unsatisfying.
Having stopped writing lies, the paper seemed unsure of what it was allowed to write at all.
If it cannot write the truth, it might as well cease publication.
(May 2007)