In
August, the Asahi Shimbun retracted
thirty years worth of stories about comfort women when they realized their
source, Yoshida Seiji, was not reliable after a review of his testimony. Yoshida Seiji approached the Asahi in 1982 when he claimed that as an
army officer in the 1940s he was personally responsible for taking Korean women
from Jeju Island to serve the Japanese Army.
After citing Yoshida’s testimony sixteen times over thirty years, Asahi editorial re-examined Yoshida’s
accounts, determined they are not verifiable and issued retractions.
There
is a lot wrong with this story, on the part of the Asahi and other parties. The
Asahi should have worked harder to
verify Yoshida’s story sooner. After the
Yoshida testimonies were first published, the Asahi became Japan’s standard-bearer for the cause of coming to
terms with wartime history. Now their
reputation is hurt, and the Japanese political right, including the Prime
Minister, can use the Asahi’s
mistakes to protect their own position.
Consequently, the big worry for historians is that the Yoshida
controversy will fuel the revisionists, who would like to downplay or outright
deny wartime atrocities. Ironically, the
Asahi’s own review was inspired by
the revisionsists.
The current Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo
called for a review of the Kono Statement of 1993 when Abe assumed office two
years ago. The Kono Statement was a
formal apology made by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei, acknowledging
that the Japanese military was involved in recruiting women to serve in
brothels, under a variety of circumstances, often through coercion. Abe Shinzo along with other Japanese
conservatives have never been happy with the Kono Statement and have long
called for changes. When Abe became
Prime Minister again in December 2012 he proposed a formal review of the Kono
Statement and appointed a five-person committee for the job, lead by eminent
historian Hata Ikuhiko. Hata’s committee
published a preliminary report in February 2014, and submitted their full
report to the Diet in June. The review
committee concluded that the Kono Statement did not need to be revised or
retracted. Well, the review committee’s
initial report inspired the Asahi to
conduct their own review, and lead them to conclude that Yoshida Seiji’s
testimony was fraudulent.
Now we get to the crux of the
matter. First, the fact that the
Government of Japan was thinking of messing with the Kono Statement at all was
bad enough. Diplomats from China, South
Korea, and the United States lodged protests against the review of the
statement. China and South Korea were
not even mollified by Hata’s recommendation to leave the statement as is. In the Chinese and South Korean view, there
should have been no review of the Kono Statement at all. As for the Asahi, although their articles based on Yoshida Seiji’s writing
have been retracted, they maintain that nothing about how we understand this
history has changed. Asahi’s editors still argue that further
evidence of systematic use and coercive recruitment of comfort women exists,
such as the testimony of survivors. It’s
good that Asahi intends to stick to
its guns, but their credibility in doing so is reduced. The general public that buys newspapers has a
reason to be skeptical of Asahi
articles about comfort women from now on, and right-wing revisionists will
certainly take advantage of this.
The
only thing to be done now is let the retractions stand, and for historians to
keep at their work.
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