The Japanese government asked for a partial revision of a 1996 report on wartime “comfort women” by a United Nations special rapporteur, but the request was immediately rejected. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told an Oct. 16 news conference that the revision request was made to Radhika Coomaraswamy, who compiled the report for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. According to Foreign Ministry officials, Kuni Sato, the Foreign Ministry ambassador in charge of human rights and humanitarian issues, met with Coomaraswamy in New York on Oct. 14 and asked her to revise references to a book written by Seiji Yoshida on how he forcibly took away comfort women from South Korea. Coomaraswamy, a legal expert from Sri Lanka, refused to change the report, saying the Yoshida reference was only one part of the evidence, according to Suga and Foreign Ministry officials. In early August, The Asahi Shimbun compiled a special coverage package of its past reporting on the comfort women issue and concluded that Yoshida’s testimony was a fabrication. Asahi retracted its articles related to testimony by Yoshida. At his news conference, Suga cited the Asahi’s retraction of the articles as a reason for making the revision request. “We will persistently explain to the international community, beginning with the United Nations, in order to obtain their understanding,” Suga said at his news conference. The 1996 U.N. report does not quote from any Asahi article, including those related to Yoshida. About 300 words in the report are devoted to Yoshida. Clearly stating that the information was taken from Yoshida's book, the report states that “he confesses to having been part of slave raids in which, among other Koreans, as many as 1,000 women were obtained for ‘comfort women’ duties under the National Labor Service Association as part of the National General Mobilization Law.” http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/politics/AJ201410160051 In the 1980s, the Asahi Shimbun reported, without thorough investigation, that Seiji Yoshida forcibly took local women from South Korea’s Jeju Island to serve as comfort women, or as the UN refers to them as enforced sex slaves. “We have judged that Mr. Yoshida’s statement, in which he said that he took comfort women by force from Jeju Island, was fake, and we retract the article. At the time we could not figure out that the statement was fake,” wrote the Asahi Shimbun recently. What’s the background on Seiji Yoshida’s contribution to the Asahi Shimbun and the effect of its retraction? Today, I discuss that topic is Michael Cucek, Adjunct Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University Japan. http://www.asiapundits.com/podcast-comfort-women/ It has been commonly believed in Korea and China that the so-called comfort women were forcibly removed from their homes to serve in a few hundred comfort stations set up across Asia by the Japanese military in the 1940s. The 1996 UN report based its kidnapping allegation on Yoshida’s testimony and he confessed in his autobiography that he was responsible for kidnapping around 200 girls from a remote Korean island. But Japan's Asahi newspaper that originally reported Yoshida's story recently retracted all articles related to the alleged incident as it has become clear that Yoshida's book was entirely fictional after an academic's investigation, who visited South Korea’s Jeju Island and interviewed the locals. Yoshida’s fictitious testimony also widely appears in Korea's school textbooks and most Koreans grow up believing in the misleading information on their country's past.
