One thing needs to be made clear at the outset: wartime “comfort women” did in fact exist across Asia during World War II, with the involvement of Japan and the Japanese military. It is also undeniably true that there were numerous instances of local women in war zones being forced into sexual service under threat of military violence. In this respect, their plight is no different from the violence perpetrated by occupation forces in other wars.
The emphasis here, though, is on “war zones.” The comfort women system itself was simply an incarnation of Japan’s officially approved system of managed prostitution taken to areas occupied by the Japanese military. (Japan abolished its managed prostitution system in 1958.) The majority of comfort women consisted of Japanese women in mainland Japan, as well as women in Korea and Taiwan, which were annexed to Japan at the time. Managed prostitution was no less than officially sanctioned human trafficking, and there is no question that it grossly violated the human rights of those subject to it. But this human rights violation was altogether different from coercion in war zones, which is a war crime.
Be that as it may, the comfort women issue is still treated as a war crime in South Korea, as it also was in Japan up until a certain point. One factor underpinning this is a lie: the testimony of a man by the name of Yoshida Seiji (1913–2000). Yoshida claimed to have worked during World War II as a labor mobilization manager at the Shimonoseki branch of the Yamaguchi Prefecture Rōmu Hōkokukai, an organization that oversaw day laborers. He published two books in the 1980s, in which he wrote that he had “hunted out” roughly 200 young women on Jeju Island during wartime. Years later, when the issue blew up, reporters, historians, and even Korean researchers conducted surveys on the island to confirm the facts, but none of them was able to find evidence or testimony supporting his account.
Yoshida Seiji
If this were the whole story, Yoshida’s tale would have faded into oblivion without gaining much public attention. But as fate would have it, the Asahi Shimbun—Japan’s most influential newspaper since before the war—wrote up the testimony in an article in 1982. “Comfort women hunting” in the Korean Peninsula thus made Korean headlines and became a central issue in the country’s criticism of Japan. Things were further complicated by the way that the Asahi mixed up joshi teishintai (women’s volunteer corps), in which Japanese citizens were gathered to volunteer their labor during the war, with comfort women. Women’s volunteer corps existed throughout Japan and its territories, primarily in schools. This led to widespread discourse based on the assumption that “comfort stations” were highly common.
Summary of the Asahi Assessment of Its Comfort Women Coverage1. Existence of coercive recruitment
Regarding the September 2, 1982, article in the Osaka morning edition about “comfort women hunting” on Jeju Island, which was based on the testimony of Yoshida Seiji, and the description in an editorial on January 12, 1992, that women were “solicited or forcibly taken away as volunteer corps”: In Korea and Taiwan, which were under Japanese colonial rule, prostitution rings were able to deceptively recruit large numbers of women with promises of good work, and no records have been found of the Japanese military systematically abducting women for sexual purposes. In regions occupied by the Japanese army, including Indonesia, records indicating that the military carted off local women have been confirmed. In both cases, the women were forced into service against their will.
2. Yoshida Seiji’s testimony about “comfort women hunting” on Jeju Island
Regarding having run 16 articles based on Yoshida’s testimony since becoming the first major media outlet to take up the testimony: Asahi conducted additional research on Jeju Island but was unable to obtain information corroborating Yoshida’s testimony. Judging the testimony to have been false, it retracted the articles.
3. 1992 article and political intent
Regarding the criticism that the January 11, 1992, story on a document indicating military involvement in comfort stations was timed to coincide with Prime Minister Miyazawa’s visit to Korea: There was no such intention, and Asahi ran the article five days after learning the details. Meanwhile, the government had been notified of the document’s existence prior to the article being printed.
4. Confusion of volunteer corps with comfort women
Regarding the 1991–92 articles stating that comfort women from the Korean Peninsula were forcibly recruited under the pretext of joining the joshi teishintai (women’s volunteer corps): Joshi teishintai refers to the joshi kinrō teishintai (women’s volunteer labor corps), which mobilized women to work in munitions factories and other locations during the war, and is completely distinct from comfort women. Some of the reference materials used by the reporters also confused the two, resulting in misuse of the term.
5. Background of the August 11, 1991, article on the first testimony by a former comfort woman
Regarding allegations that the article, which preceded Korean media coverage, was somehow biased, because its writer was related to a senior member of a Korean organization supporting lawsuits by former comfort women: What prompted the story was information provided by the chief of the Seoul bureau of the time, and there was no intentional distortion of facts.
Coverage along these lines reached a climax around the time of Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi’s visit to South Korea in January 1992. The previous year, a former comfort woman had come forward for the first time and sued the Japanese government. As with the Yoshida testimony, Asahi wrote up the story ahead of Korean media. In the midst of the commotion, just days before Miyazawa left for Korea, Asahi reported on a document suggesting that the Japanese military and public agencies had facilitated the transportation of comfort women to “comfort stations.” The prime minister was obliged to repeatedly apologize during his visit, and the next year Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei released a statement regarding the comfort women issue. (Although the statement acknowledged the existence of comfort women, public-sector involvement in operating comfort facilities, and coercion in war zones, it made no mention of coercion in Korea.) Other media organs began following in Asahi’s footsteps.
With the government being forced into action, the articles to date quickly came under scrutiny, the outcome being that Yoshida’s testimony had no basis in fact and that the volunteer corps and comfort women had been mixed up. From August 1992 onward, Japanese media refrained from coverage based on the testimony. But they neither retracted nor corrected past articles.