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‘Comfort Women’ Denial and the Japanese Right

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Yoshikata Veki ,
Julie Higashi ,
Norma Field  and
Tomomi Yamaguchi
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It is a remarkable thing to behold, the extent to which the issue of “comfort women” galvanizes the Japanese right more than two decades after the first Korean survivor appeared in public. The hopeful moments of the Kono Statement (1993) and the Murayama Statement (1995) seem to belong to a remote past. Circumscribed though they were, those official statements by the then chief cabinet secretary (Kono Yohei) and prime minister (Murayama Tomiichi) squarely acknowledged the grievous consequences of imperial Japan's acts of aggression not only on the Japanese people but their Asian neighbors, and most pertinently with respect to “comfort women,” the involvement of the Japanese military.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 30 , July 2015 , e2
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2015

References

Notes

1 Hayashi Hirofumi, Government, the Military and Business in Japan's Wartime Comfort Woman System.

2 Jeff Kingston, Testy Team Abe Pressures Media in Japan.

3 Arudou Debito, Japanese Government Pressures American Publisher to Delete Textbook Treatment of Wartime Military Sexual Slavery: An Interview with Herbert Ziegler.

4 The Asahi's thoroughgoing repudiation is itself the subject of continuing controversy. See (especially pp. 2-6, in Japanese) of the thoughtful reflection by Uemura Satoshi (currently Secretary General of the Center for Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility), on the considerations historians need to keep in mind in interpreting the historical record, such as the “Yoshida Testimony.”

5 For the significance of these observations as well as Yoshikata's research in general, see Uemura Takashi with an introduction by Tomomi Yamaguchi, Labeled “the reporter who fabricated” the comfort woman issue: A Rebuttal on this site.

6 On Yoshida Seiji's role, see, for instance, “Reexamining the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue: An Interview with Yoshimi Yoshiaki” on this site.