Reexamining the “Comfort Women” Issue An Interview with Yoshimi Yoshiaki. Intoduction by Satoko Oka Norimatsu

Extract

Yoshimi Yoshiaki, a leading historian of the Japanese military sex slavery system, stresses three points in an interview held in late October of 2014, as part of the Japanese weekly Shūkan Kin'yōbi's series of articles to counter-argue the prevailing trend in the Japanese mainstream media that inclined towards denying the history of the sex slavery itself, based on Asahi Newspaper's correction of one of the witnesses Yoshida Seiji's accounts in related articles published in early 1990's. One, Yoshimi reasserts that Yoshida's false accounts were not used at all in the making of Kono Statement, the Japanese government's 1993 apology for and recognition of the Japanese military's involvement in the sex slavery system. Two, the Japanese military was the main culprit in the crimes of mobilizing and confining women for forced sexual servitude. Three, the system was without a doubt one of sex slavery, as it deprived those women of the four kinds of basic freedom. The third point merits particular attention in light of the Yomiuri Newspaper's November 28 announcement of retraction and “apology” for its use of the term “sex slave” in its earlier English-language reports. With the “apology,” Japan's largest newspaper officially declared to the world that the women who were repeatedly raped by Japanese military members under the direct control of the military were not sex slaves. Japan's public broadcaster NHK has also been known, according to the October 17 report of The Times, to have issued a set of directives called the “Orange Book” including one that instructed English-language reporters not to use the terms “sex slaves” and “be forced to.” Those moves, reinforcing the claims of the Abe administration, are precisely the kind of historical falsifications that Yoshimi fears may damage Japan's international reputation. SN