The following is from an article by Mr. Tsutomu Nishioka in the Sound Argument section of today's Sankei Shimbun titled "The main culprit behind the deterioration of Japan-Korea relations."
As already mentioned, the Suga administration should give him the National Medal of Honor for his achievements.
It would be nice to give it to an athlete who has done a great job.
It is the role of every intelligent person, not only artists, orators, and politicians, to reveal the hidden truth.
If Prime Minister Suga makes the wise decision to implement my suggestion, his approval rating may go up, but it will not go down.
On the contrary, this wise decision is comparable to the death sentence handed down by the Fukuoka District Court yesterday to the gang leader.
It reveals to the world the criminal acts that the Asahi Shimbun has continued to inflict on the Japanese nation and its people.
It is because it will reveal to the world that the Asahi Shimbun and its employees are, in fact, traitors who are no better than the Yakuza.
The rest of this article will be posted later on the official website of the Turntable of Civilization, in the paid articles section.
It has been 30 years since the Asahi Shimbun created an opportunity to worsen the relationship between Japan and South Korea by reporting falsely on the comfort women issue.
A lie that spread to the international community
In 1991, Asahi launched a major company-wide campaign on the comfort women issue.
In the same year, Asahi published a whopping 150 articles on comfort women.
As a result, the lie that "between 80,000 and 200,000 Korean women were forcibly brought to Japan under the name of the Volunteer Army and made into comfort women" suddenly spread throughout Japan, South Korea, and the rest of the international community.
The two pillars that supported the newspaper's campaign were the testimony of Yoshida Seiji as a perpetrator and Kim Hak-sun as a victim.
Asahi first reported both in the Japanese and Korean media.
Asahi first reported on the Yoshida testimony in 1982.
After that, it didn't cover it much, but in 1991, it reported it twice again in a big way.
Only in 2014 did Asahi finally admit that this testimony was false.
The first time Asahi reported Kim Hak-sun's testimony was on August 11, 1991.
It was also the first among the Japanese and Korean media.
The article (Osaka edition) began as follows.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, one of the Korean comfort women who took to the battlefield under the name of "women's volunteer corps" and was forced to engage in prostitution with Japanese soldiers was found to be still alive Seoul. On April 10, the council released a tape recording of the woman's story to a reporter from the Asahi Shimbun."
However, Ms. Kim has never mentioned that she was sent to the battlefield under the name of "Women's Volunteer Corps," as this article describes.
In a complaint in a trial seeking compensation from the Japanese government for the comfort women issue, she quit ordinary school because of her low-income family, became the adopted daughter of a man named Kim Yi-yuan, and attended Kisaeng school for three years from the age of 14, and was 17 years old. At times she wrote that her adoptive father took her to a Japanese military comfort station in China.
Another testimony stated that her mother received 40 yen from her adoptive father when she became an adopted daughter and began training in Kisaeng.
We cannot allow the Asahi Shimbun to lie.
I was shocked when I read this complaint and others, and I have been criticizing Asahi's coverage of comfort women, including this article, since 1992.
Asahi developed a campaign to forcefully bring in comfort women by adding in a self-serving manner that Kim Hak-sun had been taken to the battlefield under the name of the Women's Volunteer Corps, which she had never mentioned.
I wrote that this was a fabrication.
The reporter who wrote the article sued me in civil court, claiming that my criticism was defamatory. Still, in March this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the criticism of fabrication was genuine, and I won the case ultimately.
Ms. Kim Hak-sun was not a victim of forced labor by the Japanese military but a victim, her parents, sold due to poverty.
The same was true for the former Korean comfort women who came forward afterward.
It is true that the public prostitution system, in which parents receive advance payments and their daughters are forced to repay them by prostituting themselves, is a severe violation of women's human rights from the perspective of conventional values.
The Japanese military set up comfort stations in the war zones and allowed Japanese, Koreans, and other private companies to operate them to carry out the war effort.
Therefore, I am not opposed to the Japanese government showing apology and sympathy to the women who worked in the comfort stations based on the current values.
I feel the same way.
However, Asahi's campaign that the Korean women were forcibly taken away is a lie. I cannot admit that it is a lie.
"Comfort Women Memorial Day"
However, in 2018, the South Korean government officially designated August 14, the day of Kim Hak-sun's first press conference, as the nation's "Comfort Women Memorial Day.
As this year is the 30th anniversary, there were many events and media coverage in South Korea.
In a video message sent to the Memorial Day event, President Moon Jae-in said, "Thirty years have passed since the late Kim Hak-sun publicly testified to the fact that she was forced to work as a comfort woman for the Japanese army, and 30 years ago, the truth of this sentence came out to the world."
He still says Kim Hak-sun was the victim of forced entrainment.
Unfortunately, Kim Hak-sun was a victim of poverty rather than a victim of forced entrainment in South Korea, which is barely mentioned except by a few online media outlets.
The only thing that has been repeated is the argument that the Japanese government and many Japanese people have not made a sincere apology and remorse while committing the crime of forced conscription of comfort women, which is comparable to the Holocaust.
The former Asahi reporter who wrote the fabricated article has been widely featured as a "conscientious Japanese" on Korean TV and newspapers.
There can be no friendship between Japan and Korea except based on the truth.
The leading cause of the deterioration of Japan-Korea relations lies in the lies told by the "Anti-Japanese Japanese," who is praised as "conscientious Japanese" in Korea.
At the end of the month, I will publish a new book, "40 Years of the Japan-Korea 'History Perception Problem,'" in which I will discuss their responsibility in detail.
Let's have an extensive discussion in Japan and Korea about how to improve Japan-Korea relations.
