Ikuhiko Hata and Tsutomu Nishioka in conversation 'Asahi's misreporting is defamation of Japan'
The Sankei Shimbun, January 3, 2015
The year 2014 marked a major turning point in the "comfort women" issue, with the verification of the Kono Statement by the government and the resignation of the president of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
This year, will there be any progress on the peninsula situation and Japanese citizens' abduction by North Korea?
Ikuhiko Hata, 82, a contemporary historian and winner of the 30th Sound Argument Grand Prize, and Tsutomu Nishioka, 58, a professor at Tokyo Christian University, discuss the peninsula situation and the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korea.
The two men, who continue to appeal for the truth of history, shared their views.
(Moderator: Mr. Masatoshi Ohno, Deputy Director of the Public Opinion Research Office)
-- On December 10 last year, Takashi Uemura, a former reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, published a memoir in the "Bungei Shunju" on the "comfort women" issue a rebuttal to Dr. Nishioka.
Some media outlets also interviewed him.
Will the comfort women issue take a new turn?
Nishioka
I thoroughly refuted Uemura in the latest issue (February) of the monthly Sound Argument magazine.
He claimed that he did not fabricate the article in his memoirs. Still, he arbitrarily added a fictitious history of being taken as a female volunteer, which the former comfort women themselves had never mentioned.
He also failed to write the real history that she repeatedly told him that she was sold to a bawdyhouse to become a kisaeng due to poverty and was taken to a comfort station by her bawdyhouse foster father. I criticized him for those things fabricated by him.
Hata.
On December 22, it released the report of the third-party committee commissioned by Asahi.
I had been paying attention to it because of the uproar over Uemura's hiring as a lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University. Still, I was disappointed when it ended up being a shallow plunge, saying it was 'easy and careless' but 'not unnatural.'
'It recorded the tape of the former comfort women's testimony that was the basis of the 'scoop.'
But the Seoul Bureau Chief at the time learned of its existence and told Mr. Uemura about it, so he traveled to Seoul to listen to the tape and write about it.
Why did the Seoul Bureau Chief go out of his way to call Mr. Uemura from the Osaka Social Affairs Department?
Nishioka.
There was a difference in temperature between the Asahi Shimbun's Tokyo and Osaka headquarters. And the Osaka edition had a special feature titled 'Women's War in the Pacific,' which was developed based on its strong beliefs, such as 'The Japanese were evil before the war.'
＊It is an undisputed fact that the documentary series repeatedly reported by NHK was just as the Asahi Shimbun Osaka editorialized.
GHQ had complete control over the Japanese media with the War Guilt Information Program.
The Japanese people and the people of the world must know that the main media used to implant a 'masochistic view of history' in the Japanese people as they intended were the Asahi Shimbun and NHK.
But many articles did not appear in the Tokyo edition.
I think the Seoul bureau chief, who would be under the Tokyo Foreign News Department's jurisdiction, tried to get Osaka to write it.
Hata.
But still, it remains disreputable that they wrote the article based on a tape that is not clear who blew it in, right?
A representative of the Korean Council on Paratroopers' Affairs played the tape to me, but he returned home without meeting with the former comfort women themselves.
If I stayed there for three more days, I could attend a press conference with Kim Gak-sun, who came forward.
I think that would have been the perfect scoop.
Some Asahi alumni doubt that the tape recording ever existed.
The independent committee's report was generally harsh, but it seemed to follow the Asahi's verification in August.
The report did not uncover any new facts and did not provide any further insight into the comfort women issue's nature, which was disappointing.
The Yoshida testimony (see note 1) has been thoroughly discussed, and I don't think it will become a new point of contention in the future.
Nishioka.
Why did the Asahi publish a verified article last August?
It had previously transmitted the blatant anti-Japanese diplomacy of the Park Geun-hye administration and the campaign for comfort women by Koreans abroad in the United States and elsewhere as 'Sex Slaves, 200,000,' as per the Uemura article and Yoshida Seiji's initial testimony.
The Japanese public began to wonder if it was strange, and upon investigation, the Asahi had misreported the event.
I think this results from the growing debate that the misreporting of more than 20 years ago is responsible for Japan's gradual defamation around the world.
Hata.
I agree.
The Asahi's influence on public opinion is rapidly beginning to cool down. There is a growing tendency to criticize it more strongly for its stance on the comfort women issue.
The Asahi's divergence from public opinion has been noticeable in other areas as well.
It must have realized that it needed to change its direction somehow.
Nishioka.
The verification method is also in the form of a 'To Our Readers.'
It is the stance of answering readers' questions.
Twenty-three years ago, Dr. Hata went to Jeju Island and was the first to raise the issue of Yoshida's claim that it was a fabrication, but this is not an attitude of answering Dr. Hata's question.
It's a way of saying, 'We'll answer falsely charged with,' although there is growing criticism.
As an organization of speech, it should respond to criticism by saying, 'We will respond to that Nishioka paper.'
The Uemura memoirs do not respond to the Nishioka paper either.
--Last year, the government verified the Kono Statement (see note 2).
Will clarifying the truth of history opens up the future of Japan-Korea relations?
Nishioka
The most significant influence on Japan-Korea relations was Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi's apology to President Roh Tae-woo when he visited Korea in January 1992.
Since 1951, when negotiations for the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries began, it had never addressed the comfort women issue as a diplomatic issue.
If there was a real problem, it should have addressed when it signed the Japan-Korea Basic Treaty in 1965, but it wasn't here either.
Then, in the 1980s, Yoshida wrote a book and went to Korea to apologize. In 1991, the former comfort women, accompanied by Japan's expert post-war compensation lawyer, took the former comfort women to court. Asahi continued to report the story in real-time.
Until then, the Korean media had given little treatment to the comfort women issue, but after Asahi's big campaign in 1991, it began to be covered extensively.
Hata
Against this backdrop, the Asahi wrote a campaign article on January 11, 1992.
It said, 'Evidence of military involvement found,' 'Under the guise of the Women's Volunteer Corps, they were forcibly taken and turned into comfort women,' and 'The majority of the comfort women were Korean women.'
The next day's editorial argued that Japan should apologize and compensate for our actions.
I call this the 'Big Bang,' and the comfort women issue unfolded according to Asahi's plot.
Nishioka.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in turn, has made an apology a priority, and the issue of comfort women has become a diplomatic issue in tandem with the Asahi report.
In the current review of the Kono Statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it considered apologizing as early as December 1991.
As Mr. Yoshida has testified, the facts about the forced rendition of women are not known, and it should not make an apology before the actual situation is investigated.
Why apologize diplomatically here?
It should make an apology after investigating the situation.
Hata.
More than half the blame for the comfort women issue became such a big problem lies with Japan.
Korea has been very passive.
Starting with Mr. Yoshida, some lawyers have gone to various parts of Asia to find former comfort women and bring them to the court for compensation. Some lawyers have called for the U.N. Human Rights Commission (now the U.N. Human Rights Council) to change the term "comfort women" to "sex slaves" and have brought this to fruition.
I can't help but wonder why some Japanese people are so eager to embarrass their own country in such a manner.
There should be social sanctions in other countries, but in Japan, that's not the case.
The media would instead lift them.
Nishioka.
While it would appear that things began with the Asahi's verification of the comfort women issue last August, this is not the case.
The Sankei Shimbun and the monthly paper 'Sound Argument' have obtained records from the time and exposed the fact that the interviews of 16 former comfort women, which were supposed to be the basis for the Kono story, were a bullshit investigation without any supporting research.
Furthermore, they published the full text of a phantom rebuttal to the Kumaraswamy Report (see note 3), which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had submitted to the United Nations and then abruptly withdrawn, and this was a major scoop for the Sankei Shimbun and the monthly publication of the report.
The release of a government document that was considered top secret and the release of new facts has raised the level of debate.
I think this was the background of the rapid development of the comfort women report.
If you want to say something in the press, it is necessary to find new facts and propose new ways of looking at things.
I hope that this kind of constructive discussion will continue in the New Year.
The Sankei Shimbun, January 3, 2015
The year 2014 marked a major turning point in the "comfort women" issue, with the verification of the Kono Statement by the government and the resignation of the president of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
This year, will there be any progress on the peninsula situation and Japanese citizens' abduction by North Korea?
Ikuhiko Hata, 82, a contemporary historian and winner of the 30th Sound Argument Grand Prize, and Tsutomu Nishioka, 58, a professor at Tokyo Christian University, discuss the peninsula situation and the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korea.
The two men, who continue to appeal for the truth of history, shared their views.
(Moderator: Mr. Masatoshi Ohno, Deputy Director of the Public Opinion Research Office)
-- On December 10 last year, Takashi Uemura, a former reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, published a memoir in the "Bungei Shunju" on the "comfort women" issue a rebuttal to Dr. Nishioka.
Some media outlets also interviewed him.
Will the comfort women issue take a new turn?
Nishioka
I thoroughly refuted Uemura in the latest issue (February) of the monthly Sound Argument magazine.
He claimed that he did not fabricate the article in his memoirs. Still, he arbitrarily added a fictitious history of being taken as a female volunteer, which the former comfort women themselves had never mentioned.
He also failed to write the real history that she repeatedly told him that she was sold to a bawdyhouse to become a kisaeng due to poverty and was taken to a comfort station by her bawdyhouse foster father. I criticized him for those things fabricated by him.
Hata.
On December 22, it released the report of the third-party committee commissioned by Asahi.
I had been paying attention to it because of the uproar over Uemura's hiring as a lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University. Still, I was disappointed when it ended up being a shallow plunge, saying it was 'easy and careless' but 'not unnatural.'
'It recorded the tape of the former comfort women's testimony that was the basis of the 'scoop.'
But the Seoul Bureau Chief at the time learned of its existence and told Mr. Uemura about it, so he traveled to Seoul to listen to the tape and write about it.
Why did the Seoul Bureau Chief go out of his way to call Mr. Uemura from the Osaka Social Affairs Department?
Nishioka.
There was a difference in temperature between the Asahi Shimbun's Tokyo and Osaka headquarters. And the Osaka edition had a special feature titled 'Women's War in the Pacific,' which was developed based on its strong beliefs, such as 'The Japanese were evil before the war.'
＊It is an undisputed fact that the documentary series repeatedly reported by NHK was just as the Asahi Shimbun Osaka editorialized.
GHQ had complete control over the Japanese media with the War Guilt Information Program.
The Japanese people and the people of the world must know that the main media used to implant a 'masochistic view of history' in the Japanese people as they intended were the Asahi Shimbun and NHK.
But many articles did not appear in the Tokyo edition.
I think the Seoul bureau chief, who would be under the Tokyo Foreign News Department's jurisdiction, tried to get Osaka to write it.
Hata.
But still, it remains disreputable that they wrote the article based on a tape that is not clear who blew it in, right?
A representative of the Korean Council on Paratroopers' Affairs played the tape to me, but he returned home without meeting with the former comfort women themselves.
If I stayed there for three more days, I could attend a press conference with Kim Gak-sun, who came forward.
I think that would have been the perfect scoop.
Some Asahi alumni doubt that the tape recording ever existed.
The independent committee's report was generally harsh, but it seemed to follow the Asahi's verification in August.
The report did not uncover any new facts and did not provide any further insight into the comfort women issue's nature, which was disappointing.
The Yoshida testimony (see note 1) has been thoroughly discussed, and I don't think it will become a new point of contention in the future.
Nishioka.
Why did the Asahi publish a verified article last August?
It had previously transmitted the blatant anti-Japanese diplomacy of the Park Geun-hye administration and the campaign for comfort women by Koreans abroad in the United States and elsewhere as 'Sex Slaves, 200,000,' as per the Uemura article and Yoshida Seiji's initial testimony.
The Japanese public began to wonder if it was strange, and upon investigation, the Asahi had misreported the event.
I think this results from the growing debate that the misreporting of more than 20 years ago is responsible for Japan's gradual defamation around the world.
Hata.
I agree.
The Asahi's influence on public opinion is rapidly beginning to cool down. There is a growing tendency to criticize it more strongly for its stance on the comfort women issue.
The Asahi's divergence from public opinion has been noticeable in other areas as well.
It must have realized that it needed to change its direction somehow.
Nishioka.
The verification method is also in the form of a 'To Our Readers.'
It is the stance of answering readers' questions.
Twenty-three years ago, Dr. Hata went to Jeju Island and was the first to raise the issue of Yoshida's claim that it was a fabrication, but this is not an attitude of answering Dr. Hata's question.
It's a way of saying, 'We'll answer falsely charged with,' although there is growing criticism.
As an organization of speech, it should respond to criticism by saying, 'We will respond to that Nishioka paper.'
The Uemura memoirs do not respond to the Nishioka paper either.
--Last year, the government verified the Kono Statement (see note 2).
Will clarifying the truth of history opens up the future of Japan-Korea relations?
Nishioka
The most significant influence on Japan-Korea relations was Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi's apology to President Roh Tae-woo when he visited Korea in January 1992.
Since 1951, when negotiations for the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries began, it had never addressed the comfort women issue as a diplomatic issue.
If there was a real problem, it should have addressed when it signed the Japan-Korea Basic Treaty in 1965, but it wasn't here either.
Then, in the 1980s, Yoshida wrote a book and went to Korea to apologize. In 1991, the former comfort women, accompanied by Japan's expert post-war compensation lawyer, took the former comfort women to court. Asahi continued to report the story in real-time.
Until then, the Korean media had given little treatment to the comfort women issue, but after Asahi's big campaign in 1991, it began to be covered extensively.
Hata
Against this backdrop, the Asahi wrote a campaign article on January 11, 1992.
It said, 'Evidence of military involvement found,' 'Under the guise of the Women's Volunteer Corps, they were forcibly taken and turned into comfort women,' and 'The majority of the comfort women were Korean women.'
The next day's editorial argued that Japan should apologize and compensate for our actions.
I call this the 'Big Bang,' and the comfort women issue unfolded according to Asahi's plot.
Nishioka.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in turn, has made an apology a priority, and the issue of comfort women has become a diplomatic issue in tandem with the Asahi report.
In the current review of the Kono Statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it considered apologizing as early as December 1991.
As Mr. Yoshida has testified, the facts about the forced rendition of women are not known, and it should not make an apology before the actual situation is investigated.
Why apologize diplomatically here?
It should make an apology after investigating the situation.
Hata.
More than half the blame for the comfort women issue became such a big problem lies with Japan.
Korea has been very passive.
Starting with Mr. Yoshida, some lawyers have gone to various parts of Asia to find former comfort women and bring them to the court for compensation. Some lawyers have called for the U.N. Human Rights Commission (now the U.N. Human Rights Council) to change the term "comfort women" to "sex slaves" and have brought this to fruition.
I can't help but wonder why some Japanese people are so eager to embarrass their own country in such a manner.
There should be social sanctions in other countries, but in Japan, that's not the case.
The media would instead lift them.
Nishioka.
While it would appear that things began with the Asahi's verification of the comfort women issue last August, this is not the case.
The Sankei Shimbun and the monthly paper 'Sound Argument' have obtained records from the time and exposed the fact that the interviews of 16 former comfort women, which were supposed to be the basis for the Kono story, were a bullshit investigation without any supporting research.
Furthermore, they published the full text of a phantom rebuttal to the Kumaraswamy Report (see note 3), which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had submitted to the United Nations and then abruptly withdrawn, and this was a major scoop for the Sankei Shimbun and the monthly publication of the report.
The release of a government document that was considered top secret and the release of new facts has raised the level of debate.
I think this was the background of the rapid development of the comfort women report.
If you want to say something in the press, it is necessary to find new facts and propose new ways of looking at things.
I hope that this kind of constructive discussion will continue in the New Year.
