It was about 15 years ago, recalled Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a mild-mannered historian, when he grew fed up with the Japanese government's denials that the military had set up and run brothels throughout Asia during World War II.
Instead of firing off a letter to a newspaper, though, Yoshimi went to the Defense Agency's library and combed through official documents from the 1930s. In just two days, he found a rare trove that uncovered the military's direct role in managing the brothels, including documents that carried the personal seals of high-ranking Imperial Army officers.
Faced with this smoking gun, a red-faced Japanese government immediately dropped its long-standing claim that only private businessmen had operated the brothels. A year later, in 1993, it acknowledged in a statement that the Japanese state itself had been responsible. In time, all government-approved junior high school textbooks carried passages on the history of Japan's military sex slaves, known euphemistically as "comfort women."
"Back then, I was optimistic that this would effectively settle the issue," Yoshimi said. "But there was a fierce backlash."
The backlash came from young nationalist politicians led by Shinzo Abe, an obscure lawmaker at the time in the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who lobbied to rescind the 1993 admission of state responsibility. Their goal finally seemed close at hand after Abe became prime minister last September.
Abe said he would adhere to the 1993 statement, but he also undercut it by asserting that there was no evidence showing the military's role in forcibly recruiting women into sex slavery. His comments incited outrage in Asia and the US, where the House of Representatives is considering a nonbinding resolution that would call on Japan to admit unequivocally its history of sex slavery and to apologize for it.
To Yoshimi, Abe's denial sounded familiar. Until Yoshimi came along 15 years ago, the government had always maintained that there were no official documents to prove the military's role in establishing the brothels. Abe was now saying there were no official documents to prove that the military forcibly procured the women -- thereby discounting other evidence, including the testimony of former sex slaves.
"The fact is, if you can't use anything except official documents, history itself is impossible to elucidate," said Yoshimi, a history professor at Chuo University.
John Dower, a historian of Japan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Yoshimi's "extremely impressive" work has "clarified the historical record in ways that people like Prime Minister Abe and those who support him refuse to acknowledge."
After completing his studies at the University of Tokyo, Yoshimi concentrated on Japan's postwar democratization. It was while searching for documents related to Japan's wartime use of poison gas that he first stumbled upon proof of the military's role in sex slavery.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing