More than 10,000 people are suing Japan’s leading liberal newspaper over stories about Tokyo’s system of forced sex work during World War II, which they say have stained their reputations as Japanese.
The move is the latest salvo in the nation’s battle over its history, which pits an increasingly aggressive revisionist right wing against an ever-more cowed mainstream that accepts the Japan’s guilt over World War II practices.
The group of plaintiffs, led by Shoichi Watanabe, a professor emeritus at Sophia University in Tokyo, seeks apparently symbolic compensation of ¥10,000 (US$85) for each member, describing themselves as “Japanese citizens whose honor and credibility were damaged by the false reports made by the Asahi Shimbun,” according to court documents.
They say that the newspaper’s reports on the so-called “comfort women” system “have imposed indescribable humiliation not only on former soldiers, but also on honorable Japanese citizens ... who are labeled as descendants of gang rapists.”
Despite a dearth of official records, historians say that up to 200,000 women, many from Korea, but also from Taiwan, China, Indonesia and Philippines, provided sex to Japanese soldiers in military brothels called “comfort stations.”
Most agree that these women were not willing participants and that the Imperial Japanese Army and wartime government were involved in their enslavement.
However, Japan’s political right wing holds that the women were common prostitutes engaged in a commercial exchange who are now fighting a vigorous rear-guard battle to alter the narrative.
The Asahi has become the focus of their ire because it published a series of articles in the 1980s based on the now-discredited testimony of a Japanese man who said he had rounded up Korean women to work in military brothels.
After years of pressure, the paper retracted the articles and apologized. The company’s president also resigned.
Conservatives leapt on the Asahi’s retreat, and nationalist Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who wants a more sympathetic telling of Japan’s history, took the move as proof of a smear.
“In the post-war period, the Asahi Shimbun has consistently been haunted by socialistic fantasies, infected by anti-Japanese, self-degrading ideologies,” the lawsuit alleges.
The paper “never hesitated to humiliate [the men] who so selflessly staked their lives for Japan’s independence and modernization,” the document said.
“The Japanese military complied with international law and maintained high moral standards, with the world’s strictest military discipline,” the document said.
The Asahi said it would study the court document before responding.
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