Japan, Seeking Revision of Report on Wartime Brothels, Is Rebuffed

By -
After a long time of hesitation, NYT tries to rescue their wrong articles like the Asahi by labeling majority of Japanese politicians and journalists as "right-wing". Mr. Fackler is a nice guy who reads my blog. It is sorry that he has surrendered to NYT politics, but he is much more cautious than Onishi.
Calls by right-wing politicians and activists to challenge the women’s stories have increased sharply since August, when a major liberal newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, printed a front-page retraction of several articles it published on the issue in the 1980s and 1990s. Those were based on the testimony of a former Japanese soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who said he had helped kidnap Korean women to work in the brothels.

Many mainstream Japanese scholars and most non-Japanese researchers reject those claims, saying Mr. Yoshida’s testimony was never a major piece of historical evidence that women were coerced. They cite other evidence, mainly the testimonies of many of the women, who in the 1990s broke decades of silence.

Based largely on those testimonies, scholars have concluded that tens of thousands of mostly Asian but also Dutch women worked in Japanese wartime brothels, many against their will. Japanese conservatives dispute that, calling the women’s testimony biased and unreliable, and pointing to a lack of documentary evidence to corroborate their accounts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A troubling position on 'comfort women'

By -
The Yomiuri Shimbun's editorial criticizes the EU Parliament's resolution: The Japanese government must lobby other governments to persuade them not to follow in the footsteps of the European Parliament in adopting a resolution that sullies Japan's standing. The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning Japan over the "comfort women" issue. The resolution calls for the government to apologize, saying the Imperial armed forces coerced young women in Asia to work as "sex slaves" before and during World War II. The latest development resembles the resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives over the comfort women issue in July. This matter has now spilled over to Europe. The parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands also have adopted similar resolutions. However, interest in the comfort women issue has not necessarily been high in Europe. The European Parliament's resolution was advocated by the minor Green Party and fewer tha
Read more

Norimitsu Onishi, a liar

By -
The most influential source of lies is Norimitsu Onishi , the Tokyo bureau chief of NY Times . He was born in 1969 in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, and moved to Canada when he was four. He graduated from Princeton University and joined the Times and covered Africa, Afganistan, and other foreign countries before he came to Japan in 2003.
Read more

Asahi Shimbun fabricated "comfort women"

By -
Image
All these things began with a wrong article. "Comfort women" or  "military abduction" weren't discussed before it. The Asahi Shimbun reported in the front page on 11 January 1992 that the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered documents that proves the Army's "commitment" to comfort women in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency.
Read more