Seiji Yoshida's lies about "comfort women" exploited by Japan's right

When Seiji Yoshida first bared his tortured soul about his actions in Korea during the second world war, he was acclaimed as a hero by the left wing at home, and by governments in parts of Asia that had felt the full force of imperial Japan's adventures in the early decades of the 20th century.

Here was a man who had overcome his loyalty to his nation and confessed to helping to kidnap more than 2,000 young women from across the Korean Peninsula to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military.

Or so they thought. Originally from Yamaguchi prefecture, Yoshida had indeed served in the Japanese military during the war and was stationed in Korea, which was a Japanese colony at the time. But the rest of his story eventually began to unravel.

Though Yoshida died in 2000, his dodgy testimony is at the heart of a scandal that roils Japan to this day, with two universities last week reporting bomb threats against two staff who were involved in reporting the veteran's stories in the 1990s.

After his repatriation, Yoshida - whose real name was Yuto Yoshida - became involved in politics and was a member of Japan's Communist Party. In 1947, he ran as a communist in elections for the city council in Shimonoseki, but was unsuccessful. He earned a living as a writer and went largely unremarked until 1977, when he published a volume of his memoirs titled Korean Comfort Women and Japanese People.

Dealing with an issue that had previously been largely taboo in Japan - the abduction of young Korean women to serve as "comfort women" in military brothels - it attracted a great deal of attention, not least in South Korea.