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Takashi Uemura will pursue a defamation suit. Photo: AP

How threats and intimidation change the life of key former journalist in Asahi ‘comfort women’ scandal

Former journalist who has faced far-right threats over a 24-year-old article on second world war 'comfort women' takes legal action

For 24 years, Takashi Uemura has been the target of criticism from the far-right and threats of violence against him and his family for a story he wrote when a journalist for Japan's left-leaning .

Now, he says, he's had enough.

On January 9, Uemura filed a civil suit against Bungei Shunju, publishers of the news magazine, and Tsutomu Nishioka, a professor at Tokyo Christian University, who have accused him of fabricating stories that appeared in the about the "comfort women" issue.

Those allegations - unfounded, Uemura insists - have triggered a campaign of vitriolic letters and emails that cost him a new position as a professor at a university in Kobe. A similar assault was launched when he was offered a position as a part-time lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University, in Hokkaido.

So far, however, that institution has resisted the intimidation of extremists who continue to deny that "comfort women" were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops by the military. On the contrary, they insist, the women were little more than prostitutes who got rich during the war.

"My university received another threatening letter yesterday," Uemura said with a sigh in a recent interview. "To me, it's terrible that they disguise their identities and send these letters to my employers. This kind of behaviour cannot be allowed to continue in a free society."

Uemura's lonely battle with Japan's right-wing dates back to August 1991, when he interviewed a woman in South Korea, named Kim Hak-sun, who detailed her experiences as a sex slave at the hands of the Japanese military in the early decades of the last century.

The sniping at the and Uemura was constant over the following years as nationalists sought to discredit reports that the Japanese military had been involved in accosting women overseas and forcing them into the euphemistically named "comfort stations" for their troops.

The pace and strength of the attacks were ratcheted up last year, however, when the was forced to admit that reports it had printed quoting Seiji Yoshida, a former soldier who told of rounding up women on the South Korean island of Jeju and forcing them into sexual slavery, were incorrect. Yoshida's testimony had been considered suspect for some years and the was finally forced into printing a retraction.

The right seized on this as evidence that every report on the sex slaves was fatally flawed and should be dismissed, once again putting Uemura's work in the spotlight. But an internal probe by the and an external, independent investigation found that his reports were accurate.

Yet still the attacks came.

In August last year, the ran a story headlined "Reporter who fabricates stories hired to be a professor at university for young women". Quoted in the article, Professor Nishioka accused Uemura of making his stories up.

"As a result of these allegations, there have been a great number of threats and protest letters and phone calls to myself and the university where I work," Uemura said.

Inevitably, the threats have found there way onto the internet as well.

"Even my daughter has become a target," he said.

He quoted one statement aimed at his daughter that he found online, which stated: "The actions of her father have caused untold suffering to many Japanese people and obviously he has made a great deal of money from taking part in anti-Japanese movements. That means his daughter has grown up in luxury. We have no choice but to drive her to commit suicide."

Briefly, Uemura becomes tearful.

"Japan is supposed to be a democratic society," he said. "We cannot allow this sort of terrible behaviour to continue."

A team of no fewer than 170 lawyers has rallied to Uemura's support and in the suit filed against the magazine publisher and professor Nishioka are demanding that a paper criticising Uemura's news reports be removed from the internet, that both take out adverts in which they apologise for slandering Uemura and that they pay him a total of Y16.5 million (HK$1.09 million) in damages.

Uemura and his legal team intend to go after others who have repeated the slanders as soon as this case won.

"There are people in our society who do not want to look too hard at what happened in the past," he said. "They are trying to prevent us from doing that.

"I intend to prove that I never fabricated any of my reports," he said. "I will defend my honour and my name through the courts and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have never made up any of my stories. I will not bend."

 

10,000 people sue Japanese newspaper over stories on wartime comfort women

More than 10,000 people are suing Japan's leading liberal newspaper over stories on Tokyo's system of wartime sex slavery, which they say have stained their reputation as Japanese nationals.

The group of plaintiffs, led by Sophia University professor emeritus Shoichi Watanabe, is demanding 10,000 yen (HK$657) in apparently symbolic compensation for each, describing themselves as "Japanese citizens whose honour and credibility were damaged by the false reports made by the ", according to legal documents presented at court.

They argue the reports on the so-called "comfort women" system "have imposed indescribable humiliation not only on former soldiers but also on honourable Japanese citizens ... who are labelled as descendents of gang rapists."

Despite a dearth of official records, mainstream historians say up to 200,000 women, many from Korea but also from China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan, served Japanese soldiers in military brothels called "comfort stations". Most agree that these women were not willing participants.

Right-wingers say the women were common prostitutes engaged in a commercial exchange, and are fighting a vigorous rear-guard battle to alter the narrative, which they blame on reports in the 1980s.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Academic's fightback over sex slave story
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