Campaign against Japan’s left-wing daily an effort to rewrite history
Deniers of historical abuses apparently behind campaign sparked by Asahi Shimbun admitting past reporting on 'comfort women' inaccurate
Japan's conservative press and even some middle-of-the-road publications are lining up to criticise the left-leaning Asahi Shimbun in a campaign that media-watchers suggest is a widening of the trend of reinterpreting the nation's history.
The Asahi has always been a political opposite of the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Sankei Shimbun, the Yukan Fuji and a host of related monthly news magazines, but those differences of opinion have now boiled over into open warfare in the editorial pages.
The trigger was the admission by the Asahi in early August that there were inaccuracies in its reporting dating back to the 1980s on the comfort women issue.
The paper retracted parts that focused on the mobilisation of sex slaves on the Korean peninsula based on the testimony of former soldier Seiji Yoshida.
Yoshida's "memories" of the Japanese military rounding up women on Jeju Island and forcing them to become sex slaves were made before the Japanese government in 1993 issued the Kono Statement, the blanket apology to Asian women forced into sexual slavery by Japan in the early decades of the last century.