ABSTRACT
The comfort women issue was first introduced into Japanese middle-school textbooks in 1997. Three events led to the inclusion of such material: 1) in August 1991, South Korean halmoni (grandmother) Kim Hak-sun publicly revealed her past as a military comfort woman during World War II and filed a suit against the Japanese government; 2) in January 1992, Prof. Yoshimi Yoshiaki revealed documentary evidence proving that the Japanese Armed Forces was directly involved in creating and managing military comfort stations; and 3) in August 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei’s officially recognized Imperial Japan’s responsibility for the comfort women system and pledged to revise the Japanese school curriculum to reflect that historical fact. Publishers began to include information on wartime sexual servitude in public middle-school textbooks.
Ultra-conservative forces mobilized to combat schoolbook revisions and launched a national campaign to force the removal of comfort women content. A broad “New Right” alliance emerged dedicated to restoring pride in Japan’s modern history, and inside the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the National Diet, revisionist lobbying groups formed, providing powerful political support for the backlash. Textbook publishers gradually phased out or eliminated “objectionable” passages, creating a chilling effect, and the few who refused went out of business. By 2006, school texts no longer even mentioned the comfort women. Since December 2012, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s second administration has filled the Cabinet and other high political positions with New Right revisionists. Enjoying a majority in both houses of the Diet, this ultra-conservative alliance of top government officials, bureaucrats, and lawmakers has attempted to gradually assert total state control over the educational content of the nation’s schoolbooks and our children’s minds.
