ABSTRACT
On August 5, 2014, the Asahi Shimbun released the results of its reexamination of past coverage of “comfort women” (Asahi Shimbun 2014). The paper admitted that testimony provided by the late Yoshida Seiji, in which he stated that he captured and forcibly transported “comfort women” in Korea during WWII, was a fabrication, and retracted sixteen articles that were related to Yoshida’s comments from the 1980s and 1990s. Subsequently, protests against the Asahi and its reporters intensified with a vengeance. Many papers, magazines, books and television talk shows, ranging from conservative to more liberal ones, criticized the Asahi for its comfort women coverage and belated mea culpa. Conservative politicians, including government leaders, openly condemned the Asahi. On the street, particularly in front of the Asahi Shimbun company headquarters in Tokyo and Osaka, there have been frequent demonstrations by right-wing groups against the company. On the Internet, attacks against the Asahi have soared to unprecedented levels, making Asahi-bashing a major social phenomenon since 2014. (See Fackler Chapter 3)
In this situation, one journalist in particular stood out as a target: a former Asahi reporter, Uemura Takashi, who took early retirement from the company in March 2014. Uemura had never written any articles drawing on the discredited testimony of Yoshida Seiji, belatedly repudiated by the Asahi. Yet, Uemura was attacked and accused of fabricating two stories that he wrote in the early 1990s on the first “comfort woman” to go public with her experiences, South Korean Kim Hak-sun. Earlier in 2014, intense Internet harassment combined with anonymous protest calls, letters and emails cost Uemura a position as professor he was to assume at a university in Kobe. The Asahi’s “re-examination” in August, which concluded that there were no fabrications in Uemura’s articles and thus the paper
would not retract them, ironically made the situation worse. By that time he was an adjunct lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University in Hokkaido, and that university became subject to an intense campaign of threats to fire him. Uemura and his family were also threatened, leading him to file lawsuits against his critics and their publishers for defamation in January and February 2015.
