Mainichi Daily News published an interview with Ikuhiko Hata, who has criticized Asahi's story. Mainichi, who once accused the "sex slave", secretly changed their position.
The Asahi Shimbun's acknowledgement that Seiji Yoshida's claims that he "hunted up" women in Korea, which was under Japan's colonial rule, to make them serve as comfort women was a fabrication, and its retraction of the relevant articles written based on his testimony can be appreciated to a certain extent even though the move came too late.
It is regrettable, however, that the Asahi Shimbun continues to claim that its understanding of the issue remains unchanged, and that the public should look squarely at the essence of that issue. It appears that the daily is still following the view that comfort women are sex slaves, though this is based on false testimony, rumors and deliberately manipulated information.
One cannot help but wonder if comfort women's lives at comfort stations were so miserable that it is appropriate to call them "sex slaves." Comfort women were earning income dozens of times that of soldiers, and had the freedom to quit their jobs and go back to their home countries or refuse to take customers. U.S. military documents that illustrate these circumstances remain extant. [...]
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