Seiji Yoshida

Yūto Yoshida (吉田 雄兎, Yoshida Yūto, born 15 October 1913) is a Japanese communist novelist and former soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army. He has published under a variety of pen names, including Seiji Yoshida (吉田 清治, Yoshida Seiji), Tōji Yoshida (吉田 東司, Yoshida Tōji), and Eiji Yoshida (吉田 栄司, Yoshida Eiji).^[1][2] He wrote "My war crimes" which is origin of a dispute over comfort women 30 years after World War II; he admitted it was fictional at the interview with Shūkan Shinchō on May 29, 1996.^[1]

Early life

Originally from Yamaguchi Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, Yoshida was stationed in Korea, then a colony of Japan, during World War II; he claimed that he assisted police to kidnap over 2,000 women from various rural areas of the Korean peninsula to serve as comfort women.^[3] After the war, he ran as a Japanese Communist Party candidate in the 1947 Shimonoseki city council elections, but was defeated.^[1]

Memoirs controversy

In 1977 and again in 1983, Yoshida published memoirs about his actions during the war.^[3] His books and a subsequent 1991 media interview have been credited with bringing about an apology to Korea by Foreign Affairs minister Yōhei Kōno.^[4] As Yoshida's memoirs became widely known, he began to attract suspicion. Ikuhiko Hata, a historian at Takushoku University and one of Yoshida's leading critics, pointed to inconsistencies between Yoshida's 1977 and 1983 memoirs, using these to assert that his claims are fabricated.^[3] South Korean newspaper interviews with residents of Jeju Island, where the forced recruitment allegedly took place, found no one who admitted to remembering a sweep through a button factory there which Yoshida detailed in his 1983 memoirs.^[2][3] In May 1996, weekly magazine Shūkan Shinchō published remarks by Yoshida made to them in an interview, admitting that portions of his work had been made up. He stated that "There is no profit in writing the truth in books. Hiding the facts and mixing them with your own assertions is something that newspapers do all the time too".^[5][6][7] In June 2009, Lee Yong-hoon, who is a professor of Seoul National University, argued that Yoshida's testimony has spread among Korean society after Yoshida published books.^[8][9]

Since then, historians seeking to deny or downplay the existence of comfort women commonly mention Yoshida and his testimony. The inaccuracy of Yoshida's claims are used to cast doubt on the existence or extent of forced prostitution under Japanese rule in World War II.^[10]

Works

• 吉田清治 [Seiji Yoshida] (March 1977). 『朝鮮人慰安婦と日本人』 [Korean comfort women and Japanese people]. 新人物往来社 [Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha]. ISBN 978-4-404-00795-7. OCLC 23327293.  Cite uses deprecated parameters (help)
• 吉田清治 [Seiji Yoshida] (January 1983). 『私の戦争犯罪―朝鮮人強制連行』 [My war crimes—the forced transport of Koreans]. 三一書房 [San'ichi Shobō]. OCLC 13784662.  Cite uses deprecated parameters (help)
  • Translated into Korean as 吉田淸治 [요시다세이지 = Seiji Yoshida] (1989). 《나는 조선사람을 이렇게 잡아갔다 -나의 전쟁범죄 고백》 [I kidnapped Koreans like this - confession of my war crimes]. 청계연구소 [Cheonggye Yeonguso]. OCLC 21073210. 

References