JAPANESE SCHOLARS’ POSITION ON RESPONSE TO STATEMENT ISSUED BY
AMERICAN SCHOLARS(Opening Address)

Speaker:Dr. WATANABE Toshio
Chancellor, Takushoku University

Date:

August 6, 2015 (Tuesday)

Place:FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan)

My name is Watanabe Toshio. I am one of the organizers of today’s event.
In May of this year a statement concerning the so-called comfort women was published;
it was signed by 187 American scholars. I was astonished to see the names of Ronald
Dore and Ezra Vogel in the list of signers, as they are distinguished scholars who have
had significant influence on Japan’s intellectuals.
I have read the statement in question and noticed that it makes claims that absolutely
must be challenged. It is my hope to improve mutual understanding between Japan andthe United States. To that end, I will limit my discussion to two points at issue.
First, the statement contains the following language: “Among the many instances ofwartime sexual violence and military prostitution in the twentieth century, the ‘comfort
women’ system was distinguished by its large scale and systematic management underthe military, and by its exploitation of young, poor, and vulnerable women in areascolonized or occupied by Japan.”Because it is an attack on a nation’s history, an accusation like this one must be based on
scrupulous verification of the facts. Is this statement the product of such an effort? The
fruits of meticulous research into the comfort-women system done by Japanese scholars
prove that the assertions made by the Americans will not stand up to scrutiny.
The statement enters the realm of obsession when it chastises Japanese researchers forusing “legalistic arguments focused on particular terms or isolated documents tochallenge the victims’ testimony.” It urges us to abandon this approach, and instead focus
our efforts on leaving “as full and unbiased an accounting of past wrongs as possible.”We, on the other hand, embrace a value system rooted in the belief that the truth exists
only in facts. We search for historical resources and testimony to the extent possible.
They may be limited, but when we examine them in detail and accumulate a body ofverified facts, then — and only then — can we arrive at the unvarnished truth. In otherwords, we are advocates of historical positivism.

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Through painstaking efforts on the part of Japanese researchers, we now know the truth
about the comfort women. Today the great majority of Japanese are aware of the resultsof that research and have come to terms with it. Professor Nishioka Tsutomu will address
this topic later today. In any event, the allegation that Japanese military authorities forced
200,000 Korean women into sexual slavery, and then slaughtered most of them after thewar is patently untrue.
In the world of Japanese journalism, the Asahi Shimbun has for many years been
publishing articles maintaining that Japanese military personnel abducted Korean womenand compelled them to serve as comfort women. However, even the Asahi Shimbun
published an article in August 2014 admitting that its statements about abduction andcoercion were erroneous, and retracting all previous articles on the subject. The
Americans’ contention that the comfort-women system stands out “[a]mong the many
instances of wartime sexual violence and military prostitution in the twentieth century” isextremely inappropriate, flying in the face of sound research as it does.
It is most unfortunate that the notion that comfort women were forcibly recruited has
become conventional wisdom in the Western world. American history textbooks, which
are used by young people at a suggestible age, contain appallingly brazen statements suchas:“The Japanese army forcibly recruited, conscripted, and dragooned as many as two
hundred thousand women … to serve in military brothels … .”“The army presented the women as a gift from the emperor … .”and“At the end of the war, soldiers massacred large numbers of comfort women to cover up
the operation.”
There is no factual basis for any of these insulting accounts.
Precisely because they are scholars, and because they exert a powerful influence onsociety, I urge American scholars to turn their attention to the empirical research
conducted by members of Japan’s academic community, and then to do everything intheir power to dispel the misconceptions that have arisen from false reports like those in
the aforementioned textbook.
The second issue I would like to raise concerns the portion of the statement that praises
Japan for its postwar history of democracy. Unfortunately, the next sentence reads asfollows:“Yet problems of historical interpretation pose an impediment to celebrating theseachievements.”2

I object to the arrogance of this particular remark, which demonstrates a complete lack oftolerance for differences of “historical interpretation” between nations or ethnic groups.
Today’s date, August 6, marks the 70th anniversary of the day the atomic bomb wasdropped on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 noncombatants. Three days later, on August 9,
another atomic bomb claimed 74,000 innocent victims, this time in Nagasaki. Earlier in1945, on March 10, more than 100,000 Japanese citizens burned to death during thefirebombing of Tokyo. These events have been validated as undeniable fact. However,there is a difference between the way they are perceived in Japan and in the US. We
believe in tolerance for diverging interpretations of historical events that have beensubstantiated. But if the Americans insist on our adopting their interpretations ofhistorical events, which have not been substantiated, we have no hope of forging healthyinternational relations.
Furthermore, we are convinced that the report issued by the UN Commission on HumanRights (commonly known as the Coomaraswamy Report) in 1996, the resolution
condemning the comfort-women system issued by the US House of Representatives in2007 and other, similar publications are nothing more than attempts to inculcate aspecific, unsubstantiated historical interpretation.
We appeal to all principled Japanese scholars who believe that the truth lies in the facts,
and only in the facts, to join us in our protest against the statement issued by theAmerican scholars, and urge you to support our position.

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