This article is the first of a three-part symposium. See parts two and three here.

Perhaps it should have been foreseen, but it was not evident in 1995 just how farcical, tragic, and alarming the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII would look in Japan. Then, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, the Socialist politician in an extraordinary coalition, to put it politely, with the Liberal Democratic Party, issued a statement acknowledging that his country, “through its colonial rule and aggression, [had] caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.” That followed upon a declaration two years earlier by the then chief cabinet secretary, Kōno Yōhei, which states, “Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military authorities of the day. The then Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women. The recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military. The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments. They lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” This remarkably straightforward observation from what is known as the “Kono Statement” exists in “unofficial” translation on the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This article is the second in a three-part symposium. See parts one and three.

Contentious debates between historians who investigate and document the Imperial Japanese military's active involvement in the establishment, maintenance, and operation of its system of enforced prostitution and those who seek to simultaneously refute and justify it have been ongoing since the mid-1990s. But Japanese far-right historical revisionists are now making concerted efforts to mobilize Japanese communities in the U.S. in an effort to induce sufficient doubt concerning the accepted historical knowledge of the WWII-era Japanese military “comfort women” to paralyze international efforts to hold the Japanese government accountable.

This article is the third of a three-part symposium. See parts one and two.

In early April 2015, we learned that a Japanese language instructor at the university where we teach had invited online broadcaster Taniyama Yujiro to campus to screen his film Scottsboro Girls, a quite amateurish three-hour video devoted to the proposition that “comfort women” were not sexual slaves but instead were well-paid, self-interested prostitutes, who serviced the Japanese military of their own free will. Looking at the YouTube preview, we were struck by how the film repeated the standard revisionist talking points, with which we have become all too familiar over the past several years, along with various ethnic slurs against Koreans and others. Announcing the screening, Taniyama published on his website a letter of invitation by the Japanese language lecturer and his own response.

Some Japanese studies scholars recently published an “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan,” to counter the revisionist atmosphere surrounding the “comfort women” issue in Japan. While the author agrees that historical revisionism should be criticized, he takes issue with some elements in the Letter. First, it distorts the history of post-1945 Japan by listing factually incorrect “achievements.” Second, its treatment of nationalism in Japan and other countries is problematic. The Letter seems to be the result of a compromise among people with divergent views, and the author argues that what should not be compromised has been compromised.