Seiji Yoshida

Yūto Yoshida (吉田 雄兎) was a Japanese novelist and member of the Japanese Communist Party.

He has published under a variety of pen names, including Seiji Yoshida (吉田 清治), Tōji Yoshida (吉田 東司), and Eiji Yoshida (吉田 栄司).

Ikuhiko Hata also threw doubt on the fact that Yuto Yoshida was carried on the list of 1931 graduates from Moji Commercial School as deceased.

The screaming was terrible, but that was my routine throughout 1943 and 1944,"

"We would use 5 or 10 trucks, and sweep the villages, choosing two or three young women from each who would be suitable."

"We had seized perhaps 2,000 women."

"It was just like kidnapping. It may be the worst abuse of human rights in Asia in this century.""

""... hunted up 200 young Korean women in Jeju Island.""

""... Moreover, the wartime experiences of one raider, Yoshida Seiji, are recorded in his book, in which he confesses to having been part of slave raids in which, among other Koreans, as many as 1,000 women were obtained for "comfort women" duties under the National Labour Service Association as part of the National General Mobilization Law.""

""Soldiers of many nations have committed atrocities in war, but the story of these women has a shocking difference.

The enslavement was an official activity ordered by the highest authority in Japan.

Everything went through proper channels, from the Cabinet to the Army Ministry and then to local governors and on to soldiers like Seiji Yoshida, whose job was to go on field trips to Korea, accompanied by subordinates and police officers, hunting for women to imprison in Imperial Army brothels.

The result was a system of nationalized sexual slavery unique in modern times.

Once again, women were regarded simply as commodities.

After the war, he ran as a Japanese Communist Party candidate in the 1947 Shimonoseki city council elections, but was defeated.

In 1977 and again in 1983, Yoshida published memoirs about his actions during the war.

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.

Asahi Shimbun retracted all 16 articles based on his testimony in the 1980s and 1990s.

The President of Asahi Shimbun later made an apology for the errors and an editor was fired as a result.

According to his son's testimony in the Sankei Shimbun, he was poor before publishing and worked for a bakery run by a Korean.

Yoshida frequently applied for essay contests for prize money and he won by a fictional story about slavery workforce during the war.

Later, this story was used by Korea University educator Park Kyung-sik (朴慶植) and quoted in “Record of Korean forced compulsion”.

""We grabbed screaming infants from the women's arms before forcing the women into trucks and shipping them to the front lines in China to serve in brothels for Japan's invasion force.

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.

Some historians say the impact of the Yoshida's testimonies were minimal because they have been refuted and rejected by virtually all historians during the 1990s.

His books and a subsequent 1991 media interview have been credited with bringing about an apology to Korea by Foreign Affairs minister Yōhei Kōno.

As Yoshida's memoirs became widely known, he began to attract suspicion.

Yoshida, a director of mobilization for Yamaguchi Prefecture during the war, spoke out in 1991 and published a book about the events.

He had been only one of thousands of employees of the Patriotic Labour Association involved in conscripting labourers and sex slaves in the colonies.41 After speaking out, Yoshida was denounced by veterans' associations and became the target of death threats.""

He wrote "My war crimes", which is the origin of a dispute over comfort women 30 years after World War II; he admitted that portions of his work had been made up in an interview with Shūkan Shinchō on May 29, 1996.

Later, his fictional work was used by George Hicks in his "The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War".

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.

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 your own assertions into the story is something that newspapers do too".

The publisher of his book, Sanichi Shobou, also admitted that it was a novel, while being interviewed by NHK.

However they are often cited by influential reports and media after 2000.

In June 2009, Lee Young-hoon, a professor of Seoul National University, argued that Yoshida's testimony has spread among Korean society after Yoshida published books.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki and others argue that historians seeking to deny or downplay the existence of comfort women commonly mention Yoshida and his testimony since then and that 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.

On August 5, 2014, Asahi Shimbun announced that they came to the conclusion that the testimony of Yoshida was a fabrication.

In April and May 2014, the Asahi Shimbun dispatched reporters to Jeju Island and interviewed about 40 elderly residents and concluded that Yoshida's accounts "are false" because they did not found supporting evidence for it.