Seiji Yoshida

Yūto Yoshida (吉田 雄兎, Yoshida Yūto, 15 October 1913 – July 2000) 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, Yoshida Seiji), Tōji Yoshida (吉田 東司, Yoshida Tōji), and Eiji Yoshida (吉田 栄司, Yoshida Eiji). He wrote "My war crimes", which is the origin of a dispute over comfort women 30 years after World War II; he admitted it was fictional 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. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. 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. 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.

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