In February of 1996, the United Nations issued a special report (E/CN.4/1996/53), authored by its special rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, that authoritatively confirmed and condemned the Japanese imperial practice during World War Two of having used so-called “comfort women”. At issue was the Japanese military’s practice of forcing thousands of women from the occupied territories (Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, etc.) into sexual slavery during the war. Coomaraswamy’s report called upon Japan to apologize and to pay compensation to the surviving women or their families.Three years earlier, the Japanese government had already issued the Kōno Statement (Yōhei Kōno was the chief cabinet secretary at that time, hence the title of the statement). This statement was broadly interpreted at the time – especially in South Korea – as Japan’s formal apology for the sex slavery network that its military had maintained during the war.

Both the 1993 Kōno Statement and 1996 UN report have since been a source of perpetual anger for some members of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party and for Japanese conservatives more generally. To them, the Kōno Statement and the UN report constitute an unacceptable blemish on Japan’s reputation. In other words, they reject what has become the international consensus on that issue for (what are mainly) reasons of national pride. And in recent years, the governments headed by Shinzō Abe have tried undermine both the Kōno Statement and the UN report.

In order to undermine the claims that were already made, and which were more or less admitted to in the Kōno Statement, the Abe government has seized on the admission by the Asahi Shimbun (which is the main left-of-center newspaper of Japan) that some of the reporting it did on the issue 20 years ago was flawed. Its articles back then contained testimony from a man called Seiji Yoshida who had made claims that he had kidnapped South Korean women and forced them into the sex slavery system, but whose pronouncements had long been questioned by the academic community.

The admission by the Asahi that one of its sources had been untrustworthy did not impact the UN report in any signficant way, as it had relied mainly on the testimony from the surviving women who broke their silence in the 90’s. Nevertheless, it created a rhetorical opening for powerful conservative figures to start a campaign against the legitimacy of the UN report, with the Japanese government officially asking Coomaraswamy for a partial retraction of her report – which she refused to do.

Prior to asking for the report to be partially retracted, in June of 2014 the Abe government had already issued a review of the Kono Statement, which questioned the involvement of Korean diplomats in the draft process of the statement, while pointing out that it had relied on the unverified testimonies of 16 Korean former comfort women and that there had been no documents available at the time to verify those claims.

What is really behind the conservative drive for revision of the “comfort women” issue? It actually ties in the political Right’s long history of appropriating some of the Japanese pacifist movement’s most succesful and popular narratives that revolve around Japanese victimhood. The scholar James Joseph Orr argues persuasively in his book ‘The Victim As Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan‘:

“Like any other ideological structure, the image of the Japanese people as war victims served multiple agendas, and this utility helps to explain its longevity in Japanese public discourse on war. … Conservative politicians appropriated the rhetoric of Japanese war victimhood in recognition of electoral pacifist sentiment, with the added benefit that in doing so they could position themselves apart from the militarist period and perhaps evade discussion of Japanese war responsibility.” (p.7)

In this particular case, the twist given to this sense of victimhood by Abe and his side is that the Japanese people are the victims of an international campaign to impugn Japan’s honour. This seems to me to be the most convincing reading of what motivates conservative Japanese opinion on this issue.