Session 1. The Implications of the 30th anniversary of Kim Hak-soon’s Public Testimony
What Kim Hak-soon Wanted to Tell: The Report from the Journalist Who First Reported UEMURA Takashi I Publisher and President of Weekly Friday, Japan & Former Asahi Shimbun Reporter
In the Summer of 1990, I Could Not Hear a Single Testimony of a Former ‘Comfort Woman’ In 1990, as a reporter at the Osaka headquarters of the Asahi Shimbun, I wanted to introduce the testimony of former Japanese military comfort women in an article on the Summer Peace Project. At that time, I was the “ethnicity person” in charge of Koreans and Korean issues in Japan. I rented an apartment in Ikuno-ku, Osaka City, where a lot of Zainichi Koreans and ethnic Koreans live, and was covering the issues of human rights of Zainichi Koreans, Koreans and political prisoners. As a foreign language student for Asahi, I studied at the Yonsei University Korean Language Institute in Seoul for one year, starting from the summer of 1987. Therefore, I was able to use Korean for the coverage, and I often went on business trips to Korea. In June of 1990, Rep. Motooka Shōji (Socialist Party, JSP), at the Budget Committee of the House of Councilors, urged the Japanese government to investigate the comfort women issue. In response to this, the head of the Ministry of Labor’s Job Security Bureau at the time responded by saying that “Private contractors were carrying them along with the military,” inciting protests in Korea. I wanted to convey the voices of the victims. I consulted my friend, a Korean female journalist, asking, “Is it possible to listen to the story of a former comfort woman?” “There’s a woman I’ve interviewed before,” she responded. Thinking that I would be able to interview her, I headed to Korea. However, the woman had already passed away. There was no trace to follow. In January of that year, I also heard a story from Ewha Woman’s University professor Yun Chung-ok, who published a series called “Report following the footsteps of Chongshindae Victims” in 230
