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A screenshot of Himawari Japan’s webpage

The Japanese Consulate General in New York has stirred controversy by recommending a right-wing organization as a channel to receive counseling for individuals who have been bullied over historical issues, Japanese newspaper the Tokyo Shimbun reported on Oct. 8.

Since June, the consulate’s website has informed people who have been bullied about historical issues or who know of others who have that they can receive counseling by contacting the consulate or a certain organization in the private sector. The private-sector organization the consulate has put in charge of counseling is called Himawari (“Sunflower”) Japan. This is the organization that has led the opposition to the construction of comfort women statues in the US.

On its website, the group identifies itself as having been “formed in June 2016 by Japanese women living in New York and New Jersey, providing support in sharing a proper history of Japan to Japanese people living in the US so that children can live proudly as Japanese.”

Himawari Japan’s web page also includes a sourcebook on the Japanese military comfort women issue developed by Nadeshiko Action, another far-right group. In it, comfort women are described as “women who worked as prostitutes at ‘comfort stations’” and were “amply compensated.”

The first lecture meeting sponsored by the group after its formation was attended by right-wing figures such as Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Mio Sugita, who generated controversy with her remarks that LGBT people “cannot bear children” and “lack productivity.”

As the conflict over the comfort women issue heated up between South Korea and Japan, the Japanese Foreign Minister moved in 2014 to create counseling channels in the Japanese embassy in Washington and consulates in San Francisco and Los Angeles for people “harassed due to historical issues such as the comfort women issue.”

Meanwhile, a Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper report the same day citing multiple sources on South Korea-Japan relations claimed that South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Kang Kyung-hwa informed her Japanese counterpart Taro Kono in a Sept. 11 meeting in Hanoi about plans to dissolve the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation formed after the South Korea and Japanese governments’ agreement on the comfort women issue.

President Moon Jae-in alluded to the plan in Sept. 25 remarks to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in New York, saying that the foundation had “failed to function properly and withered away due to objections from the comfort women survivors and South Korean public.”

Kono requested during the meeting that President Moon visit Japan in the near future, to which Kang replied that the visit would take place after the foundation had been disbanded, the newspaper reported.

By Cho Ki-weon, Tokyo correspondent

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]