hankyoreh

Japanese journalist Takashi Uemura (center)

“I am not a reporter who fabricates. These attacks are not only attacks against me. It’s bashing of journalism that seeks to confront history and uncover the truth.”

Takashi Uemura, a former report with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, spoke clearly and forcefully on the afternoon of July 2 before a judge at the Sapporo High Court in the city of Sapporo on the Japanese island Hokkaido.

In 1991, Uemura became the first person to report on the victimization of Kim Hak-soon, who was forced into sexual slavery as a “comfort woman” under the Japanese imperial military. On July 2, the court was holding a second round of oral arguments in the appellate trial of a lawsuit by Uemura claiming damages from Yoshiko Sakurai, a right-wing figure who attacked his reporting as “fabrications.” In 2015, Uemura filed suit against Sakurai and two magazines that published Sakurai’s columns and articles. He demanded 5.5 million yen (US$51,093) in damages for each column and the publication of an official apology, citing defamation of his professional reputation. In November of last year, Sapporo District Court ruled against him, arguing that while Sakurai’s column had damaged Uemura’s social estimation, there were “substantial” grounds for believing that her writings themselves were truthful about the matter in question.

The full-scale attacks on Uemura began in 2014, with Sakurai and other right-wing figures at the center of them. Right-wingers have picked apart his 1991 report line by line in an effort to portray it as fabricated. An example of this is the charge that the first line of his article at the time, which refers to Kim being “taken to the battlefield as a ‘Women’s Volunteer Corps’ member,” did not distinguish between the volunteer corps and comfort women. The claims deliberately ignore the fact that the two terms were often used interchangeably at a time in the 1990s when the details of the comfort women’s victimization were not well known. In the courtroom, Uemura explained, “‘Women’s Volunteer Corps’ was a term that both the Japanese and South Korean media generally used at the time.”

Uemura vocally protested the actions of right-wingers in “attacking my articles as ‘fabrications’ without sufficient investigation or even properly reading the documentation.” In particular, he submitted new evidence with a 1992 magazine article by Sakurai referring to Kim’s story, which he said showed contradictions in her own writing on the issue.

“[Kim] was forcibly drafted by the Japanese army. As a human being, I cannot contain my compassion,” she wrote at the time.

Uemura also recently lost the first round of a suit in Tokyo District Court demanding damages from Tsutomu Nishioka, another right-wing figure. Like Sapporo District Court, Tokyo District Court acknowledged issues with Nishioka’s claims but ultimately ruled against Uemura, citing “legitimate grounds for believing [the claims] to be truthful and in the public interest.”

The attacks against Uemura have continued in Japan. A search for his name on the Japanese portal site Yahoo! Japan shows “death penalty” as a related term. But he has continued his battle outside the courtroom. Taking over this year as president of the Japanese progressive weekly Shukan Kinyobi, he is working to save progressive journalism.