It would be helpful if Yuki Tanaka would point to exactly which documents he (most people think Tanaka is female - he is not) thinks are being withheld. Otherwise the same kind of scholarship can be used to level an accusation at any country for any alleged crime, that the documents proving it are being hidden from view. What I want to know is how he can know of the existence of documents he has not seen before, and cannot cite by name.

As for all documents relating to the war, everything was taken to the US and meticulously copied there. Even if the Japanese government wanted to cover something up, they could not because the US is in possession of the same documents. A researcher could gain access to those files.

As for Kono’s statement. the background was a bit complicated.
seisaku-center.net/modules/wordpress/index.php?p=38
(http://www.)
It was diplomatic concession. But when taking Indonesian cases, it is true that there were cases that Japanese military was involved in recruiting forcibly. Some Japanese are against it because it was misleading;Kono’s statement didn’t make it cleat that such cases were exception, and they were done against the policy.
Of course, there are many cases, as Japanese comfort woman’s confession on your another post shows, where women suffered a lot under the horrible brothel situation and horrible social conditions. The Japanese rightists and the leftists all agree that was tragedy and in that sense, Japanese government was responsible. That is the major ground for the apologies Japanese government has made.
However, such tragedy was common in Asia. It happen under Japanese rule, it happened under the US occupation, and it had been happening under Korea until recently.
Only Japanese government acknowledged that it was wrong, and only Japanese government apologized. It is ironical that it is the U.S. representative and many of ethnic Koreans who blame Japanese government. That has been my point in the discussion on this issue.

I reviewed the site you suggest.

Your first link lead to the Asian Women’s Fund site. The page it opened was a page containing information about the historical research done by the government of Japan in regards the comfort women issue. (The government conducted two full scale studies in 1992 and 1993.)

That site is very useful because they actually have PDF files containing most of the source documents that were used for drawing the conclusions that ultimately lead to the Kono Statement. For anyone else reading this here is the link.

Of course, a lot of the documents are hand written and in a slightly older form of Japanese, so for me they’re not something I can easily read through.

However, I think Yuki Tanaka must be referring to other documents that were not used in this study.

I think I see your point though. If the government conducted a full scale inquiry into this issue, not once — but twice, then wouldn’t they have made use of any relevant documents?

This is a good point and one I’ll have to think about when I look further into this topic.

Whatever the case may be though, there are people right now who are concerned with Japan’s war time responsibility, and a sore spot with them is that they can’t access certain records that they think would be revealing.

I’ve already provide two examples above, Tanaka in his book, and Yutaka Yoshida.

As time permits, I’ll try to look into this a little deeper to see what these writers thought of the government studies …

By the way I also read your comments at Occidentalism, and will refer back to them as necessary. Thanks.

Also thanks for pointing out that Tanaka’s book has only been published in English.

As for (3), I posted the comment on another blog.
occidentalism.org/?p=702#comment-25404
(http://www.)