The year 2014 marked a significant turning point in the "comfort women" issue, with the verification of the Kono Statement by the government and the resignation of the president of the Asahi Shimbun.

Social sanctions should fall in other countries, but not in Japan. Instead,
2020/8/17
The following is an article I found in the course of my search.
It is from https://ironna.jp/article/825.
It is the truth that not only the people of Japan but also people around the world, especially those involved in the UN, need to know.
It is a truth that Hillary Clinton especially needs to know.
Ikuhiko Hata and Tsutomu Nishioka, 'Asahi's misreporting is defamation of Japan.'
The Sankei Shimbun, January 3, 2015
The year 2014 marked a significant turning point in the "comfort women" issue, with the verification of the Kono Statement by the government and the resignation of the president of the Asahi Shimbun.
Is there any progress in the peninsula situation or the abduction of Japanese people by North Korea this year?
Ikuhiko Hata (82), a contemporary historian and winner of the 30th Sound Argument Grand Prize, and Nishioka Tsutomu (58), a professor at Tokyo Christian University, discuss the situation peninsula and the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korea.
The two men, who continue to appeal for the truth of history, shared their views.
(Moderator: Mr. Masatoshi Ohno, Deputy Director of the Sound Argument Research Office)
-- On December 10 last year, Takashi Uemura, a former reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, published a memoir in the "Bungei Shunju" on the "comfort women" issue, which included a rebuttal to Dr. Nishioka. Some media outlets also interviewed him. Will the comfort women issue take a new turn?

Nishioka: In the latest February issue of the monthly Sound Argument magazine, I gave a full-throated rebuttal to Mr. Uemura. He claims that he didn't fabricate any fictionalized accounts in his memoirs. Still, he arbitrarily added a fictitious history in which the former comfort women themselves were brought in as The Women's Volunteer Corps, which she never mentioned.
And I also criticized him for failing to write a real history of 'As a result of poverty, she was sold to cathouse to become a Kisaeng and taken to a comfort station by cathouse's foster father,' which she repeatedly told to the world so that it was a fabrication.

Hata: On December 22, the report of an independent committee commissioned by Asahi was released. I paid attention to it because of the uproar over Uemura's hiring as a lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University. Still, I was disappointed when it ended up being a shallow plunge, saying it was "easy and careless" but "not unnatural."
It is a tape recording the testimony of a former comfort woman who was the source of the "scoop." Still, I heard that the Seoul bureau chief at the time knew the existence and told Uemura. Hence, he traveled to Seoul and listened to the tape and wrote an article, but why did the bureau chief go out of his way to invite Mr. Uemura from the Osaka Social Affairs Division?
It is incomprehensible.

Nishioka: At the time, the Asahi Shimbun had a view of things differently at its headquarters in Tokyo and Osaka, and the Osaka edition had a special feature titled "Women's Pacific War," in which it presented a strong conviction that 'the Japanese were evil before the war.'
Many articles did not appear in the Tokyo edition.
The Seoul bureau chief, who would be under the jurisdiction of the Tokyo Foreign News Department, may have tried to have the articles written in Osaka.

Hata: Nevertheless, the doubtfulness of writing an article based on a tape that was unclear as to who blew it in is still there.
The representative of Korean The Women's Volunteer Corps let him listen to the tape, but he returned home without meeting the former comfort women themselves. If he stayed there for three more days, he could attend a press conference with Kim Hak-sun, who came forward.
I think that would have made it a complete scoop.
Some Asahi alumni doubt whether or not the tape recording ever existed. The report of the independent committee was generally harsh in its tone of voice. Still, I was more than a little disappointed that it seemed to follow the Asahi's August report on the facts and did not uncover any new facts or provide any new insight into the nature of the comfort women issue. The Yoshida testimony (see note 1) has been thoroughly discussed, and I don't think it will become a new point of contention in the future.

Nishioka: Why did the Asahi Shimbun publish a verification article last August? The blatant anti-Japanese diplomacy of the Park Geun-hye administration and the campaign for comfort women by Koreans living abroad in the United States and elsewhere had previously led to the Uemura article and Yoshida Seiji's first testimony, which were transmitted as 'sex slaves, 200,000.' The Japanese public began to wonder if it was strange, and upon investigation, realized that the Asahi had misreported the story.
I think this is the result of the growing debate that the misinformation of more than 20 years ago is responsible for the gradual damage to Japan's reputation around the world.

Hata: I agree with you. The Asahi's influence on public opinion is rapidly beginning to cool down, and there is a growing tendency to criticize it more strongly for its stance on the comfort women issue. Even in other areas, the Asahi's divergence from public opinion has been noticeable. I think the company realized that it needed to change its direction somehow.

Nishioka: The way the verification is done is also in the form of a 'To the Reader', which is a way of answering the reader's questions.
Twenty-three years ago, Dr. Hata went to Jeju Island and first raised the issue that Yoshida's claims were fabricated, but this is not an attitude of answering Dr. Hata.
It's a way of saying, 'We will answer what we are falsely charged,' although the criticism is growing, right?　
As an organization of speech, they should respond to criticism by saying, 'We'll answer that Nishioka paper.
The Uemura memoir does not answer the Nishioka paper either.
　-Last year, the government verified the Kono Statement (see note 2). Will revealing the truth about history open up the future of Japan-Korea relations?
Nishioka: I think the most significant influence on Japan-Korea relations was Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi's apology to President Roh Tae-woo during his visit to South Korea in January 1992. Since 1951, when negotiations for the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea began, the comfort women issue had never been addressed as a diplomatic issue. If there was a real problem, it should have been treated when the Japan-Korea Basic Treaty was signed in 1965, but it wasn't here either. Later, in the 1980s, Yoshida wrote a book and went to Korea to apologize. In 1991, former comfort women filed a lawsuit with a lawyer specializing in post-war compensation in Japan, and Asahi continued to report the story in real-time. Until then, the Korean media had not treated the comfort women issue very well, but after Asahi's big campaign in 1991, it began to receive a lot of attention.

Hata: On January 11, 1992, Asahi used this as a backdrop to write a Great Campaign Article, "Evidence of Military Involvement Discovered," "Forced Removal and Comfort Women Under the Name of The Women's Volunteer Corps," and "The Majority of the Comfort Women are Korean Women," in a trick-like manner, and the following day's editorial argued that they should apologize and compensate for their actions.
I call this the "Big Bang," but the comfort women issue unfolded according to the Asahi Shimbun plot.

NISHIOKA: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave a further boost to the issue by focusing on an apology first. The comfort women's issue became a diplomatic issue along with the Asahi reports. In the current review of the Kono Statement, the ministry says it considered apologizing as early as December 1991. The facts about the forced rendition of women, as Mr. Yoshida has testified, are not known, and an apology should not be made before the actual situation is investigated. Why apologize diplomatically here? An excuse should be made after examining the case.

Hata: I think more than half of the blame for the comfort women issue became such a big problem lies with Japan. Korea has been passive. Starting with Mr. Yoshida, some lawyers went to various parts of Asia to find former comfort women and brought them to the court for compensation. Some lawyers called for the UN Human Rights Commission (now the UN Human Rights Council) to change the term "comfort women" to "sex slaves" and made it happen.
I can't help but wonder why there are Japanese people who are so passionate about trying to kill their own country. Social sanctions should fall in other countries, but not in Japan. Instead, the media would lift them.
　
Nishioka: It looks like things started with the Asahi's verification of the comfort women issue last August, but that's actually not the case. The Sankei Shimbun exposed the fact that an interview with 16 former comfort women, which was believed to be the basis for the Kono state, was a bullshit investigation without any supporting research, after obtaining records from the time.
Furthermore, the Sankei Shimbun has obtained and published in full a phantom refutation of the Coomaraswamy Report (see note 3), which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs once submitted to the UN and then abruptly withdrew.
The Sankei Shimbun and the monthly Sound Argument are the big scoops.
The release of government documents that were considered top-secret and the release of new facts raised the discussion level. I think this was the background of the rapid development of the comfort women report. If you want to say something in the newsroom, it is necessary to find new facts or propose a new way of looking at things. I hope that this kind of constructive discussion will continue in the New Year.