Yoshiaki Yoshimi
Japanese historian
Yoshiaki Yoshimi (吉見 義明, Yoshimi Yoshiaki; born 1946) is a professor of Japanese modern history at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan. He is a founding member of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility.
He was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and studied at the University of Tokyo.
Notable research
Yoshimi has done major research on war crimes perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the first part of the Shōwa period. He has published his studies on the use of chemical weapons by Japan, ordered by Michinomiya Hirohito himself.
Yoshimi is mostly noted for his work on sex slaves. He found the first documented evidence at the "Defense Agency Library" of Tokyo that the Imperial Japanese Army established and ran "comfort stations." He discovered plenty of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of approximately 2,000 comfort women centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and Japanese women, many of whom were teenagers and some as young as fourteen, were detained and forced to perform sexual activities with Japanese troops.
One piece was a notice written on 4 March 1938 by the adjutants to the Chiefs of Staff of the North China Army and Central China Expeditionary Army titled "Concerning the Recruitment of Women for Military Comfort Stations." According to that document:
"Many agents should have required special attention. Some of them accentuated the name of the armies as much as they might hurt the credibility of the armies and cause misunderstanding among the public, others recruited women without control through war correspondents or entertainers, and others selected the wrong agents who took a kidnapping approach to recruit women so that the police arrested them.
In the future, the armies in the field should control recruiting and select the agencies circumspectly and properly, and should build up a closer connection with the local police and the local military police in the implementation of recruiting.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q701935. VIAF identifies the subject as 108175569. The Library of Congress control number is n81079700. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1938.
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