TOKYO — The head of Japan’s influential public broadcaster drew sharp criticism on Sunday for saying that the broadcaster would refrain from criticizing the right-leaning government on such delicate issues as visits to a controversial shrine honoring war dead. He also said his nation should not be singled out for forcing women into sexual servitude during World War II.
The newly appointed chairman of the public broadcaster, NHK, Katsuto Momii, made the comments during his inaugural news conference on Saturday.
Other members of the news media in Japan quickly complained that NHK, widely seen as the nation’s most influential news broadcaster, appeared to be under political pressure to adhere to the government’s nationalist line on wartime and other issues. Mr. Momii, a former corporate executive, was selected chairman last month by a 12-member board of governors, four of whom were named last year by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
While the publicly funded NHK is nominally independent from the government, members of its governing board are named by the government and approved by Parliament.
Many liberals fear that Mr. Abe will try to drive Japan to the right as he tried to do during his first term as prime minister. His government has begun to slowly make some moves in that direction, including a proposal that textbooks be rejected if they do not teach patriotism in a way officials deem proper. Mr. Abe also recently visited a Tokyo shrine that pays homage to the country’s war dead, including war criminals — angering the Chinese and South Koreans who say such visits signal a lack of repentance for Japan’s wartime atrocities.
Mr. Momii also drew criticism from the South Korean news media for his comments about the women forced to work in wartime brothels; many of the women were Korean. Many South Koreans say these so-called comfort women should be compensated as victims of imperial Japan’s brutal early 20th-century colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
Some members of the Abe government say that the women were no more than common prostitutes, a view disputed by many historians.
On Saturday, Mr. Momii said that “all nations” ran military brothels during the war, and questioned South Korean demands that Japan compensate surviving comfort women, most of them now in their 80s and 90s.
“It is puzzling for Koreans to say that Japan was the only nation that forcibly took them,” Mr. Momii said. “Give us money, compensate us, they say. But this was all resolved by the Japan-Korea peace treaty. Why are they reviving this issue? Isn’t it strange?”
Mr. Momii was referring to the 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the two nations, when the Japanese government says it resolved all issues of compensation related to the war. Many South Koreans say the comfort women were not covered by the treaty because their existence was not known until more recently.
Mr. Momii also said that it was ”only natural” for NHK to follow the Japanese government position in international broadcasts on issues such as maritime territorial disputes with China over islands in the East China Sea that both countries claim.
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