Thanks for your post. One thing I'd like to point out.

Existence of comfort women was never a secret. As an example, this is a non-comprehensive list of postwar movies that depicted comfort women. Note that the first one (『肉体の門』) is about the postwar comfort women that took American customers, but the rest are about comfort women during and before WW2.

The argument that the existence of comfort women wasn't known is ridiculous as far as Japanese are concerned. The "Uemura broke the silence" narrative reminds me of how Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking was promoted in the US. It's not just misleading, it's just plainly wrong.

For Uemura's case, he has been arguing, in order to defend himself, that he was neither the first nor the only one who wrote about the issue. In misleading and/or misleading ways, which is one of the issues of his lawsuits.

It's interesting that so many people who discuss this issue are totally ignorant of how the issue had been handled before the late 1980s. This particular thread provided me with an insight into how it could happen. I'm actually grateful for that.