Yoshiaki Yoshimi

On 17 April 2007, Yoshimi and fellow historian Hirofumi Hayashi told a news conference that they had discovered documents at the archives of the Tokyo Tribunal that demonstrate that Tokkeitai members coerced or otherwise forced women from Indonesia, Indochina, and China into sexual slavery.

In July 2004, Yoshimi and historian Yuki Tanaka proclaimed the discovery of documents at National Archives of Australia that demonstrated that cyanide gas was tested on Australian and Dutch prisoners in November 1944 on the Kai Islands.

The publication of these documents led to admission statements by the Chiefs of the Cabinet: Secretary Koichi Kato on 12 January 1993 and Yōhei Kōno on 4 August 1993. The Kono statement has been especially important in the comfort women issue. He accused former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's of denying facts when the former leader denied the military's involvement of comfort women.

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.

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: