Japanese-Korean professor Yuji Hosaka wins partial victory in appeal seeking ”comfort women”-related damages

The second hearing of a lawsuit for damages filed by Sejong University professor Yuji Hosaka, a Korean of Japanese descent, against representatives of civic groups for defamation and insult over the "comfort women" issue.
However, he won a partial victory. According to the Korean legal community on the 18th, the Seoul Central District Court decided to dismiss the defendants in the damages lawsuit filed by Professor Hosaka against Kim Byung-hun, representative of the National Action for the Abolition of the Comfort Women Law, and two others.
The court ordered the plaintiffs to pay 4 million won (approximately 420,000 yen) in compensation. The court said, "The plaintiffs' personal rights as scholars were violated by the false statements and insulting remarks, and they caused them mental distress.
Prior to this, Kim and others had criticized Professor Hosaka's book "The New Pro-Japanese" at rallies and on social media from November 2020 to August 2021.
Kim and others argued that Professor Hosaka had driven a wedge between Japan and South Korea by claiming without evidence that comfort women were forcibly mobilized, and that he had written that the Japanese military excluded Japanese women from the list of comfort women.
Last year, the first trial court ruled that Professor Hosaka had not made any unfounded claims about forced labor and that the defendants had made insulting remarks by citing some false facts, based on the fact that he had mentioned the existence of Japanese comfort women in his book.
However, the appeal court decided that some of the remarks that the first instance court found to be insulting were merely violent and rude, and could not be considered legally insulting.
Professor Hosaka's total bill was 85 million won (approximately 9.08 million yen).