I organized "the 50 Japanese academics' rebuttal of the 20 American historians' statement," which was announced last September and published in the December issue of Perspectives on History of the American Historical Association (AHA). This is the same periodical that published the 20 American historians' statement last March. Our rebuttal was reported on in the Dec. 10 edition of The Japan Times and the December issue of Inside Higher Ed, an e-magazine on education based in Washington. I would like to take this opportunity to clarify the main aim of our rebuttal.

We said the 20 American historians would never find a single Japanese academician with whom they could stand, even though the title of their statement was "Standing with historians of Japan," because there are at least eight factual mistakes in 26 lines about "comfort women" in the McGraw-Hill textbook at issue. Furthermore, we questioned their fairness since their statement had no reference to the report by the Interagency Working Group in the United States in 2007.

However, a more important reason for why we wrote the rebuttal is that we were concerned about the 20 American historians' basic stance as scholars and educators, beyond the immediate comfort women issue. We were confident that our arguments could lead to better education for American youths, and hence were inherently beneficial to the U.S. as well as to the rest of the world in the longer perspective.