Kyodo adds that the Asahi Shimbun has been caught in a series of controversies recently, including a series of articles it published in the 1980s and 1990s in which a Japanese man named Seiji Yoshida recounted how Korean women on Jeju Island were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. The man's stories were later proven to be historically false, Kyodo adds, and the paper retracted the articles last month.