Yūto Yoshida(吉田雄兎, born 15 October 1913) is a Japanese writer and former soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army. He publishes under a variety of pen names, including Seiji Yoshida(吉田清治) and Tōji Yoshida(吉田東司). Originally from Yamaguchi Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, he was stationed in Korea, then a colony of Japan, during World War II; he claimed that he assisted police to kidnap over 2,000 women from various rural areas of the Korean peninsula to serve as comfort women. After the war, he ran as a the Japanese Communist Party candidate in the 1947 Shimonoseki city council elections, but received only 129 votes.[citation needed] In 1977 and again in 1983, he published memoirs in which he detailed his actions during the war. His books and a subsequent 1991 media interview have been credited