Japan Institute for National Fundamentals

　　　　　On October 19, the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals held a symposium titled "How to Fight International Information Wars" at an annual meeting for its members in Tokyo. Panelists reported that Japan has continuously lost international information wars since before the World War II and expressed a sense of crisis that Japan could lose its disputes with China and South Korea over perceptions of history unless its government and private sectors are united to enhance information dissemination.

Continuous losses
　　　　　JINF Vice President Tadae Takubo at the symposium introduced a book titled "Information and Conspiracy" published by Kokushokankokai Inc. and authored by Kunio Kasugai who worked for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office for 22 years. The book includes a little known story in which World War II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a big spy close to him to the United States and won its participation in the war by proposing to then U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the two countries jointly develop atomic bombs and share German codes to be broken by Britain soon.
　　　　　Reviewing his experience as parliamentary vice minister for foreign affairs to deal with Japan's attempt in 2005 to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, former Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told the symposium that Japan then failed to secure majority support as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs mistook the trends of African countries and lost an information war.
　　　　　"Japan has continued to lose information wars with North Korea," said Tokyo Christian University Professor Tsutomu Nishioka, who serves JINF as a Planning Committee member. He introduced an episode that the Japanese government's secret information on North Korea's nuclear development easily leaked to Pyongyang through a bigwig of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Remove wrong suspicions
　　　　　Next year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. On this occasion, China and South Korea are well expected to involve the U.S. and the international community in intensifying a history-related propaganda and information war to criticize Japan over the prime minister's visit to Yasukuni Shrine and the comfort women issue. Mr. Takubo won assent from the audience when he said Japan should change its exclusively defensive national character by amending its constitution in order to win any international information war.
　　　　　Many foreign experts on Japan including those in the U.S. advise Japan to refrain from rebutting allegations that Japanese officials coercively made women sex slaves, noting that such rebuttal would fail to get support from the international community sympathetic to former comfort women. At the symposium, however, panelists agreed that Japanese politicians, diplomats and private think tanks should be united to enhance external communications to remove wrong suspicions about Japan's past acts.
　　　　　It is needless to say that external communications are important for Japan to get support over the Senkaku Islands disputes with China as well. Mr. Onodera said he had persuaded as the defense minister visiting U.S. lawmakers to recognize the significance of the U.S. commitment to the Senkaku Islands issue by telling them that half the islands are leased to U.S. forces as shooting ranges and that if the Senkakus were Chinese territory, U.S. forces would have to implement shooting attacks on China.

Yasushi Tomiyama is Senior Fellow and Planning Committee Member at the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals.