Japan Institute for National Fundamentals

　　　　　During late January, I went on a lecture tour of the United States giving talks on “China’s Maritime Expansion.” While in America, I became keenly aware of the fact that the Japanese government has fallen behind in communicating information internationally, and that Japanese people living abroad are dissatisfied with this shortcoming.

Immediate rebuttals to slander
　　　　　At the University of Pennsylvania, I spoke for around twenty minutes to an audience of approximately thirty people, and then fielded their questions after my presentation. Among the attendees was a Japanese engineer living in Philadelphia who asked about the information warfare carried out by China. His point was that the Japanese government should emulate the Israeli government in the way it wages information warfare.
　　　　　The engineer said, “Israeli embassies and consulates immediately respond to anti-Israel slander with rebuttals of their own, no matter how small the media outlet is in which the slander appears. Japan does not do nearly enough of this when it comes to disseminating information. As long as the Japanese embassies and consulates fail to be both timely and proactive in disseminating information, lies such as that the comfort women were sex slaves will continue to find traction in American society. There are a few dozen people here at this talk, but the major American media outlets have readerships in the hundreds of thousands.”
　　　　　At the University of California, Berkeley, I was asked a question about the comfort women, so I used PowerPoint to explain the sole Allied report on Korean comfort women, who had been captured and interrogated in Burma (present-day Myanmar) in August of 1944. This report shows that the Korean comfort women captured in Burma: 1) earned a salary approximately fifty times that of an average private in the Japanese military; 2) lived a luxurious lifestyle, which included periodic visits back to the Korean Peninsula; 3) were able to marry soldiers whom they liked; and, 4) were able to refuse service to soldiers who were drunk. When I explained that the propaganda that the comfort women were sex slaves is completely different from the actual historical facts, those in the audience—including not only Americans but also PhD candidates from South Korea—seemed never to have heard this before.

Doubts about the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Overseas Dissemination of Information
　　　　　No matter how many presentations one gives refuting the theory that there were “200,000 sex slaves” working for the Japanese military, all such efforts are nearly without effect as long as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website contains no fact-based rebuttals to such propaganda, and instead conveys the assertion that “Japan has already apologized.” This assertion is premised on such things as the statement issued in 1993 by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, which accepted that the comfort women had been forcibly conscripted.
　　　　　At the very least, shouldn’t the Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately have posted to its website the answer Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave in response to Rep. Kyoko Nakayama’s (The Party for Japanese Kokoro) question during the recent session of the House of Councilors Budgetary Committee?
　　　　　Prime Minister Abe’s response was, “There was found no direct reference to so-called forced recruitment by the military or by the authorities in any of the documents discovered by the government. What is meant by ‘under military involvement’ [as the phrase appeared in the December, 2015 South Korea-Japan accord on the comfort women issue] is that comfort stations were constructed at the request of the military authorities at that time [and not that the military was involved in coerced recruitment or in the sexual enslavement of any women]; that the former Japanese military was directly and/or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of comfort stations and in the transportation of comfort women; and that the principal actors in the recruitment of comfort women were private businessmen who had received requests from the military.”
　　　　　Approximately fifty billion yen (about four hundred forty million dollars) was appropriated for international public relations in the budget for fiscal year 2015. I hope that these funds will be put to more effective use going forward.

Fumio Ota is a JINF Planning Committee Member