2017-07-23
This chapter contrasts America’s lobbying-driven politics with the principle that facts, scholarship, knowledge, and art must remain independent of lobbying. It cites a Sankei Shimbun feature on State Department remarks related to the comfort women issue, warning that U.S. understanding has deteriorated and urging continued explanation of the Japan–ROK agreement’s significance.

2017-07-23
It may be no exaggeration to say that American politics is sustained by lobbying.
Or perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that American democracy itself is lobbying.
However, facts are something unrelated to lobbying.
Scholarship and art are also unrelated to lobbying.
By “unrelated,” I mean that facts, scholarship, knowledge, and art are entirely unrelated to such a thing as lobbying.
In other words, when one sustains politics through lobbying, one must always admonish oneself about that fact.
The United States, which has come to equate lobbying with democracy, had Soviet spies infiltrated into the Democratic FDR administration before World War II.
And even though Fumimaro Konoe repeatedly proposed U.S.–Japan summit talks, staking his life on avoiding war between Japan and the United States, America deliberately ignored this and dragged Japan into war with the United States.
This led to the expansion and growth of communism in the postwar world and produced the present arrogance and expansion of China and North Korea.
When I read the remarks by spokespeople of the Trump administration in yesterday’s two-page Sankei Shimbun feature, I keenly felt that they are still repeating the same mistakes even now.
Therefore, in this chapter, I convey the truth to the world.
The feature Sankei Shimbun is now running is a feature of the following content.
What China and South Korea are launching against Japan is a series on a conspiratorial war in which they, sustaining their regimes through anti-Japan propaganda, use fabricated reporting—fabrications it would not be an exaggeration to say they had Asahi Shimbun report—to spread a fabricated historical narrative around the world, degrade Japan, undermine Japan’s credibility and trust in the international community, and weaken Japan’s ability to speak.
Sankei Shimbun, by this serialized feature alone, can be said—without exaggeration—to be the world’s number one newspaper company now.
All emphasis within the text, other than the headline, is mine.
[Washington = Hiroyuki Kano]
At a press conference on the 20th, State Department spokesperson Nauert was asked by Korean media, in connection with the Moon Jae-in administration’s announcement of establishing a “Day of Remembrance for Victims of the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women,’” about her understanding regarding a “system of sexual slavery,” and she replied, “We condemn it generally. It is an area of great concern for the United States.”
Korean media reported the remark as meaning that the U.S. government had condemned “Japan’s sexual enslavement.”
Nauert also said, “It is a very sensitive issue.”
Because her remark could be taken as the U.S. government acknowledging comfort women as sexual slaves, Sankei Shimbun sought confirmation, and Adams, spokesperson for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told Sankei Shimbun on the 20th—while prefacing it as a general statement—“That women were trafficked for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II is a terrible human rights violation. The U.S. government’s position has not changed.”
Backslide in understanding under the Trump administration
The portion in which Adams, spokesperson for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told Sankei Shimbun that women were “trafficked by the Japanese military” clearly lacks accuracy and signifies a backslide in the U.S. government’s understanding regarding the comfort women issue.
The previous Obama administration considered that the comfort women issue hindered Japan–South Korea relations and also affected regional security, and welcomed the agreement reached at the end of the year before last in which both governments confirmed a “final and irreversible resolution.”
However, in the United States, which adopts a political appointee system, ministry and agency leadership changes with every change of administration.
It appears that the course of events that led to the Japan–South Korea agreement, and the weight of the agreement itself, have not been carried over to the Trump administration.
On the Korean Peninsula before and during the war, there were many cases in which women, due to poverty, were sold by their parents, or were sold to comfort-station operators by pimps who made a livelihood out of human trafficking itself, and became comfort women.
A former comfort woman who died in Seoul this April at the age of 98 also spoke of how she had been deceived by the sweet words of “a Korean man about 40 years old” and made into a comfort woman.
It is obvious that this was not the former Japanese military.
On the other hand, forced abduction by the former Japanese military or authorities has not been confirmed.
In February last year, Shinsuke Sugiyama, then Administrative Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, explained at the United Nations Office at Geneva in Switzerland, “Among the materials discovered by the Japanese government, there was nothing that could confirm so-called ‘forced abduction’ by the military or authorities.”
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has also used the expression “victims of human trafficking,” but he had in mind pimps and brokers.
The South Korean government and some South Korean media may exploit the current U.S. stance to once again revive the comfort women issue.
The Japanese government should continue explaining until the Trump administration correctly understands the significance of the Japan–South Korea agreement.
(Takaro Harakawa)