This text argues that the Kono Statement enabled the comfort women narrative to spread into U.S. politics and media, and warns that diplomatic defeat can be as damaging as military defeat. It critiques Japan’s major newspapers for framing diplomacy as “friendship” while ignoring losses, and examines Japan’s negotiation weakness through references to Kimindo Kusaka and Churchill.

The words “Question the newspapers” may be something we should engrave in our hearts.
2016-10-31
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The comfort women issue spread further, and through Chinese and South Korean operations, resolutions were even introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives—an institution largely unrelated to the matter—demanding that Japan apologize and pay compensation.
At the same time, some American newspapers ran front-page stories describing Japan’s comfort women as “sex slaves” or “sexual slavery.”
Even in the allied United States, these claims are grounded in the “fact” that “the Japanese government admitted it itself,” namely the Kono Statement.
Unless the Kono Statement is withdrawn, or at the very least its illegitimacy is denied logically and with evidence assembled, this will continue in the future just as it does now.
However, once a statement has been issued, governments often continue to uphold it even after it has become outdated.
As the single case of the Kono Statement demonstrates, defeat in diplomacy can be comparable to defeat in war.
Because diplomacy is conducted with each nation wagering its “future,” it is a “war without bloodshed” in which neither side can afford emotionalism or indulgence, and in which cold bargaining is unavoidable.
Yet when Japan’s major media write about diplomacy, it often becomes a so-called “friendship with neighboring countries” article filled with hypocrisy and contrivance that ignores “losses equivalent to defeat in war that would be suffered if diplomacy is lost.”
At such times, in left-leaning media such as the Asahi Shimbun, the Hokkaido Shimbun, and the Tokyo Shimbun, one can almost always find articles with faulty premises, flavored with words like “friendship,” “amity,” and “international exchange,” insisting that “Japan should concede,” “reflect on past wars,” and “sincerely accept Asia’s feelings.”
It may not be the old Sankei Shimbun commercial slogan, but the words “Question the newspapers” may be something we should engrave in our hearts.
Now then, “discussion,” which is included within diplomacy, is also something Japan is not good at.
Not only do Japanese people have an allergic reaction to topics such as the military, they are also poor at negotiation.
In essence, negotiation is the most basic of basics: if a country’s demand is 10, it should boldly present 10 to 15 at the outset, as other countries do, and begin negotiations from there.
This is similar to how, when shopping in Asian countries or in places like Osaka, a merchant may quote a higher initial price in order to negotiate.
Yet at this initial stage, many Japanese people, out of “restraint” or “timidity,” begin negotiating not from 10 but from around 5.
Naturally, when negotiations start from 5, the settlement point that can be obtained will be, at best, 2 or 3.
Even at the level of intuition, Japanese people tend to think things like “we must not be too greedy,” or “it is the mature attitude to negotiate amicably at five to five,” and they also tend to entertain naïve thoughts such as “if we concede first, the other side might concede a little as well.”
This “Japanese-style negotiating method,” which works only among Japanese, is not a world standard.
Kimindo Kusaka, chairman of the International Research and Scholarship Foundation, touches on Japan’s diplomatic abnormality in his book The Next Ten Years.
In summary, he says that when unreasonable demands are made in diplomacy, Japan tends to endure and concede, thinking it can “reach agreement by adjusting to the other side,” but doing so only escalates the other side’s demands and produces no good result, and therefore from the beginning one should not “endure” but “negotiate.”
In that book, Churchill’s The Second World War is cited.
It says that Churchill wrote, “The Japanese seem not to know what diplomacy and negotiation are.”
Even Churchill, following diplomatic convention, began negotiations with Japan by first making outrageous and unreasonable demands, but Japan, without even objecting, immediately accepted those initial outrageous demands with a smile.
As diplomacy, it was anticlimactic.
Put differently, it must have been a pleasant miscalculation for Britain.
But as a person responsible for Britain’s diplomacy, he naturally had a duty to maximize his country’s benefit.
Churchill judged that Britain could still press Japan further, and escalated his demands.
Yet again, Japan accepted the other side’s demands with a smile.
As long as Japan kept accepting, Britain would repeat unreasonable demands.
As Britain’s representative, the plan was to test Japan’s limits in that way, then begin negotiation in earnest, and ultimately seek a mutually acceptable landing point that would bring the greatest benefit back to the British people.
But when Britain’s demands were repeated, at some point the expression on the Japanese face suddenly changed.
“We thought Britain was a gentlemanly country, but it is a wicked and inhumane country.
We can endure no more.
We will die by stabbing each other.”
Because Japanese people had previously been smiling while accepting the demands, for the British, the moment the Japanese bared their fangs was “sudden.”
That must have been surprising.
Then, in December 1941, the year Churchill wrote these memoirs, Britain saw two ships—its principal battleship, said at the time to be the “strongest in the world,” the Prince of Wales, and the veteran battlecruiser Repulse—sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s air arm.
These two were battleships Britain boasted to the world, and in the common sense of the time, it was considered “impossible to sink a battleship on operations by aircraft.”
They were also battleships Churchill favored.
He never imagined—not in the slightest—that “against aircraft,” and that “these two strongest ships,” would be sunk.
In the same book, he describes his feelings at that time as, “Throughout the whole period of the war, I never received a shock like it.”
In principle, a country “with the power to sink the two strongest battleships” has no need to bow indiscriminately or force a flattering smile, nor any need to continue accepting demands one-sidedly.
To be continued.
The above is taken from http://ccce.web.fc2.com/a.html.