After reading the monthly magazine Seiron, the author argues that relying solely on mainstream media does not reveal the truth.
Quoting an essay by Tetsuhide Yamaoka, the article discusses South Korea’s propaganda strategies surrounding the comfort women statue movement.
Using an example of a foreign journalist’s perception, it examines how propaganda shapes global opinion.
The author also criticizes Japanese intellectual discourse, the “learn from Germany” narrative, and Western media coverage of Japan.

2019-02-03
February 3, 2019
It goes without saying that he would never say that Japan is actually a wonderful country.
Those who read the monthly magazine Seiron released yesterday must all have felt the same thing.
That simply subscribing to newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and watching NHK does not allow one to understand the truth of matters at all.
The following concerns Mr. Tetsuhide Yamaoka, whom I did not know at all until August five years ago.
While living in Australia he encountered the comfort woman statue installation movement, an anti-Japan propaganda campaign that South Korea has spread around the world by taking advantage of the Asahi Shimbun’s fabricated reporting.
For the honor and credibility of Japan and the Japanese people, he boldly confronted this movement and prevented the installation of a comfort woman statue in Australia.
In other words, the following is an excerpt from an essay written by Mr. Tetsuhide Yamaoka titled “We Cannot Win the Information War with South Korea Like This.”
The reason I excerpted this passage is that it served as a concrete example proving the correctness of my statement that the world is in fact ignorant and foolish.
Preface omitted.
South Korea’s propaganda techniques.
Here I would like to introduce one episode.
Last year I was asked to attend an interview in which a German female journalist, the Seoul bureau chief of The Economist, interviewed Ms. Yoshiko Sakurai.
The interview concerned the comfort women issue, but she clearly did not possess much knowledge.
When we explained the facts, how did she respond.
“So are you saying that their claims have no basis even though so many people gather every week in Seoul to demonstrate and even stay overnight next to the comfort woman statue?”.
Her face clearly showed the thought, “That cannot possibly be true.”
This is exactly the point.
The more sensible a person is, the more easily they are deceived.
This is the propaganda technique that South Korea has mastered through its long history filled with humiliation.
What is necessary to counter this is the immediacy that I have been emphasizing.
To be continued.
Among those so-called scholars who kept saying the ridiculous phrase “Learn from Germany,” the foremost would likely be Kang Sang-jung.
As I have already written, when I first saw him on the program “Asa Made Nama Television,” I instantly sensed something suspicious about him.
If Japan had organizations like the CIA or the FBI and I were their director, I would have immediately ordered an investigation of this man.
One day in July 2010, after writing these thoughts, I searched his name.
I quickly realized that my intuition had been correct.
When he was an unremarkable student at Waseda University, the Korean intelligence agency KCIA had already approached him.
His study destination was Germany.
Because roughly half of Germans are uninformed, he must have greatly contributed to the formation of anti-Japan sentiment there.
It goes without saying that he would never claim that Japan is in fact a wonderful country.
It is astonishing that the University of Tokyo welcomed such a man as a professor.
More on these matters later.