In the current issue of Seiron, Tetsuhide Yamaoka presents a rare and substantial essay based on concrete action and historical responsibility.
By contrasting Yamaoka’s successful efforts to block a comfort women statue in Australia with the conduct of Japanese media and opposition groups, this piece examines how Japan has been politically constrained in the international arena even seventy years after the war.

March 6, 2017

He and I are doing the work of billions of people in order to set Japan right and to set the world right.

In the current issue of the monthly magazine Seiron, Mr. Tetsuhide Yamaoka has published what is truly a rare and genuine scholarly work in recent years, presented across eight pages in a three-column layout—an authentic intellectual labor.

Mr. Tetsuhide Yamaoka was born in Tokyo in 1965.
In 2014, upon learning of a movement to install a so-called “comfort women” statue in Strathfield, Australia, he founded the Australia–Japan Community Network (AJCN).
Despite overwhelming odds, he succeeded in preventing the installation of the statue in the city in 2015.

He and I are doing the work of billions of people in order to set Japan right and to set the world right.

Meanwhile, media organizations such as Asahi Shimbun, the so-called cultural figures who echo their stance, so-called human-rights lawyers, opposition parties such as the Democratic Party and the Communist Party, and those who support them,

have each devoted the equivalent labor of billions to degrading Japan, diminishing Japan, despising Japan, eroding the credibility of Japan and the Japanese people, and continuing—now seventy years after the war—to keep Japan in the position of a political prisoner within the international community.