Uemura Takashi, a former reporter of the Asahi Shimbun, is currently an adjunct lecturer at Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo. In 1991, while a reporter for the Asahi, he wrote two articles on Kim Hak-sun, the first “comfort woman” to come forward to tell her story (1991). Because of these two articles, Uemura has been the target of denunciations by nationalists. He has been labeled “the reporter who fabricated the ‘comfort woman’ issue” and denounced by nationalists as a “traitor.” Such bashing took a critical turn for the worse in 2014, to the extent that he and his family risk losing their right to a livelihood.

If 2014 was a year of consolidation on the two opposing sides of the long-running Okinawan saga over US military base hosting plans, 2015 promises to be one of intense, perhaps decisive struggle. By 2014, civic groups had established a strong institutional power base in the city administration in Nago and the prefectural one in Naha, while resistance continues also at Takae in the Yambaru forest (against the construction of “Osprey pads” for the Marine Corps), and on Yonaguni Island, where the town assembly has called a plebiscite on the issue of the construction of a Self-Defense Force base, to be held on 22 February 2015. But the Japanese state had shown itself to be implacable in its determination to push ahead with its long delayed project for the construction of a major military complex for the US Marine Corps at Henoko, in Northern Okinawa. Since the national government is unbending in its determination to overrule Okinawan dissent and the “Okinawan problem” was scarcely mentioned during the national elections of December 2014, Prime Minster Abe Shinzo has a more-or-less free hand to deploy whatever resources of the state he wishes in order to crush opposition and implement his design on all fronts.

On September 9, 2014, the Imperial Household Agency released to the public its carefully vetted Authentic Account of the Showa Emperor's Life and Reign (Showa Tenno Jitsuroku). This was the long-awaited official version of nearly every aspect of Emperor Hirohito's long life and reign. Compilers, researchers, and outside scholars of the Agency's Archives and Mausoleum Department—including a few specialists in modern Japanese history–started on the project in 1990. It took nearly a quarter century to finish. Through negotiations they secured the cooperation of imperial family members, chamberlains, and others who had worked closely with the emperor and were prone to self-censorship in revealing what they knew about him. They collected a huge trove of 3,152 primary materials, including some unpublished, even unknown diaries of military and civil officials, all of which were arranged chronologically in 61 volumes.

Thank you all for coming to this press conference today in spite of your busy schedules. Today, I have decided to bring a libel suit in order to defend my human rights, the rights of my family and friends, and to protect the safety of my employer, Hokusei Gakuen University. The defendants are two, the Bungei Shunju Company, which publishes the Shukan Bunshun, and Mr. Tsutomu Nishioka, professor at the Tokyo Christian University, who has, without justification, labeled my articles “fabrications.”