On June 2, I held a party at the Meiji Kinenkan to celebrate the publication of Theoretical Modern History III: The Real History of Japan and Additional Edition of Theoretical Modern History, as well as the eve before my birthday. Thirty-one ambassadors and other embassy personnel from 23 countries, as well as 36 National Diet members, said they would attend, and the actual number of guests at this lively party numbered more than 1,300. At the press conference about the publication of my books held before the event, I spoke as follows.
　APA Group’s business is extremely favorable, and the APA Hotel network currently includes 425 hotels with 70,559 guest rooms, including franchise and partner hotels as well as those under design and construction. In Tokyo alone we have 72 hotels with 17,422 rooms. Property values are soaring and it would be hard to acquire this land right now, but we did so at an ideal timing and our business is prospering.
　We started our Summit 5 project, a medium-term business plan, in 2010, and we were able to pay cash for all of our properties back when the price of land slumped to one of its lowest levels after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. We started Summit 5-II in 2015 and have planned hotels not only in Tokyo but also central provincial cities like Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Fukushima. This plan, focused on hotel building in the Tokyo metropolitan area, has been a great success and most of our hotels maintain monthly occupancy rates of 100%. Hotels of 20 floors or higher are generally referred to as “tower hotels.” APA has 11 of these, five of which are open for business and six (with 12,105 guest rooms) of which are under design or construction. Our tower hotels include APA Hotel & Resort Tokyo Bay Makuhari, Japan’s tallest single hotel building; and APA Hotel & Resort Yokohama Bay Tower, which will be opened in autumn 2019 with 35 floors, two underground floors, and 2,311 guest rooms, one of the largest capacities in Japan. We are particularly focused on the Shinjuku area that is visited by many Asian tourists and is home to Kabukicho, Japan’s largest entertainment district, and JR Shinjuku Station, which has the largest number of passengers in the world. We are also focusing on the Roppongi area that draws many European and American tourists, where we will build several hotels. We will also open APA Hotel Kokkai-gijido-mae Station in mid-February 2019 in front of the Prime Minister’s Official Residence, and it will become a landmark APA Hotel.
　Regarding my efforts to express my views to the world, I started publishing Apple Town, this monthly magazine, in April 1990 and launched my Big Talk interviews one year later. I have since spoken with 312 important figures from Japan and abroad. I began writing under the penname “Seiji Fuji” in December 1992, and have since penned 298 of these essays. I founded the “True Interpretations of Modern History” Essay Contest in 2008 and the Shoheijuku school in 2011. Today monthly meetings are held in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kanazawa, and the total number of past participants exceeds 13,000 people. Lectures by myself and other persons are posted on YouTube each month for many people to view.
　Japan enjoyed rapid economic growth as it profited while other countries fought in the Cold War, but this structure collapsed with the end of the war. In the post-Cold War era, the intelligence agencies of various countries have survived by transforming themselves into institutions for industrial espionage. Many overseas Japanese businesses have failed because of this, the economy has inevitably shrunk, and Japan is now worn out. To remedy this, I felt that I must teach many people about Japan’s true modern history and restore its pride. I wrote Unreported Modern History in 2008, which opened the eyes of readers to historical truths in a rather bold way.
　One example is the discord between Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il of North Korea. Former President Jimmy Carter brokered an agreement between the United States and North Korea, which was experiencing a severe famine and needed international aid. The conditions were that North Korea freeze its nuclear development program, switch to the provided light-water reactors (for which there is a low risk of nuclear proliferation), and receive 500,000 tons of fuel oil annually. Kim Jong-il removed Kim Il-sung, who had abandoned nuclear development in this way; secretly continued nuclear development since right after the deal; and announced in 2003 (when its weapons were near completion) that North Korea would withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It is very possible that this scared Jiang Zemin of China, so he ordered Kim Jong-il to visit China and tried to persuade him to cease nuclear development. Kim Jong-il didn’t agree to this, so Jiang Zemin may have planned to kill him with a bomb on his way home from China and made preparations some time before by deeply burying explosives underneath the branch line along the main line at Ryongchon Station. In April 2004, an entire train was blown up with 800 tons of TNT.
　North Korea is an important geopolitical buffer zone to Russia, China, and the U.S. Kim Jong-il narrowly avoided death when the U.S. or Russia – which did not want him to be assassinated – leaked this information. However, nearly 200 people died and more than one thousand were injured, including elementary school students who had come to see Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-il declared in 2005 that North Korea had nuclear weapons, and it conducted its first underground nuclear test in 2006. Many people don’t understand this, but North Korea constantly has nuclear weapons as a way to protect the Kim structure against China.
　Unreported Modern History contains information of this type, but the media ignored it entirely. I started the “True Interpretations of Modern History” Essay Contest because I wanted to inspire society to take a look at true modern history. Toshio Tamogami, then-chief of staff of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force, was awarded the Grand Prize (Fuji Seiji Prize). Due to his position, he was criticized by many media outlets for his essay that differed from the Japanese government’s official view. He was demoted and forced to resign, but afterwards this “Tamogami scandal” won huge numbers of people over to his side and also made society aware of the contest. The second Grand Prize (Fuji Seiji Prize) went to Tsuneyasu Takeda, today active as a controversialist, and the essay contest has become firmly established in society. This year marks the 10th annual contest and the Grand Prize money has been increased from three to five million yen. Conservative sentiment has been growing in Japan over the past nine years. The Eternal Zero, a film depicting the feelings of the kamikaze pilots, drew rave reviews and was a huge hit. It has become trendy to visit Yasukuni Shrine, including among many young women. These things led to Shinzo Abe taking up the reins as prime minister for a second time. However, the media is still bound by the Press Code imposed by the American occupation army right after World War II. The entire text of this code has never been printed except for when I ran it as an ad in the Sankei Shimbun newspaper. Member of the House of Representatives Mio Sugita, who won the Grand Prize (Fuji Seiji Prize) in the 7th annual contest, asked a question about the Press Code in the National Diet in 2014. A deputy director-general from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied that the code was invalidated when the Treaty of San Francisco came into effect, but The Asahi Shimbun still leads all of the newspaper companies in complying with the Press Code in the form of voluntary restraints. I have continually expressed my views to oppose this Press Code.

　After the 2015 House of Councillors election, Diet members in favor of constitutional change now occupy more than two thirds of the seats in both houses. If a motion to reform the constitution is not submitted at this timing, we will never get a second chance to do so. Perhaps Abe had an ingenious idea when he proposed on Constitution Memorial Day in May that we leave the first and second clause of Article 9 as-is while adding a new third clause. It would be hard to get many people on board with switching to an independent, autonomous constitution straight away. Komeito will not accept constitutional reform but it will accept an additional clause, and it would be easy to drum up support for a motion to add a third clause. However, this is pointless unless the third clause clearly stipulates the position of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF). To transform the JSDF from its current policeman-like role, in which it can only do pre-approved actions, to one that can do everything but what is banned on a list of prohibited actions, the third clause must recognize the maintenance of military strength and right of belligerency for self-defense. I definitely hope that Article 9 will be amended by 2020 in a way that meets these requirements.
　Thanks to the major publicity from the book scandal instigated by China, APA Hotel has continually broken sales and occupancy rate records in January, February, March, April, and May. My friend living in China said, “APA Hotel gained global fame, and today you and Abe are the most well-known Japanese people in China.” APA Hotel is now renowned as a hotel chain with no Chinese customers, and it is hugely popular among Taiwanese who don’t want to be mistaken as Chinese. We also received more than 20,000 e-mails and faxes from many Japanese people applauding APA and myself, and some have even stayed at APA Hotels in support. The Japanese and global economies are on an upturn, and across the world stock market capitalization looks like it will reach record highs. In this great environment, I will carry out more vigorous business and self-expression activities based on my feeling that “a person who chases two rabbits will catch both.”

　　I held a question-and-answer session after the pre-party press conference on June 2. First, a Sankei Shimbun reporter asked me about the future prospects of the Shoheijuku, which is celebrating its sixth anniversary this year. I replied that I want to further boost its influence and open a path towards constitutional reform. I added that I thought it would be good for a constitutional amendment motion to be submitted in the National Diet in June 2018, the lower house to be dissolved afterwards, and a general election and national referendum to be held at the same time.
　The second question was from a female Reuters reporter. She said that we had removed my books from an APA Hotel in Sapporo during the Sapporo Asian Winter Games in February 2017 due to the book scandal, and mentioned that the same sort of problem could occur during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. She then asked what we intended to do. First, I corrected her mistaken question. The entire APA Hotel & Resort Sapporo was rented out by the Organising Committee during the Sapporo Asian Winter Games. This was according to a contract from last year that stipulated we must remove all informational materials. I told her that we acted in accordance with this contract, not because of the backlash against my book. Next, I clearly stated there is no reason to remove the books from the guest rooms in Japan – a country where freedom of speech is guaranteed – and that, naturally, we would not do so during the Tokyo Olympics.
　I answered this question around 3:30 p.m. At 5:39 p.m., roughly two hours later, a English-language article entitled “Japan hotel won’t remove books that deny Nanjing Massacre during Olympics” was posted on the Reuters website from New York City in the U.S. The article was also reprinted on The Asahi Shimbun’s English website. A Japanese-language article was posted on the Japanese Reuters afterwards, which was then reprinted on Yahoo! News. I felt a sense of suspicion regarding the different content in the English and Japanese articles. The English article claimed that the books had been removed from the Sapporo hotel because of the backlash, just like the reporter stated in her question. It read:

　This portion is not included in the Japanese article. The English article ends with my response to the reporter’s query, namely that we removed the informational materials in compliance with the contract:

　The Xinhua News Agency purposefully ran a false article stating that I had removed the books because of Chinese protests. The Asahi Shimbun then re-printed this article, entitled “APA Promises to Remove Books,” without confirming with APA. I suspect the Reuters reporter wrote her article in advance based on this, assuming that I would give a vague answer about the Tokyo Olympics. But I responded in a way she did not anticipate, so she hurriedly tacked on my statement at the end of the article. As a result, the English article is inconsistent – it is written based on the reporter’s mistaken assumptions, which are then negated by my words. The Japanese article does not maintain this inconsistency, but coherently reports that China and South Korea did not patronize the hotel. The claim that we removed the books because of the scandal should also be removed from the English article. China has three diplomatic objectives: implanting a sense of atonement in Japan, making Japan apologize, and ensuring that Japanese people are unable to think for themselves. I think the Reuters article was exceedingly dishonest, and that China was involved in making it seem like I had apologized.

　Yahoo! News ran a Japanese-language article entitled, “APA Hotel Won’t Remove Book Denying the Nanking Massacre During the Tokyo Olympics.” In the blink of an eye, it drew 3,822 comments, 95% of which applauded APA’s stance. The largest portion (27,064 comments), was to the tone of, “Let’s support APA by staying at APA Hotels!” and included many “Likes.” If you count the number of people who clicked the “Like” button on these comments, the number of positive reactions probably exceeds one million. We received 20,000 encouraging messages via e-mail and fax after the book scandal broke. I suspect this is because many Japanese people likely don’t believe in the Nanking Massacre, forced transportation and sex slavery of comfort women, and other stories despite what they have learned in school and heard in the news, and despite the politicians they have seen apologizing based on the Kono and Murayama Statements. In Japan, China can no longer play its Nanking Massacre card like it has many times in the past, nor can South Korea use the comfort women card any longer.
　In the introduction to Additional Edition of Theoretical Modern History, I included photographs to show three representative historical truths regarding which fictions are widespread in modern Japanese history. I did this to give readers a new outlook on history. The Huanggutun Incident was carried out by the Soviet secret service. An attempt had been made on Zhang Zuolin’s life two years before, and he had arrested Soviet consulate personnel. The photograph of the explosion also differs from what was described by Kwantung Army Colonel Daisaku Komoto, who is regarded as the perpetrator.
　There was no Nanking Massacre. Nanking, a documentary film shot on the front lines by Toho Cinema in 1938, shows Chinese children playing with firecrackers right after the occupation, as well as unarmed Japanese soldiers walking by. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that a massacre took place. It is said Chiang Kai-shek’s army hunted down and put to death the pro-Japanese citizens of Nanking, killing as many as one thousand people in one day. The story of the massacre by the Japanese Army was fabricated to cover this up.
　An advertisement soliciting comfort women states that their monthly pay was the equivalent of three million yen in today’s currency. They were not sex slaves, but rather well-paid, high-class prostitutes. This is a historical truth.
　Now is the perfect timing for constitutional reform, since many people have come to sympathize with my historical views and stance against China. Even if we add a clause to Article 9 that clearly mentions the JSDF, we should recognize its military strength and right of belligerency for self-defense, create a war provision that says the JSDF can do everything but what is specifically prohibited, and have court-martials so JSDF personnel who kill people in combat are not accused of murder. Afterwards, Japan should take part in nuclear sharing with the U.S., just like the four North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries of Germany and Italy (other defeated states from World War II), as well as the Netherlands and Belgium. In this way, we must have our own deterrence against nuclear weapons. The Chinese Communist Party leaders want to avoid a war due to pressure from the citizens, who are stirred up by the media, and I am sure they would actually welcome Japan enhancing its military force in this way to restrain the media and Chinese people. Constitutional change to enhance Japanese military power would contribute greatly to peace in East Asia. I published Theoretical Modern History III: The Real History of Japan and Additional Edition of Theoretical Modern History based on these feelings, and I hope that many Japanese people will read these books, learn the truth, regain their pride, and devote themselves to the revival of Japan.