In recent years the American media has covered the grossly disproportionate U.S. military presence in Okinawa mostly following such atrocities as the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three American servicemen in 1995, and the 2016 rape and murder of a twenty-year-old woman for which a former Marine, employed by the U.S. military at the the time, is charged. However, the New York Times and Washington Post have published occasional articles about the ongoing protests in Okinawa against the planned Marine airbase at Henoko, and tcritics of American foreign policy have reported on them. The broadcast that follows is unusual in that it aired on PBS and offers multiple perspectives on the bases.

Feminist thought leaders Onozawa Akane and Kitahara Minori discuss in dialogue the contemporary relevance of the Japanese military scheme of wartime sexual slavery. They identify the recruitment tactics of Japan's pornography and prostitution businesses today as similar to those used in the wartime trafficking of women, and suggest that low level comprehension of women's human rights means male demand for prostitution continues unhindered in Japan, as it has throughout modern history. The two authors suggest that the social context of women's prostitution, which occurs in conditions of gender equality, must be emphasized in order to combat victim-blaming ideas about women's ‘choice’ and voluntarism in being sexually exploited. They canvass policy alternatives against prostitution like the law currently in operation in South Korea and France that penalizes sex industry customers.

To anyone not serving in the American or Korean armies along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the current talk of war and nuclear war is surreal and archaic, a throwback to an earlier and more dangerous era, a time when Bob Dylan sang about feeling lonesome and blue about walking into World War III with bad dreams in his head.