Twenty-three years after the announcement of the U.S.-Japan plan for a new U.S. Marine Corps air base at Henoko, the project's completion date continues to fade into the distance as technical challenges mount. For its part, the Japanese government continues to insist that it will be completed in the face of powerful Okinawan opposition and soaring costs.

Counterinsurgency tactics for winning hearts and minds are key weapons in state efforts to suppress rebellion and the possibility of rebellion. Always predicated on the threat of state violence, hearts and minds counterinsurgency is usually thought to originate in British or French strategies for managing insurgency in their colonies in Asia, especially in suppression of the 1948-1960 communist insurgency in Malaya. However, work with archival data, a genealogical approach to clear, hold and protect population management, which is a key principle of hearts and minds strategy, and careful review of scholarship on Japan's colonial military and governance (especially but not only in Japanese language) indicates that hearts and minds/hold and protect counterinsurgency principles have origins in imperial management of insurgency in Japan's colonies. It is also possible that elements of imperial Japanese “soft” counterinsurgency strategy undergird American and British hearts and minds counterinsurgency strategies in Malaya and South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.

This pair of articles draws on talks by Tomomi Yamaguchi and Satoko Oka Norimatsu at the seminar “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Woman’ Issue: Revisionism and the Right-wing in Contemporary Japan, U.S., and Canada,” at the Institute of Asian Research, the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC), hosted jointly by the Centre of Korean Research and the Centre for Japanese Research, on November 21, 2019. Tomomi Yamaguchi discusses the “history wars” over the “comfort woman” issue in Japan and the U.S., followed by Satoko Oka Norimatsu's “Canada's ‘History Wars’: The Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre.”

This article is based on a talk that Satoko Oka Norimatsu gave at the seminar “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Woman’ Issue: Revisionism and the Right-wing in Contemporary Japan, U.S., and Canada,” held at the Institute of Asian Research, the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC), hosted jointly by the Centre of Korean Research and the Centre for Japanese Research, on November 21, 2019.