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The FCCJ Gets a New Home

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan has a new home, not far from the old location. It remains a place for press conferences that otherwise would not be held in Japan.

The Campaign to Overwrite the Comfort Women Past

In 1993, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono made the most full-throated admission and apology acknowledging that Japan had coerced women across Asia into being sex slaves—euphemistically referred to as “Comfort Women”—for the Japanese military during the Pacific War. More recently, however, conservative politicians such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura have engaged in a campaign that is less about carving out a path toward reconciliation than to overwrite memories of an unsavory past.

The Scourge of Overtourism

Japan is facing the problem of “overtourism.” Between 2010 and 2017, annual visitors to Japan grew from 8.6 million to 28.7 million. The Japanese media refers to the problem as “tourism pollution.”