Author: Tetsuhide Yamaoka
President of the Australia-Japan Community Network Inc.
A Young Man Who Called Himself 'Miki Dezaki'
About three years ago, a young man who called himself "Miki Dezaki" approached several well-known conservative opinion leaders, introducing himself as a graduate student of Sophia University. He asked for interviews with them in order to make a documentary film, he said, focused on the comfort women issue. He alleged the project was to complete his master's degree.
One of Dezaki's emails said:
"As I researched, I found the comfort women issue was more complex than I had read in the Western liberal media. In my research I found there was no evidence that the women were coerced to become comfort women, and that the lives of the comfort women were not as bad as some activists or experts insisted. I have to admit that I had believed the media reports, but now I have doubts. […] As a graduate student, I have the ethical duty to introduce interviews with you with respect and fairness. Also, this is academic research and there are certain academic standards and conditions which must be met, so it will not be biased journalism."
He approached Kent Gilbert, Yoshiko Sakurai, Nobukatsu Fujioka, Mio Sugita, Yumiko Yamamoto, Tony Malano (also known as "Texas Daddy") and Shun'ichi Fujiki (the manager of Texas Daddy's Japan Secretariat), among others. All of them took Dezaki at his word and expected he would make a fair and neutral documentary film as promised. On that basis, they agreed to interviews with him.
