Books about the infamous Nanking Massacre of 1937, or the enslavement of comfort women in military brothels, were denounced as historical masochism or dismissed as the Tokyo Trial View of History. The left was accused of being complicit in spreading foreign Chinese, Korean, or American propaganda.

That is why Abe can get away with appointing cronies to the board of NHK, the national broadcasting company, who openly claim that the military brothels were an entirely private enterprise and that the Nanking Massacre was a foreign fabrication. Historical truth is not the point political mastery is.