My guest today is James Corbett. James is an award-winning investigative journalist who began the Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics.

His videos have garnered over 50 million views on YouTube alone. One of the principal themes of this podcast and other

projects I've worked on is that is that of the divergence between official truth and truth

on the ground. In short, what's on the label is very often not what's in the box. To know what's

in the box, you actually have to lift up the lid and examine

the contents. As we record this, the pandemic lockdowns are beginning to be loosened in many

countries or regions within countries, and as might be expected in a fog of war time when extreme

measures are taken, there's been a particularly large disconnect between

official statements and the underlying reality. Those statements could be related to data,

to models of how the virus was expected to spread under certain conditions, or they could be

disconnects between executive orders and how people actually behave. One of these

disconnects can be intentional sometimes or complex, but at other times it seems pretty clear what's

going on and why. You live in Japan, and I want to get into the response taken there, But first, tell me why you think the Japanese government was so slow to admit that they even

had a COVID problem.

Well, actually, Japan is an interesting case in all of this, because I think while almost

every power structure in the world had an incentive uh, an, uh, an, uh, an, uh, an, uh,

an, uh, an, uh, a, place just a couple months from now in Tokyo,

obviously not going ahead.

Although Japan did not want to admit that for a very long time,

because as always, billions of dollars are invested in these games

over the course of the better part of a decade,

preparing for them and preparing

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