What do Japanese historians think of the alternative Amelia Earhart histories?

In short, they're not big fans of the claim that Japan kidnaped her.

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A photo that HISTORY Channel tried to claim depicted Amelia Earhart in Japanese captivity; a Japanese blogger disproved this 30 minutes after the program aired.

Earlier this week I wrote about the new sonar find that just might show Amelia Earhart’s plane in the part of the ocean where it is known to have ditched and sunk. This subject always revives the two major false claims about her fate. The first is most easily dismissed, that Earhart & Noonan flew instead to a different island Nikumaroro, where they survived for a time as castaways, as it’s actually physically impossible in addition to being logically absurd — that conjecture really only exists as the grift of Ric Gillespie, who spent decades hosting tourists on overpriced “archaeological tours” of Nikumaroro.

But the other theory is actually physically possible — though just as illogical. Promoted mainly by American author Mike Campbell, it posits that after Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and ditched in the vicinity of Howland, they deployed their life raft and were picked up by a Japanese ship. It is a fact that all the ships that could be mustered spent a full week searching the area, but found nothing — these included the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, the battleship USS Colorado, the USCG Itasca, and even a few Japanese ships. Campbell asserts that the Japanese took them back to Japan as captives.

Unlike Gillespie’s conjecture, Campbell’s is possible. It certainly could have happened that way. It’s easy to find countless American historians who will dispute it (basically all of them), but really all we can say is that there’s no evidence of it, and it’s logically implausible. Although there were no formal hostilities between the US and Japan in 1937, tensions had been rising on both sides. Both sides had their hawks and their doves. Amelia Earhart was arguably the single most famous person in the world at that time, and if the Japanese wanted some propaganda victory by capturing her, obviously they never used her for that purpose. The conjecture just makes no sense.

So as Americans, it’s easy to dismiss Campbell’s book as fantasy fiction nonsense. But what do Japanese historians say about the claim — a claim which explicitly vilifies them? I wanted to find out.