Drawing on Masayuki Takayama’s Shukan Shincho column, this essay exposes the American-designed postwar narrative and criticizes Asahi Shimbun for refusing to confront it.
By examining famine in China, the conduct of the Japanese Army, and distorted imperial reporting, it challenges seventy years of historical deception.

Seventy years after the war.
Even though it is now clear that this was an American design, Asahi Shimbun refuses to speak of it.
2016-11-14
Those who read this week’s installment of Masayuki Takayama’s popular column that concludes Shukan Shincho must have been astonished to find that my remark—that Takayama is, in effect, another version of myself—was entirely accurate.
On the day Prince Mikasa passed away, I watched NHK’s Watch 9 and became aware of the abnormality of their reporting, prompting me to write my own commentary.
Although I had not read Asahi Shimbun around that time—so much so that I now only skim that paper—Takayama had read it closely.
Whether the editors of NHK’s news programs were raised reading Asahi Shimbun and internalizing its editorials as their own thinking, or whether they are in fact being completely manipulated by South Korea or China, my assertion on this point was also proven correct by Takayama.
All emphasis in the text except for headings is mine.
Henken Jizai.
“With all due respect.”
In 1942, Kim Jong-il was born over there, while Junichiro Koizumi was born here.
It was an unlucky year for both Japan and the world.
That misfortune also reached China, whose very existence seems like a calamity.
That same year, Henan Province, once called the Central Plain, suffered an unbelievable crop failure.
In a land of calamity, misfortune doubled, and the following year swarms of locusts devoured all greenery.
The people starved, but officials of Chiang Kai-shek’s government showed not the slightest compassion.
They collected taxes without fail, and if that was not enough, they even took away the seed rice for the next year.
The starving people competed with the locusts to eat weeds, consumed strange mushrooms, and were fortunate if poisonous ones killed them quickly.
In extreme hunger, they killed and ate their own children.
Unable to bear eating their own, they exchanged children with neighbors and ate them instead.
This is written in Chinese characters as 易子而食, “to exchange children and eat.”
The existence of such a four-character idiom is terrifying.
In this famine, three million people starved to death in Henan Province.
The Chinese writer Liu Zhenyun vividly describes this horror in Back to 1942.
The book features missionaries sent by the U.S. government to conduct anti-Japanese operations.
They opened churches out of pity for the starving people, but it was like a drop on a hot stone.
They appealed to officials, but Chiang Kai-shek himself did nothing.
Because for Chiang, the people meant nothing.
In fact, four years earlier, to evade pursuit by the Japanese Army, dikes along the Yellow River were breached at several locations in the same Henan Province and blamed on indiscriminate Japanese bombing for foreign propaganda purposes, as recorded in Guo Moruo’s autobiography.
As a result, a downstream area as large as Kyushu and Shikoku combined was submerged, and one million people died.
Similar breaches near Jiujiang on the Yangtze River killed tens of thousands more.
Whether local people starved to death was of no concern to Chiang.
Only when an American journalist, appalled by the devastation, contributed an article to Time magazine did Chiang feel compelled to act.
He released a small amount of food, but before it reached the starving people, most of it was stolen by minor officials.
In this respect, the current Xi Jinping regime has not changed at all.
When the abandoned people waited only for death, Liu Zhenyun writes, a miracle occurred.
The Japanese Army advanced into the area.
The Japanese Army had no surplus food, yet they even shared their own rations.
“We regained our lives by eating the Imperial Army’s provisions.”
“For the Imperial Army, some served as guides, carried stretchers, and disarmed Chinese troops.”
“We sold our country and became traitors.
But is there anything in such a country that should not be sold?”
Around the same time, in Wangyemiao in Henan Province, a Chinese orphan taken in by the former Japanese Army, Guang Junming, wrote A Seven-Year-Old Prisoner.
The orphan became the unit’s mascot, and soldiers, when they had time, “bought him clothes and sweets,” and “other units had also taken in and cherished Chinese orphans.”
While fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, which had become America’s running dogs, the Japanese Army protected orphans and shared food with the starving.
Incidentally, even during the Yellow River breach ordered by Chiang, the Japanese Army halted its advance, dispatched boats, rescued eighty thousand people swallowed by the flood, and repaired the broken dikes.
Prince Takahito Mikasa, brother of Emperor Showa and uncle of the current Emperor, passed away.
At the Renso no Gi funeral ceremony, many were saddened by the small number of imperial family members in attendance, including Princess Yuriko as chief mourner.
Amid this, Asahi Shimbun—which does not even use honorific language toward the Imperial Household—gave prominent coverage to the Prince’s instructions from his days as a staff officer in the China Expeditionary Army.
They claimed that the Shanghai Incident, the Manchurian Incident, and Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Japanese actions were all the fault of the Japanese Army, and that the Japanese Army engaged in “looting, rape, and arson.”
Seventy years after the war.
Even though it is now clear that this was an American design, Asahi Shimbun refuses to speak of it.
They conceal the fact that Chinese people expressed gratitude to the Imperial Army.
They shamelessly exploit the youthful misconceptions of the Prince for political purposes.
Come to think of it, in the past, an Asahi reporter even lured the Prince’s eldest son to Horinouchi in Kawasaki.
It is a newspaper that is filthy to the core.