2024-01-09
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s latest book, Henken Jizai: Who Buried Shinzo Abe?
This book is the latest volume in a series collecting his celebrated columns from Shukan Shincho, but the original text has been polished even further, making it still easier to read.
For this book alone, he deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature.
This is essential reading not only for the Japanese people, but for people throughout the world.
Chinese Women Who Saw Through the Lies of the Nanjing Massacre (Page 105)
It is said that the great fiction known as the Nanjing Massacre was created by the Chinese.
That is wrong.
The Chinese may be good at imitation, but they need help to conceive an idea like this.
No, no—Chiang Kai-shek had Harold Timperley, a correspondent for a British newspaper, write about the Nanjing Massacre.
That is also wrong.
For many years, he worked for the American opinion magazine Asia.
The magazine was owned by Richard Walsh, the husband of Pearl S. Buck, and operated under the patronage of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, or CPI, which directed anti-Japanese propaganda.
The CPI was composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretaries of War and the Navy, and representatives of the newspaper industry, and it used American newspaper correspondents and missionaries dispatched to China to conduct anti-Japanese propaganda.
William Donald of the New York Herald, who flew to Xi’an with Soong Mei-ling during the Xi’an Incident, was also one of those who threatened Zhang Xueliang and forced him to release Chiang Kai-shek.
Although only circumstantial evidence exists, Donald conveyed the wishes of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time: “The United States has chosen Chiang Kai-shek and will give Manchuria and Mongolia to China. Defeat Japan as promised.”
Chiang Kai-shek subsequently instigated the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, massacred 250 Japanese people in Tongzhou, and finally ordered an elite Chinese force of 60,000 men to attack the Japanese concession in Shanghai.
Just as Roosevelt had intended, Japan was dragged into a quagmire of war with China and extended its battle lines to Nanjing and Wuhan.
Roosevelt used the CPI to conduct a propaganda campaign portraying “evil Japan invading virtuous China.”
The Nanjing Incident was also used as material for that campaign.
American newspaper correspondents unanimously reported that “people were killed and women were raped.”
Missionary Miner Searle Bates, a servant of God, also gave false testimony at the Tokyo Trials, claiming that “many Chinese people were killed.”
He could not have died a decent death.
However, even the Chinese showed no interest in the story of the Nanjing Massacre fabricated in the United States because it was simply too implausible.
The United States then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Having killed 200,000 innocent civilians, the United States was compelled to revive the Nanjing Massacre as a counterweight.
First, the Asahi Shimbun, citing an announcement by headquarters, reported that “20,000 people were killed in the city of Nanjing over four weeks, and dismembered pieces of flesh lay scattered about” (December 8, 1945).
Yet the newspaper’s photographer, who had been there at the time, had photographed civilians and children smiling beside Japanese soldiers.
But 20,000 was far too few to counterbalance the atomic bombings.
The judgment of the Tokyo Trials therefore increased the figure by a full digit, to 200,000.
It was intended to counterbalance the killing of noncombatants by the two atomic bombs.
Any sensible scholar would have questioned how the number had suddenly increased by an entire digit, but many did not.
Akira Fujiwara of Hitotsubashi University and Tokushi Kasahara of Tsuru University actively supported the figure of 200,000.
Fujiwara, of course, commented on a photograph of smoke brought in by the Asahi Shimbun, saying, “Yes, that is poison gas used by the Japanese military,” in a manner reminiscent of the comedian Ken Shimura.
In doing so, this professor exposed himself as a liar.
Kasahara likewise borrowed an Asahi Graph photograph showing women returning home under the protection of the Japanese Army and wrote, “Women in the Jiangnan region were abducted by the Japanese Army” and “raped and killed.”
He, too, lies without hesitation.
Jiang Zemin, however, wanted Japan’s ODA, so he raised the number to “300,000” and had the words “300,000” displayed at the Nanjing Memorial Hall.
Incredibly, Song Gengyi, a teacher at Shanghai Aurora Vocational College, recently questioned this during a class.
She said, “No evidence supports the figure of 300,000, and we should not continue hating Japan.”
She taught that both the story of Nanjing and its numerical claims were fictitious.
When a female student secretly recorded her and posted the footage online, she was immediately “dismissed” (People’s Daily).
The uproar did not end there.
Li Tiantian, a teacher in Hunan Province who was concerned about what had happened to Song Gengyi, expressed support for her position on social media and demanded that the student who had informed on her be punished.
Government officials then arrived, seized Li Tiantian, and threw her into a psychiatric ward “with her family’s consent” (Yomiuri Shimbun).
Astonishingly, there were honorable women in China.
By contrast, the Asahi Shimbun, which had promoted the Nanjing Massacre, never once reported on these women.
Instead, the newspaper featured Yutaka Yoshida, Akira Fujiwara’s favored protégé, and once again reinforced its long-standing masochistic view of history.
How dare it call itself a newspaper?
(April 14, 2022)