2024-01-01
The following is from this month’s issue of THEMIS, a monthly magazine available only by subscription.
I subscribe to it in order to read Masayuki Takayama’s regular column.
This essay, too, proves that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
After reading this essay, my closest friend said:
“I am convinced that you and Masayuki Takayama resonate with each other.”

Kissinger’s “Ignorance” Threw Japan and the World into Confusion
The Media Praised Him, but He Misjudged the Arrogance and Rudeness of the Chinese
The Chinese—The People Furthest Removed from Culture and Civilization

Henry Kissinger died recently at the age of 100.
Perhaps intimidated by the weight of his name, Japanese newspapers published plausible-sounding accounts claiming that he brought Mao Zedong’s China into the free world and ended the Vietnam War.
Among them, it was interesting that only the Sankei Shimbun had Yoshihisa Komori, who had served as its Saigon correspondent during the Vietnam War, write about this arrogant, overbearing, and profoundly mistaken man under the headline, “Kissinger’s Great Diplomatic Failure.”
To begin with, China was closed to the outside world at that time, and Chinese people were not permitted to leave the country.
Because of Kissinger, however, Chinese people began coming even to Japan.
Immediately, crimes such as lock-picking and ATM theft surged; Japan was defrauded of three trillion yen in ODA, and even the Senkaku Islands were effectively stolen from it.
As Pillsbury later admitted, the United States itself had its intellectual property and military secrets stolen, while the only people who profited were Kissinger and the Clintons.
Today, the world is sick and tired of the arrogant and ill-mannered Chinese.
All of this happened because Kissinger did not understand the true nature of the Chinese—the Han people.
They spent China’s four-thousand-year history as slaves and therefore remained further removed from culture and civilization than anyone else.
Their sole culture was foot-binding.
They were true barbarians.
Yet Kissinger believed that such Chinese people were decent and trustworthy.
In that sense, Kakuei Tanaka was guilty of the same mistake, although his lack of judgment was settled at the cost of three trillion yen in ODA.
The Vietnam peace settlement was equally appalling.
Komori wrote that the Paris negotiations consisted solely of “the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces and the release of 600 American prisoners of war,” without a single word about the security of South Vietnam.
“In short, it was peace only for the United States,” he wrote.
Surely that did not merit a Nobel Peace Prize.
Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam honestly declined the Nobel Peace Prize and continued attacking the South for another two years, taking control of the entire South in April 1975.
The final scene, in which Viet Cong tanks rolled into the former U.S. Embassy in Saigon, remains in our memories.
The conventional understanding of what followed is that “the South was also communized, its people suffered unspeakable misery, and many fled overseas as boat people.”
Komori’s column presents the same understanding.
At the time, I was a reporter in the City News Department.
I accepted foreign news dispatches as they were and believed the same thing.
There were also cases in which boat people drifted into the Sea of Japan, were rescued, and then flew to the United States, where they wished to go.
But because of the ocean currents, anyone setting out from Vietnam could not possibly reach Japan.
Like Abe no Nakamaro, they should have been carried back in the opposite direction.
I thought it strange, and sure enough, it was later discovered that Chinese people from around Fujian had disguised themselves as boat people and illegally entered the United States through Japan.

Vietnam, Where Women Are Exceptionally Strong

I later joined the Foreign News Department and traveled through postwar Vietnam, from Dong Dang in the north to Trang Bang in the south.
I subsequently revisited the country with Masahiro Miyazaki and others.
There, I saw a Vietnam entirely different from the one portrayed by the media.
First, far from being a gloomy communist state, the country was filled with love hotels, its restaurants were packed, and everyone was enjoying life.
There was one more thing.
They disliked China.
The claim that Kissinger opened the way to peace through Mao Zedong is a complete lie.
In the film Rambo, women are abused, but in this country women are exceptionally strong.
“Men are no good,” said Nguyen Thi Thi, a former female Viet Cong fighter.
She was the first woman to cross the 17th parallel and meet Ho Chi Minh.
After reunification, she served as mayor of Saigon and ran 80 companies, including Saigon Satake, a Japanese-Vietnamese joint venture.
All the executives of her companies were women.
Hollywood films depict female snipers terrifying American soldiers, and that was based on fact.
This country is sustained by women.
The two years of war following the withdrawal of U.S. forces were, in fact, fought to reclaim the homeland.
During the period of French Indochina, the French used Chinese people to rule the Vietnamese.
In addition to a poll tax, taxes were imposed on marriage, childbirth, and funerals, and the Chinese collected them.
They also sold opium and constituted a quasi-ruling class.
After the war, the Vietnamese drove out the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
The Kennedy administration then intervened after mistakenly regarding Vietnam as a communist force.
What became known as the Vietnam War began, but it too ended with the withdrawal of U.S. forces after nearly ten years of fighting.
The final two years were fought to gain complete control of the homeland and remove the Chinese, who had put down deep roots in Vietnamese society.
As its first move, reunified Vietnam seized control of Cholon, the Chinese quarter beside Saigon, tore apart the walls and ceilings of houses, and confiscated the gold, silver, and treasures concealed there.
The Chinese competed with one another to escape by sea.
The term “boat people” actually referred to the Chinese who fled.
Chinese pirates from the mainland attacked them.
At times, they killed them.
This clearly revealed the national character of the Chinese.
When I revisited the country with Masahiro Miyazaki, our interpreter was a Chinese man from Cholon.
His father had been a government official and his mother a teacher, but both had been dismissed and lost their jobs.
The walls and ceilings of their home had been torn apart, and the family had lost its property.
He lamented that, because of his Chinese background, “I was not even permitted to attend university.”
Robert McNamara, who served as U.S. Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy administration, later said, “We did not understand the history of Southeast Asia. We misunderstood it.”
He acknowledged that the Vietnam War had been a struggle for national self-determination to reclaim the homeland from foreign powers.

Thirty Years of Fighting to Defeat and Expel France, the United States, and China

The Vietnamese fought for thirty years and defeated and expelled the foreign enemies of France, the United States, and China.
There is no reason they would be friendly toward China.
The Cambodians also watched the Vietnamese struggle and attempted to reclaim their own homeland.
That became the killing fields in which the Pol Pot faction killed 1.7 million people.
Their targets were the Chinese and Vietnamese who had entered Cambodia as agents of the French during the French Indochina period.
They had taken control of Cambodia’s government and economy and exploited the Cambodian people.
The aim of the Pol Pot faction was national self-determination, and, ironically, the Vietnamese who had provided its model became targets of the purge.
Yet newspapers still do not report either the true identity of the boat people or the intentions of the Pol Pot faction.

2023/12/23 in Kyoto