From a paper by Masayuki Takayama
Some time ago, an elderly female professor from the Royal Ballet School of Monaco—greatly respected by prima ballerinas worldwide—visited Japan.
During her visit, she spoke about the significance of artists, saying:
“Artists are important because they are the only ones who can shine a light on hidden truths and express them.”
There would hardly be anyone who disagrees with her words.Takayama Masayuki is not only a one-of-a-kind journalist in the postwar world; it would be no exaggeration to say that he is also a one-of-a-kind artist.
This essay brilliantly proves the correctness of my belief that no one today is more deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature than Takayama.
It is essential reading not only for Japanese citizens but for people all over the world.
The basis of the story was “The Typhoon of Steel,” a sloppy piece of journalism by the Okinawa Times.
April 2, 2016The following continues from the previous chapter:
The Sins of Kenzaburo Oe and the Asahi Shimbun in Politically Exploiting the “Okinawa Issue”
A court ruling to halt the publication of “Okinawa Notes” may end in a loss for Oe.
The Nobel laureate hates Japan.
When people like Takako Doi or Tetsuya Chikushi—whose backgrounds remain vague—criticize Japan, one might assume it’s at least half out of jealousy.
But when it comes to someone like Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese man who speaks ill of his own country with such glee, I find it incomprehensible.He calls himself a man of letters and even won the Nobel Prize for literature.
He may appear respectable on the surface, yet he made a point of boasting that he declined a Japanese government offer to honor his achievements—because he “hates Japan.”Perhaps he believes that hating Japan makes him look like a progressive intellectual.
Or maybe he figured the Asahi Shimbun would cheer him on, boost his image, and help sell more books.
There may well have been a calculated motive—profit through anti-Japan posturing.Such ugly self-marketing is his own business.
But just because one strikes a pose doesn’t mean one has the right to lie.Oe published a book titled Okinawa Notes with Iwanami Shoten.
In it, he wrote that on Tokashiki and Zamami islands, where U.S. forces landed, Japanese military commanders ordered local civilians to commit mass suicide.
The basis of his story came from The Typhoon of Steel, a sloppy and unreliable piece of writing by the Okinawa Times.That book claimed:
“When the U.S. attacks intensified, an order from Captain Akamatsu reached the civilians in hiding:
‘All islanders shall die shouting Long live the Emperor and praying for Japan’s victory.’”
And,
“On Zamami Island, the day before the U.S. landed, Captain Umezawa gathered the civilians before the war memorial and ordered them to perish.”To cut to the chase—this story was a complete fabrication from start to finish.
Yet Oe wrote Okinawa Notes without ever visiting the site, verifying the facts, or speaking to those involved.
He simply ran with the made-up tale.If he had merely copied the story, he might have wriggled out with a weak excuse like,
“I plagiarized someone else’s work—Asahi reporters do it all the time, so I didn’t think it was a problem.”But instead, he used his meager imagination and vocabulary to inflate the original tale, portraying the two Japanese commanders and the Imperial Army with relentless malice.
He labeled the commanders “butchers,” compared the Japanese military to Hitler’s regime, and claimed that men like Captain Akamatsu were no different from Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.
He even wrote that they should be abducted and tried in an Okinawan court “like Eichmann,” and executed.He published this in 1970—the year of the anti-Security Treaty protests.
He clearly had the cunning to align himself with the spirit of the age.
Why couldn’t he have channeled even a tenth of that shrewdness into honest writing?Oe’s “Defense” in the Asahi ColumnThe arrogance of Kenzaburo Oe becomes starkly apparent when one compares his work with Ayako Sono’s The Background of a Certain Myth, which addresses the same subject matter.
Sono visited Okinawa, spoke with those involved, examined the records, and published her findings three years after Oe.In her book, there is testimony that contradicts Oe’s account—Captain Yoshijiro Akamatsu, whom Oe vilified as a “butcher,” had actually tried to persuade residents not to commit suicide.
After the war, when local islanders requested he take responsibility so that families could qualify for survivor pensions, Akamatsu agreed out of kindness.The story of Captain Umezawa ordering suicides on Zamami Island is equally false.
Hatsue Miyagi confessed that an elder had instructed her to lie to officials, saying Umezawa had given the order—because doing so would secure survivor benefits.
She admitted to giving false testimony.If Oe had any conscience, he would have pulled the book from circulation immediately.
But even now, after 50 printings, he has not corrected a single lie.Still, his arrogance began to crumble under the lawsuit filed by those connected to the two commanders.
Even Japan’s Ministry of Education finally removed from school textbooks the lie that mass suicides were carried out under military orders—a lie once accepted simply because a Nobel laureate had said it.
This is a sign that Oe may ultimately lose in court.Yet he shows no remorse.
In an Asahi newspaper column (April 17), he shamelessly wrote that he didn’t do any field research because
“I didn’t have the courage to question the people who had survived such suffering.”But “the people of the island” lied to get money—they exploited sympathy to concoct stories and collect pensions.
The original narrative was:
The war in Okinawa was so brutal, can’t we overlook a little exaggeration?
To be continued.