The following is from America and China Tell Lies with an Air of Superiority, published on February 28, 2015, a collection consisting mainly of commentaries that Masayuki Takayama wrote anonymously at the editor-in-chief’s request for “Orifushi no Ki,” the column that opened the monthly magazine Seiron.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Everyone must surely marvel at the sharpness of his pen as he uncovers the truth and conveys it to us.
It is no exaggeration to say that, in the incisiveness of its arguments, this book represents the pinnacle of his work.
Quite some time ago, an elderly female professor at the Royal Ballet School of Monaco, who was held in tremendous esteem by prima ballerinas around the world, visited Japan.
These are the words she spoke then about the reason artists matter.
“Artists are important because they are the only ones capable of casting light on concealed, hidden truths and giving them expression.”
Surely no one would dispute her words.
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that Masayuki Takayama is not only a journalist without equal in the postwar world, but also an artist without equal in the postwar world.
Meanwhile, many of those who call themselves writers—Oe, Murakami, Hirano, and others—and imagine themselves to be artists are not even worthy of the name.
This is because, far from casting light on concealed, hidden truths and giving them expression, they have merely given expression to the lies fabricated by the Asahi Shimbun and others.
The same must be true of people like them not only in Japan but in countries throughout the world.
In other words, only a very small number of true artists exist.
This book, too, compellingly demonstrates the correctness of my assertion that no one in the world today is more deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature than Masayuki Takayama.
Are Japanese Intellectuals Targeting the Wrong Power in Their “Resistance to Authority”? (From p. 50)
Arthur Rimbaud went his own way even after making a name for himself.
After a lovers’ quarrel with Verlaine, he went to Africa and became an arms dealer.
Japanese people who have made a name for themselves, however, are different.
They contract the disease of “I don’t want to be just a celebrity.
I want to be regarded as something greater—a cultural intellectual.”
And, for some reason, they assume that a cultural intellectual must be a person of the left.
Thus Hisashi Inoue, who wrote scripts for a strip theater and made his name with Hyokkori Hyotan-jima, suddenly declared, “I am an antiwar intellectual,” and became a guardian of the MacArthur Constitution.
Seiichi Morimura, too, was dissatisfied with being merely a mystery writer and one day jumped at The Devil’s Gluttony, which the Japanese Communist Party was peddling with its pitch of “How about a little leftism?”
Unit 731 in Manchuria had conducted Nazi-style human experiments.
Here, he proclaimed, was the truth about them.
The United States declared that “Japan is an aggressive nation so brutal that it deserved the atomic bombs,” and was desperate to prove it.
Yet wherever it looked, the Japanese were admirable, and there was no looting, rape, or abuse of prisoners of war.
Having no alternative, it fabricated the massacre of Nanking residents, the Bataan Death March, and the like.
If Unit 731 had committed even the slightest wrongdoing, the Americans would have jumped for joy and made thirty times the fuss they made over Nanking.
“The unit gave the U.S. military valuable data.
That is why the Americans let it off,” says the Japanese Communist Party.
Don’t talk nonsense.
In Tuskegee, Alabama, the United States left syphilis patients untreated for forty years, conducting human experiments involving several hundred American citizens.
Clinton finally acknowledged this, apologized, and paid compensation.
In fact, it also emerged that, after the Second World War, experiments had been conducted in Guatemala in which syphilis bacteria were put into the eyes of prisoners and intellectually disabled girls to see how many days it would take them to die, and Obama apologized.
The United States is a nation of human experimentation.
There is no room for Japan to enter the picture.
Morimura knew none of this and, wanting to play the intellectual, fell for Kenji Miyamoto’s smooth talk.
Unlike these poseurs, some writers handle left-wing material with full calculation.
Toyoko Yamasaki is one.
Take, for example, The Unsetting Sun, modeled on Japan Airlines.
Yamasaki takes refuge in saying it is fiction, but its protagonist, “Onchi,” is Kantaro Ogura, chairman of the Japan Airlines labor union.
He was a hard-core Communist Party activist who flew the red flag over Mitsukoshi while studying at the University of Tokyo.
Left-wing activists are popular with women.
Even Susumu Nishibe was popular.
Ogura was tall and handsome, so he was more popular still.
Mitsukoshi’s female shop assistants, intoxicated by Ogura’s agitational speeches, charged into the police ranks, and 160 were seriously injured.
Ogura concealed this history of activism, slipped into Japan Airlines, and became chairman of its labor union.
Roosevelt said, “Do not let Japan have even a clockwork airplane.”
Shizuma Matsuo persuaded GHQ, which had prohibited even university courses in aerodynamics, to approve “a Japan Airlines run entirely by Japanese.”
What lay behind that is a subject for another article, but Matsuo intended to make Japan Airlines the foundation for rebuilding Japanese aviation.
That was why he established the Aviation Safety Agency to retain prewar pilots, and also sent personnel to the U.S. military to learn even the know-how of air traffic control.
Ogura, however, was different.
Just as he had nearly destroyed Mitsukoshi, he set about wrecking the fledgling Japan Airlines.
As he had done with Mitsukoshi’s female shop assistants, he manipulated Japan Airlines stewardesses into demonstrating in Ginza.
Their demands were a sixfold increase in monthly pay, chauffeur-driven cars to take them to work, and two days of menstrual leave.
Stockings were to be supplied free of charge.
Ogura called strike after strike, flights continued to be canceled, and Japan Airlines fell into the red.
Matsuo spent entire nights in collective bargaining with Ogura, pleading the importance of Japan Airlines.
During one of these many bargaining sessions, Matsuo’s daughter became critically ill with leukemia.
When the possibility of suspending the negotiations was raised, Ogura brazenly declared, “Take advantage of it,” and kept Matsuo at the bargaining table until dawn, day after day.
The father did not reach his daughter’s bedside in time for her death.
It was then that the union members first saw Ogura’s cruel true face.
The stewardesses wept.
Having lost his place among them, Ogura volunteered for an overseas assignment.
Yamasaki concealed these facts and wrapped Ogura in lies to turn him into a hero.
That novel concludes with the Japan Airlines crash at Mount Osutaka.
The cause was Boeing’s botched work.
Had Matsuo’s dream of rebuilding Japanese aviation been fulfilled, it could never have happened.
Yamasaki made a hero of Ogura, the man who had destroyed that dream.
Yamasaki flavored excrement with curry and fed it to unsuspecting Japanese readers.
Now, in The Man of Destiny, she portrays Mainichi Shimbun reporter Takichi Nishiyama as “a journalist who battles power.”
This, too, is a pack of lies.
He posed as a journalist, made advances to a female Foreign Ministry employee, and slept with her to obtain information.
I am not saying that was wrong.
But if he was a reporter, why did he not protect his source?
He piled up lies, claiming that she had seduced him.
That alone disqualifies him as a reporter.
A reporter becomes a reporter only by writing up the information he obtains.
Yet he did not even turn it into an article.
He took the information to the Socialist Party and used it to put pressure on the government.
That is the conduct of a corporate extortionist, not a newspaperman.
Yamasaki turned such a lowlife into a hero standing up to power.
By power, she meant the Liberal Democratic Party government.
Surely that is wrong.
The real power that dominates Japan is the United States.
While declaring that territorial expansion through war is unacceptable, it continues to occupy Okinawa.
But it wants the strategic bases, not the one million residents.
Even now, it thinks it should have killed them all when it landed on Okinawa.
So it kept the bases as they were and pushed only the burden of supporting the residents onto Japan.
To the Japanese rejoicing at the reversion, it said that they should therefore show their gratitude for America’s goodwill, and it still pesters Japan for money to maintain the bases.
Tsuneo Watanabe of the Yomiuri Shimbun, whom Yamasaki portrayed as a journalist on the take, was in Washington at the time.
He says that textile negotiations were tied to Okinawa’s reversion, but that, too, is one aspect of American greed.
How can anyone claim to “stand up to power” while ignoring the United States, which deceives and threatens Japan to plunder its wealth?
What was laughable was that Katsuya Okada, a man with zero thinking ability who had been taken in by Yamasaki’s lies, apologized to the shameless Nishiyama.
This man is better suited to drumming up customers at Aeon than to being a politician.
No Foreigner Who Practices Judo Is a Good Person
On the very day that news of Japan’s surrender arrived, the Soviet Union repudiated the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact and invaded Manchuria.
When Japan formally surrendered, it began attacking from the Kuril Islands toward Hokkaido, and while the surrender documents were being signed aboard the Missouri, it was landing troops on what are now the four Northern Islands.
A looter at a fire steals household belongings in the confusion while the house is still burning.
The expression describes the despicable act of taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune, but the Soviet Union brazenly stole territory after the fire had been extinguished.
“Shameless” does not begin to describe such an appalling act.
The man responsible was Stalin.
Purging political rivals was his hobby, and a drawing in his own hand survives to this day, showing a man suspended in the air by his bound genitals as an instruction on how to kill.
The vulgar dictator was actually a short man, 165 centimeters tall.
That was why he wore height-increasing shoes.
Kim Jong Il had no monopoly on those.
For that reason, Stalin surrounded himself with short men such as Molotov and Khrushchev.
With such a cringing disposition, he had no qualms about stealing the four Northern Islands after the fire was out.
Half a century later, another short man appeared in the Kremlin.
He was Putin, a former KGB man bearing the name Vladimir, “conqueror of the world.”
Sympathetic foreign news reports put him at 168 centimeters, a full three centimeters taller than Stalin.
His personality, too, resembles Stalin’s, and he surrounds himself with short aides such as Medvedev.
He also shows political rivals no mercy.
Although he does not hang them by their genitals, Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta, who had continued to criticize Putin, was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in 2006.
That same year, former KGB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, who had accused Putin of assassinating political opponents, was murdered in London, where he had sought exile, after being dosed with hundreds of millions of becquerels of polonium.
That Putin returned to the presidency this spring.
From a Japanese perspective, Russians are already untrustworthy enough, and the reappearance of a man who, apart from his hair, is the spitting image of the earlier dictator who stole the four Northern Islands is certainly unwelcome.
Yet there are fools in this world.
Yoshibumi Wakamiya, the Asahi Shimbun’s editor-in-chief, who was invited to Putin’s press conference, is one of them.
Although Putin had demanded so much from Japan, there was no mention of Japan in his statement of foreign policy intentions.
A Japanese reporter would have walked out, but instead Wakamiya ingratiatingly asked, “Have you forgotten Japan?”
This is the man who also wrote, in an effort to please South Korea, that perhaps Japan might give it Takeshima.
Putin, too, praised this court-jester diplomacy: “I like the way you ask without making me angry.
What an endearing fellow.”
Japan had previously angered him by demanding the return of all four Northern Islands.
“Wouldn’t a draw, as in judo, do?” the short man replied.
Wakamiya was deeply moved that Lord Putin had used the Japanese word hikiwake, “draw,” and, under the headline “It Is Time to Rebutton Our Relationship,” began advocating acceptance of Putin’s proposal of two islands plus something more.
Surely a newspaperman’s role is to openly criticize the rapacity of Russia, a shameless state worse than a looter at a fire.
Incidentally, no foreigner who practices judo is any good.
At the Sydney Olympics, the Frenchman Douillet, who had been defeated by Shinichi Shinohara’s uchi-mata-sukashi counterthrow, took advantage of an officiating error and claimed the gold medal.
Whatever may be tolerated in other sports, lies are unacceptable in judo.
Such a despicable man is no judoka.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt also liked judo.
It is said that he became president by having McKinley assassinated.
He was so adept at deception that one can hardly blame people for harboring such suspicions.
He pretended to help Cuba, only to turn it into a protectorate, and made the Philippines a colony.
Claiming that he would support the independence of Colombia’s province of Panama, he brought it under military control and swindled away the land for the canal.
I do not want such a man described as a judoka.
It is troubling that the more cunning foreigners are, the more they seem to like judo.
“Charcoal Briquette Kanae” Is Japan’s Deng Xiaoping
Kanae Kijima was put on trial on charges of deceiving men and killing them with charcoal briquettes.
She was so glib that one could only marvel at her audacity.
She brought to mind Aum’s “Whatever you say, Joyu has an answer.”
She never once said, “I concede.”
Her utterly brazen manner, so unlike that of the Japanese, eventually brought tears of frustration to the prosecutor’s eyes.
Around that time, Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura asked a dignitary visiting from Nanjing, “Wasn’t there really no Nanjing Massacre?”
The Chinese visitor, who had believed that Japanese people were supposed to apologize, was taken aback, but immediately replied, “We study history for the sake of peace.”
The Japanese felt that they had seen that response somewhere before.
China then once again sent ships to the Senkaku Islands and repeated, “The Senkakus have been Chinese territory since the Jurassic period.”
China began claiming sovereignty forty years ago.
That was after undersea oil deposits were discovered around the Senkakus, was it not?
Diplomacy means sincere dealings.
A country would surely never lie.
Still less would Deng Xiaoping lie—or so most Japanese had firmly believed.
But in this charcoal briquette trial, the Japanese saw the Chinese in the defendant Kijima.
For the first time, they learned that there are countries and people in this world who tell nothing but lies and feel no shame.
Even if Kanae Kijima receives the death penalty, she has helped awaken the Japanese.
Should that not allow her to rest in peace?