This article examines how false narratives in comfort women reporting and Nanjing Massacre reporting are constructed by left-wing activists and those influenced by Chinese or Korean Peninsula propaganda.
Through the records of the Shiro Azuma trial, including the Azuma diary, the alleged mailbag incident, textbook citations, California high school materials, and Chinese media reactions, it reveals the use of the “devil’s proof,” a tactic that demands opponents prove a fabricated claim did not happen.
It also links this method to the reporting style of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK.

April 23, 2020
In comfort women reporting and Nanjing Massacre reporting, how do left-wing activists, or people under the operations of China and the Korean Peninsula, tell lies?
I am republishing the chapter I sent out on July 15, 2019, under the title, “In order to prove it, they conducted a hand-grenade reenactment experiment in Nanjing and put a person into a bag under water to show that the mailbag incident was not unnatural.”
In this chapter, the court records below show how left-wing activists, or people under the operations of China and the Korean Peninsula, tell lies in comfort women reporting and Nanjing Massacre reporting.
I will make this clearly known to Japan and the world.
I will correct Japan and the world.
That is my mission.
The following is a fact I discovered on the internet just now and learned for the first time.
As I reread it for republication, I was astonished to learn that many of the people who make history textbooks are masses of self-tormenting historical views and anti-Japanese ideology, scholars who are like agents of China and South Korea.
Japanese citizens, we must immediately change the situation in which such lowlifes, fools who can be called traitors without exaggeration, and utter fools who call themselves scholars, have been allowed to write Japan’s history textbooks.
Otherwise, it will be impossible to stop the production of people such as those who forcibly held K-1, and those who make their living at the Asahi Shimbun and NHK while silently approving it and refusing to criticize it.
Still less will it be possible to stop the outrageous anti-Japanese education in China and South Korea.
The Wuhan virus has brought a great disaster to Japan in these respects as well.
The following is from Wikipedia.
The emphasis in the text and the passages marked with asterisks are mine.
I learned for the first time that, just as there was Seiji Yoshida in the comfort women issue, there really was also a former Japanese soldier who, taking advantage of the postwar atmosphere, or perhaps under operations from China and elsewhere, cooperated in the fabrication of the Nanjing Massacre.
Shiro Azuma, born April 27, 1912, Meiji 45, and died January 3, 2006, Heisei 18, was a Japanese soldier, conscripted serviceman, writer, and social activist.
As an army superior private in the Kyoto 16th Division, Fukuchiyama 20th Regiment, he took part in the Battle of Nanjing and accused Japan of the Nanjing Massacre, the Nanjing Incident, in his book My Nanjing Platoon.
He continued apology activities in China, the United States, and elsewhere.
Over descriptions in his diary, he became involved in a defamation trial with a former superior officer, and the Supreme Court ruled that the descriptions in the Azuma diary had no objective evidence and ordered compensation for damages.
Omission.
Whenever Azuma visited China, he was warmly welcomed in various places as a hero.
Omission.
Azuma testimony printed in textbooks.
Japan.
Hitotsubashi Publishing, World History B.
In 1993, Tokushi Kasahara quoted from Shiro Azuma’s notes in the textbook World History B, Hitotsubashi Publishing, saying that they killed village farmers so that soldiers could sleep peacefully.
“When billeting… we killed farmers and slept.
…They might attack us, so we killed them.
…” one Japanese soldier wrote in his diary.
Tokushi Kasahara, Hitotsubashi Publishing, World History B, 1993 textbook approval.
Chitoshi Uesugi and the Sankei Shimbun argued that the Azuma diary was a false story, a fabricated tale, and a suspicious source, and therefore inappropriate for use in textbooks.
Yoshiaki Itakura protested that quoting from a book then under dispute in the Azuma trial was problematic, and the publisher replaced it with the diary of Division Commander Kesago Nakajima.
As teaching material in California public high schools.
In the United States, in 2015, Azuma’s testimony was used as teaching material in world history classes at public high schools in California.
The material was The Century: America’s Time, a program by the cable television History Channel broadcast across the United States from 1999.
In that program, Azuma stated that during the war, whenever they found a Chinese woman, five men would always gang-rape her, and after the rape they would set her on fire and burn her.
Defamation trial.
A former superior officer, the former squad leader of the 1st Squad, 3rd Company, 20th Infantry Regiment, who was described in Azuma’s book as having killed a Chinese person by putting him into a mailbag, filed a defamation lawsuit on April 15, 1993, in the Tokyo District Court against three parties: Shiro Azuma, Masaki Shimozato, and Aoki Shoten.
The trial is also called the Azuma trial.
The plaintiff consulted with Yoshiaki Itakura, and the Association to Correct the Fiction of the Nanjing Incident was established at the office of the plaintiff’s attorney, Katsuhiko Takaike.
Itakura stated that he wanted to use this lawsuit as a breakthrough to prove the falsity of the alleged atrocities by the 20th Infantry Regiment, restore honor, and further reveal the fiction of the so-called “Nanjing Massacre.”
Content of the judgments.
Tokyo District Court judgment.
In April 1996, the first-instance judgment of the Tokyo District Court recognized the descriptions in the diary as fiction and ordered Azuma and the other two parties to pay 500,000 yen.
The defendants appealed.
In the first-instance judgment, with regard to the Nanjing Incident, the court followed the judgment in the Ienaga textbook trial and stated that it was a “generally undeniable fact” that “many Chinese prisoners and noncombatants were killed by Japanese soldiers.”
However, with regard to the mailbag incident, the court ruled that it should be considered unnatural, that there was no objective evidence, that it was insufficient to recognize it as fact, and that it was “dangerous to the perpetrator and not practically feasible.”
The plaintiff testified in court, “I never killed anyone in China.
I never raped anyone.
I never saw looting or dead bodies.”
Azuma’s defense team formed the Association to Support Mr. Shiro Azuma’s Nanjing Trial.
In order to prove that it did not constitute defamation, they conducted experiments to show that the mailbag incident was not unnatural, including a hand-grenade reenactment experiment in Nanjing and an experiment placing a person in a bag under water to measure the depth at which it would sink.
However, these experimental results and local investigations were also rejected in the judgment.
High Court, appeal court, judgment.
The first hearing of the appeal began on September 26, 1996, and on December 22, 1998, the Seventh Civil Division of the Tokyo High Court, presided over by Judge Koetsu Okuyama with Judges Masami Sugiyama and Yoichi Sato, dismissed the appeal.
In the appeal court, the actual “diary” said to have been written by Azuma before the war was submitted to the court.
However, the actual “diary” for the parts concerning the Nanjing campaign was not submitted.
Azuma’s side claimed that those parts of the “diary” had been written at the time in a “pocket notebook” and then copied out two or three years later.
However, that “pocket notebook” was not submitted to the court.
Furthermore, Azuma claimed that when he lent it to an exhibition, it was not returned.
However, that claim was denied by the person responsible for the exhibition.
Azuma argued in response that the diary was something he had “accurately recorded” from battlefield notes and the like between 1940 and March 1944.
However, in the judgment, the court found it questionable whether the Azuma diary had been written before the war, and there was a possibility that additions had been made after the war, and it ruled that “Azuma’s statements cannot be adopted in their entirety.”
The High Court also found that “there exist no pocket notebooks or other original materials concerning the period before March 1938, Showa 13.”
It further found that “the reason appellant Azuma was unable to reproduce and testify about concrete facts must be inferred to be that he had not witnessed the act in question, that is, that the act in question was not carried out.”
In the trial, many descriptions in the diary were also pointed out as giving rise to doubts, and it was held that “there is no evidence supporting the main parts, and they cannot be recognized as true.”
Omission.
After the High Court judgment.
Katsuhiko Takaike, attorney for the plaintiff’s legal team, stated that this judgment made clear that Azuma’s book itself lacked credibility.
He said that when the media and people who call themselves commentators expose misconduct by the former Japanese military, they often rely only on one-sided interviews with accusers, without verifying whether the claims are true or false, and write articles exactly as the accusers claim.
This case, too, was one such example.
He demanded fair reporting based on interviews with both parties, saying that the Azuma diary had been widely publicized, and that during the lawsuit, many newspapers and television stations had almost never interviewed the plaintiff’s side.
At the High Court judgment on December 22, 1998, Chinese media including Beijing Central Television, Jiangsu Television, Nanjing Television, and Hong Kong Television came to cover the event.
The Chinese media were shocked and angered that the judge appeared thirteen minutes late, that the delivery of the judgment was too brief, and that the plaintiff did not appear at the press conference.
Furthermore, at the plaintiff’s press conference, Chinese reporters protested against a banner reading “Victory in the Trial Over the Fabrication of the Nanjing Massacre,” saying, “This banner deeply hurts the hearts of many Chinese people, so please remove it,” and “It is an insult to Chinese people,” but it was not removed.
At the press conference, questions about the Nanjing Massacre came one after another.
Attorney Katsuhiko Takaike answered, “My personal view is that it is a fabrication.
Because it was war, I do not think Japanese soldiers did absolutely nothing wrong.
However, the Nanjing Massacre is not that sort of thing.
For example, if there were three murders, you would not call that a massacre, would you?”
When a reporter from Jiangsu Television protested that because it was Japan that caused the Nanjing Massacre, Japan should present evidence, Takaike countered, “If you say it happened, then the side making that claim should present the evidence.”
This Chinese way of speaking, this propaganda, is common to the way the Asahi Shimbun, NHK, and others speak in their reporting on Moritomo and Kake.
It is also common to the “yakuza-style false accusation” brought forward by activists opposing the Tomari nuclear power plant, involving claims about faults from tens of thousands of years ago under land and sea.
It is also common to the “yakuza-style false accusation” of activists opposing the restart of the Ikata nuclear power plant, who claim that if Mount Aso erupts, pyroclastic flows will reach Ehime Prefecture.
In other words, although they naturally cannot present evidence, because it is fabricated, they uniformly use as their logic the devil’s proof, demanding that the target of their attack present evidence.
This chapter of mine should also make it clear that the Asahi Shimbun, NHK, and others are under Chinese operations.
The rest is omitted.