In his essay published in Shukan Shincho, Masayuki Takayama reveals the historical fact that Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution were accepted in the Japanese-administered district of Shanghai, and criticizes China’s fabrication of history. During the Wuhan virus crisis, Israel’s response to the Chinese acting ambassador—“It was the Japanese who saved the Jews”—served to correct a distorted historical narrative.

May 13, 2020
“What are you talking about? It was the Japanese who helped the Jews.” “Shanghai was administered by Japan. Do not fabricate history.” … The acting ambassador deleted the fabricated parts from the official homepage.
The following is from an essay by Masayuki Takayama, which closes the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
This essay, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
This essay also brilliantly proves that China is a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies.
It is no exaggeration to say that Masayuki Takayama is a treasure of Japan.
The employees of the Asahi Shimbun may already be incurable madmen, but many NHK employees, excluding people such as Arima, are probably still decent, and even if they have been somewhat brainwashed, they can still be repaired sufficiently.
Reporters who can still be repaired, and people who make their living in television media, must read all of Masayuki Takayama’s works and study what reporting is and what journalism is.
The Coronavirus Effect
Michael Blumenthal, Treasury Secretary in the Carter administration, was born in 1926 in the city of Brandenburg, north of Berlin.
His Jewish parents ran a high-class clothing store, but when he was ten, the family’s circumstances darkened dramatically.
The Nazis, rising to power, intensified their exclusion of Jews, and on a moonlit night in November 1938, Goebbels’s storm troopers destroyed 267 synagogues and attacked and looted 7,500 Jewish shops.
His parents’ shop was also destroyed, and he himself was assaulted by a boy from the Hitler Youth.
The family abandoned their hometown and, barely escaping with their lives, fled onto a passenger-cargo ship departing from Naples.
The ship crossed Suez and called at British-ruled Bombay, Colombo, and Singapore.
Each time, they hoped to disembark, but nowhere allowed Jews to land.
Around the same time that the family left Naples, the St. Louis departed from Hamburg carrying one thousand Jews.
However, its destination, the U.S. protectorate of Cuba, refused them landing, and in New York they were not even allowed to dock.
After drifting for a month, the ship returned to Europe, and although some were able to disembark in Belgium, the Nazis soon occupied the country, and most of the passengers were sent to concentration camps.
But Blumenthal’s ship was fortunate.
At the end of its route, in Shanghai, the Jews were able to disembark.
The Japanese settlement, Hongkew, even allowed those without visas to reside there.
Across the Garden Bridge from Hongkew, on the Bund, stood buildings owned by Jewish financial houses such as Sassoon and Jardine Matheson, which had made fortunes in the opium trade.
They were Middle Eastern Semitic Jews, Sephardim, and were cold toward white Jews, the Ashkenazim.
In fact, Ashkenazim who fled to Palestine were refused landing and were sometimes shot dead.
The only places that accepted them were Manchukuo, controlled by the Kwantung Army, or the Japanese settlement in Shanghai.
About 30,000 people took refuge there.
Blumenthal, savoring such extraordinary good fortune, entered the former Japanese school in Hongkew that had become a housing facility.
Eventually the war ended, and the family was able to leave Shanghai, but Jews were rejected everywhere.
After waiting two years, the United States finally granted them entry.
To their surprise, in the United States under the Democratic administration, the Japanese who had been kind to them were treated as invaders worse than the Chinese.
It was not an environment in which one could say that one had survived thanks to the care of the Japanese.
The shrewd Blumenthal quickly cut the good Japan out of his own memory and threw it away.
In fact, even after the war, the U.S. Democratic Party continued to view Japan as an enemy and, just as before the war, continued to use the Chinese to contain Japan, even after China became a communist regime.
The Chinese Communist Party rode on the false story of the Nanjing Massacre concocted by the United States, pressed the Japanese for atonement, extracted ODA and technical assistance, and succeeded in half-modernizing.
To Americans, China looked like a convenient slave factory, and companies advanced into China one after another, while the U.S.-China relationship grew as strong as it had been in the days of Chiang Kai-shek.
Blumenthal, who played one part in that and made a name for himself, visited Shanghai again just a few years ago at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party.
At the former Japanese school in Hongkew, now renamed the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, he greeted people by saying, “The Japanese army was cruel” and “I will not forget the kindness of my Chinese friends.”
He was a man who knew no shame.
When the Wuhan virus spread, Israel, with a speed comparable to that of the United States, cut off travel to and from China.
Then Dai Yuming, China’s acting ambassador to Israel, criticized Israel’s heartlessness at a press conference, saying, “I am saddened. Is this how you coldly treat China, which accepted Jews during the Holocaust?” (bimonthly magazine Myrtos)
Until then, Israel had not particularly denied Blumenthal-type statements, but this time was different.
“What are you talking about? It was the Japanese who helped the Jews.” “Shanghai was administered by Japan. Do not fabricate history.” (same source)
The acting ambassador deleted the fabricated parts from the official homepage.
The coronavirus sometimes also works to correct historical distortion.