Using Aristotle’s three forms of rhetoric as a guide, this essay examines what constitutes an enemy in politics, and argues from the standpoint of justice and injustice that the Chinese Communist Party’s concealment of the initial outbreak of COVID-19 and its human-rights abuses cannot be overlooked. It further draws on the lesson of Japan’s wartime alliance with Nazi Germany to insist that Japan must never again choose evil as its friend.

2020-06-02
This criterion is a binary choice between justice and injustice, and evil is determined on the basis of the concepts of good and evil that mankind has acquired from the past to the present.
Now, the people of the world have recognized the vast injustice known as the Chinese Communist Party.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
How is an enemy determined?
Then, once again, what is an enemy?
There are three ways of thinking about this.
According to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, translated by Shichiro Shizuka, there are three kinds of thought: epideictic rhetoric, deliberative rhetoric, and forensic rhetoric.
Epideictic rhetoric is defined by praise or blame based on sensibility, and an enemy is determined by whether something is beautiful or ugly.
If the manners of a different ethnic group are bad, and if its clothing is ugly, then evil is determined by sensibility.
However, this is precisely a kind of hate speech, and such a method of determination cannot be adopted in the modern age.
Next is deliberative rhetoric, which defines the enemy by a calculation of profit and loss premised on intellect.
If something brings economic benefit, it is good, and if it brings damage, it is evil.
However, this is precisely the method by which Japan, in order to gain inbound tourism, ended up inviting in the novel coronavirus along with it, and there is no justice in that.
The final form, forensic rhetoric, is defined by accusation or defense based on reason.
This criterion is a binary choice between justice and injustice, and evil is determined on the basis of the concepts of good and evil that mankind has acquired from the past to the present.
Now, the people of the world have recognized the vast injustice known as the Chinese Communist Party.
They have witnessed the reality of a disease being spread, concealed, and responsibility for it being shifted elsewhere.
Faced with the choice of whether to accuse this injustice as an enemy or defend it as an ally, the statesmen of our country must make the proper judgment.
When we think of it in this way, can those who have labored for the benefit of the defendant, or have flattered the defendant, or those who cannot show a clear will to prosecute, really serve as leaders of our country?
No, absolutely not.
Indeed, we must not forget that the Liberal Democratic Party was founded with constitutional revision as its purpose, and yet there are those who do not make clear their will to revise the Constitution, and that this spring there were those who planned to invite Xi Jinping as a state guest and have him sit together with His Majesty the Emperor.
When we assume that international politics from now on will be a place where the defendant is judged, to make someone who has no will to punish, or worse, someone who has been intimate with the defendant, a statesman of our country would be nothing but national suicide.
What would happen if we were to overlook an evil act that brought about the disaster of plague and also seeks to cleanse a particular ethnic group?
History has already proved the answer.
I believe that the only mistake committed by the righteous and dignified Empire of Japan was that, in concluding a treaty bearing the Imperial signature and seal, it became an ally of that murderer.
On December 6, 1938, Japan decided, in the Outline of Measures Toward the Jews adopted at a Five Ministers’ Conference by five ministers including the Prime Minister, that it would not exclude the Jews.
However, in the process, there was the wording, “To adopt an attitude like that of Germany, of extreme exclusion, would not accord with the spirit of racial equality that the Empire has long advocated,” and Japan concluded the alliance in 1940 while recognizing that the Nazis were excluding the Jews.
It may be possible to defend this by saying, “Even if Japan knew of exclusion, perhaps it did not know that it extended as far as massacre.”
However, Josef Meisinger, a colonel in the Waffen-SS who was appointed military attaché at the German Embassy in Japan from April 1941, submitted to the Japanese government a request concerning the “methods” for massacring the Jews living in Shanghai, including women and children, who were under Japanese influence.
From this as well, Japan recognized the clear murderous intent possessed by the Nazis.
Despite this, Japan maintained its friendship with Germany.
Because of the gravity of this sin, even with the heroic efforts of Chiune Sugihara and Kiichiro Higuchi in rescuing Jews, did Japan not bear a guilt that decisively determined its postwar status?
Now, as a publicly known fact, it has become clear that China spent its initial response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus on concealment.
Furthermore, the fact that many people, including women and children, are being forcibly detained and treated inhumanely simply because they belong to a particular ethnic group has become an issue in the international community.
The world will not overlook such injustice, and the time will surely come when responsibility for it is pursued.
At that time, what would happen if Japan had been “an ally of the enemy of the world”?
Needless to say, legislators who, even at this stage, cry out for the protection of the occupation Constitution born of defeat and humiliation are beyond discussion.
Yet if self-proclaimed conservative legislators who speak of constitutional revision with their mouths, but in their hearts mistake friend for enemy and enemy for friend, become leaders, Japan’s future can only be dark.
Germany once fought a two-front war in the First World War and lost, and then fought a two-front war again in the Second World War and lost.
Japan once chose evil as its friend and lost, and because of the consequences of that choice, we conservatives have had to spend considerable effort defending against the false accusation that “the friend of the devil must be a devil.”
It is absolutely impermissible for Japan’s statesmen ever again to choose evil as their friend.
Japan must be a moral nation.
This essay continues.