In my November 3, 2016 article, “An Essay Titled ‘The Outrageous Career of the UNESCO Director-General Who Made the “Nanjing Massacre” a World Heritage Item,’” my criticism had moved beyond Haruki Murakami as an individual and was directed toward the United Nations, UNESCO, the Asahi Shimbun, Kenzaburo Oe, and the entirety of Japan’s pseudo-moralism.
At that point, I clearly saw that the Nanjing issue was not merely a historical dispute, but a problem in which anti-Japanese propaganda by China and South Korea was being spread through international organizations and the Japanese domestic media.
The essay by Miroslav Marinov published in the monthly magazine Seiron showed that UNESCO and the United Nations were not neutral and fair international organizations, but highly political and corrupt bodies.
In particular, the career of Irina Bokova, who had served as Director-General of UNESCO, had grave significance when considering the true nature of international organizations.
I strongly warned Japanese people influenced by the Asahi Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, their affiliated television stations, and the NHK-like news space about that danger.
To accept their reporting and editorials as correct would damage the credibility and honor of Japan, weaken Japan’s national power, and ultimately serve the national strategies of China, South Korea, Russia, and other countries.
Within that context, I criticized the editorials of the Asahi Shimbun, the arguments of Kenzaburo Oe, and the immature writings of Haruki Murakami together as pseudo-moralism.
What is important is that this criticism was written before the 2017 controversy over the description of the Nanjing Incident in Killing Commendatore.
Already in November 2016, I had seen through the fact that the Nanjing issue, UNESCO, the Asahi Shimbun-like discourse space, and Haruki Murakami-like immature historical awareness all existed within the same structure.
Therefore, when Haruki Murakami wrote an inaccurate and dangerous description of the Nanjing Incident in Killing Commendatore in 2017, I criticized it not as an accidental literary expression, but as the very structure of postwar Japan’s pseudo-moralism and anti-Japanese propaganda appearing even inside a novelist’s fiction.