In my July 27, 2017 article, “If They Read This Chapter, Even So-Called Intellectuals and Opinion Leaders in the West Who Are Ignorant of the History and Facts of Southeast Asia Will Understand,” I criticized the Nanjing issue from the perspective of the historical reality of the Chinese Communist Party.
What I showed in this chapter was the terrifying historical reality of mass killing, people’s trials, torture, forced confessions, illegal detention, the Cultural Revolution, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, and even killing quotas carried out by the Chinese Communist Party against its own people.
During the Cultural Revolution, party organization officials, university professors, elementary and junior-high-school teachers, writers, artists, old families, landlords, capitalists, and others who possessed knowledge, property, and reputation became targets of rebellion movements one after another.
Private trials were held, forced confessions by torture, arbitrary arrests, illegal detention, beatings to death, and suicides occurred one after another, and people’s lives and property were no longer protected at all.
Furthermore, in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries carried out under Mao Zedong, killing quotas were even imposed according to population.
Through people’s trials that did not deserve to be called trials, many people were executed within a short time.
This is the history of mass murder carried out by the Chinese Communist regime against its own people.
I was asking people around the world, especially Western intellectuals and opinion leaders ignorant of Southeast Asia and modern and contemporary Chinese history, to consider the meaning of the fact that China, with such a reality behind it, has spread the Nanjing issue throughout the world as anti-Japanese propaganda.
Is the story of the Nanjing Massacre not something fabricated by transferring part of the Chinese Communist Party’s own history, the violence of Chinese society, and the reality of the Chinese Communist regime onto the Japanese military, as if it were the work of Japanese soldiers?
That is the question I was posing.
In this context, the guilt of the Asahi Shimbun and Haruki Murakami is extremely grave.
For many years, the Asahi Shimbun has spread anti-Japanese discourse, including the Nanjing issue, throughout the world.
In Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami referred to the figure of “400,000” as the number of deaths in the Nanjing Incident.
For a person treated as a world-famous writer to place such a number in his work without sufficiently understanding the historical reality of the Chinese Communist Party can provide serious material for anti-Japanese propaganda on the Chinese side.
What I was criticizing was not a mere literary expression.
It was a problem concerning the honor of the Japanese military, Japan’s historical awareness, and Japan’s position in the world.
This chapter shows that my criticism of Haruki Murakami was fully connected to the Nanjing issue, the history of mass killing by the Chinese Communist Party, Asahi Shimbun-like anti-Japanese reporting, and the problem of international information warfare.
June 28, 2017
I criticized Haruki Murakami’s reference to 400,000 in Nanjing within the context of the Asahi Shimbun, NHK, Chinese-side propaganda, and international information warfare.
July 22, 2017
I argued that each time China and South Korea revealed their true nature, the lifeline of the postwar intellectuals was coming to an end.
July 27, 2017
Based on the history of mass killing by the Chinese Communist Party against its own people, I criticized the Nanjing issue and the danger of Haruki Murakami for readers around the world.