This essay challenges the postwar narrative that Japan alone fought an “evil war,” examining the influence of GHQ propaganda, the Asahi Shimbun, NHK, certain foreign correspondents, and postwar intellectuals.
It discusses Soviet information operations, the Roosevelt administration, the firebombing of Japanese cities, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the strength and discipline of the Japanese military, and the Japanese people’s profound love of country, family, and homeland.

March 24, 2019
In discussing the true character of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, one must consider figures such as Pio d’Emilia, Michael Penn, David McNeill, Justin McCurry, and Jeffrey Kingston, together with Koichi Nakano, who has supplied them with information used to disparage Japan.
What is most disturbing about their conduct is that they have chosen to live in Japan, one of the cleanest and safest countries in the world, where even a lost wallet is commonly delivered to the police and returned to its owner.
They enjoy life in Japan, and some have Japanese wives, yet under the title of foreign correspondent they continue to write articles for newspapers in their home countries that denigrate the country in which they live.
Japan is one of the safest countries in the world, filled with excellent food, and has one of the world’s largest numbers of Michelin-starred restaurants.
They enjoy all the benefits of this country while repeatedly attacking it.
Equally abnormal is the conduct of the Asahi Shimbun, its affiliated television networks, and other news programs that have treated such correspondents with deference and repeatedly presented them as authorities in reports intended to disparage Japan.
This is a spectacle without parallel anywhere else in the world.
Who created this extraordinary spectacle?
It was created by GHQ, by Marxism, meaning communism, and by counterfeit moralism.
I have long believed that the statements and activities of these people may reflect political, economic, or informational influence from China and the Korean Peninsula.
Pio d’Emilia’s reporting may also have played a considerable role in encouraging Italy, then being visited by Xi Jinping, to support the Belt and Road Initiative.
There is also said to be a Frenchman living in Japan, perhaps in Kyoto, who distributes anti-Japanese pamphlets throughout Paris.
The activities of this one man may have helped to increase anti-Japanese attitudes in France, just as the reporting of journalists at the Süddeutsche Zeitung has done in Germany.
The background and financing of such activity deserve close examination.
Why did some foreign journalists so fiercely oppose legislation intended to prevent espionage?
The Japanese people must think seriously about that question.
Through the combined effect of their campaigns and the reporting attitudes of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, Japan has become one of the world’s most permissive environments for espionage.
China and the Korean Peninsula may be using foreign correspondents and intellectuals based in Japan to influence political opinion in their countries of origin.
Whether the goal is to divide the European Union or to increase anti-Japanese sentiment within Europe, the Japanese people must confront that possibility.
March 19, 2019, 12:11 a.m. | Diary
The chapter I published on January 25, 2019, entitled “Pitiful Children Who Believed One Hundred Percent in GHQ’s Dissemination of What Were, in the Truest Sense, False Rumors—Such Is the Reality of These People, the Asahi Shimbun, and NHK,” must be reread by every Japanese citizen and by the world.
To say that the twentieth century was an age of war means that almost everyone in the countries involved participated in war in one form or another.
Unlike the so-called cultural figures who contributed to yesterday’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun column, many people volunteered to go to the battlefield.
The poets and writers who died in war are too numerous to count.
It is inconceivable that a true poet could have no love for his country.
Yet the so-called intellectuals, cultural figures, and lawyers represented by yesterday’s writer are different.
So too are NHK employees who casually declare that Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula.
The fundamental and entirely natural instinct of patriotism within them has been distorted, or deliberately distorted, and corrupted.
If there are wars that can rightly be called evil, they include the Nazi extermination of the Jews, the repeated mass killing of their own people by regimes in China and on the Korean Peninsula, and the destruction of Native American peoples by the United States.
Japan was drawn into the quagmire of the Sino-Japanese War through the actions of Soviet agents and the Asahi Shimbun.
Soviet operatives who had penetrated the Roosevelt administration then used the situation to generate pro-China and anti-Japan sentiment in the United States.
They believed that if they succeeded in placing even five percent of their operatives within a target organization, they could dominate the whole institution.
Propaganda was their supreme mission.
Regarding the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, there are Pio d’Emilia, Michael Penn, David McNeill, Justin McCurry, Jeffrey Kingston, and Koichi Nakano, who has provided them with information used to disparage Japan.
Nakano appears to exercise influence not only at Sophia University but also within parts of NHK’s news division.
The countries that benefit most from their reporting are China and the Korean Peninsula.
Their purpose is to divide Japanese public opinion and weaken Japan’s national power.
They seek to prevent constitutional revision and keep Japan in a condition where it can always be threatened and attacked.
They seek to prevent Japan from recovering territory violated or unlawfully occupied, including Takeshima, seized after the war behind the so-called Syngman Rhee Line.
I believe this is one purpose of their information operations.
The political cultures of China and the Korean Peninsula are deeply marked by profound wrongdoing and plausible falsehoods.
China is a one-party dictatorship controlled by the Communist Party.
It routinely employs a form of rhetoric that reverses formal logic by 180 degrees: falsehood is truth, truth is falsehood, black is white, and white is black.
North Korea is, in reality, an ancient-style despotic state.
South Korea also retains aspects of a political culture rooted in similar traditions.
The Soviet Union inserted agents even into countries such as Canada, where anti-Japanese opinion was formed.
The famous Herbert Norman has often been alleged to have been one of them.
When Lenin succeeded in carrying out the Russian Revolution, intellectuals around the world were profoundly shaken because of the characteristic weakness of intellectuals: they were excessively theoretical and detached from reality.
It may even have been one factor in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s suicide.
Isaac Deutscher, for example, wrote of the tremendous impact the Russian Revolution had on the intellectuals of the time.
Gifted scholars sitting in their studies throughout the world regarded it as an ideal revolution carried out by workers.
Since the true nature of communism had not yet been revealed, their reaction was, in one sense, understandable.
Yet Japan’s postwar intellectuals repeated precisely the same error.
Yesterday’s “Oiso Koiso” column exposed that fact vividly.
Who spread the belief that Japan had fought an evil war?
Who carried out this indoctrination?
The truth should have been understandable even to a kindergarten child, yet most of Japan’s postwar intellectuals failed entirely to comprehend it.
Their claim to the name “intellectual” is itself presumptuous.
Awarding the Nobel Prize to Kenzaburo Oe was the height of folly.
The claim that Japan fought an evil war was spread, needless to say, by the United States.
It was the product of American indoctrination.
For what purpose?
It was intended to divert the world’s attention from and conceal the indiscriminate firebombing of 127 Japanese cities, one of the greatest acts of civilian slaughter in the history of warfare.
It was also intended to divert attention from and justify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among the greatest and most terrible crimes in human history.
To accomplish that, Japan was portrayed as the ultimate criminal.
Yet the facts revealed through the genuine investigations of Masayuki Takayama, a journalist without equal in the postwar world, are the exact opposite of this propaganda.
Few soldiers behaved with greater civility on the battlefield than Japanese soldiers.
They possessed the aesthetic sense and moral discipline cultivated among the Japanese people over 2,600 years.
In this chapter, I tell the world the truth for the first time.
Why did the United States go beyond the indiscriminate firebombing of 127 Japanese cities and use atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
One factor was unquestionably the racial prejudice deeply embedded in American society and government at the time.
But the greatest reason was that the Japanese people, and the Japanese military, were among the strongest fighting forces in history.
Even when cut off from supplies, many Japanese soldiers fought to the death on distant battlefields in order to protect their homeland and the families, wives, and children who lived there.
Few peoples in world history had ever demonstrated such determination.
Bushido was undoubtedly one factor.
The Japanese military was simply too strong.
The armed forces of the United States, then the world’s most powerful country and equipped with overwhelming material resources, must have learned this in the most painful way.
In every battle fought against Japanese forces, their strength and tenacity far exceeded American expectations.
The Japanese military fought with the power of warrior gods.
The Japanese, whose love of country, family, and native land was perhaps stronger than that of any other people in history, became the bravest people in the world when war came.
Their love of their country, families, and home regions was so strong that no other nation could easily equal it.
That was the character of the Japanese people.
In one sense, this was entirely natural.
Through Soviet intrigue, war-promoting reporting by newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun, and the strategy of a Roosevelt administration influenced by Soviet operatives, Japan was maneuvered into a position where it would inevitably stand among the defeated nations.
For the first time in its history, Japan lost a war and was subjected to foreign occupation.
Until then, for more than two thousand years of recorded history, Japan had never been occupied and governed by another country.
There is no comparable nation elsewhere in the world.
The people whose love of country is astonishingly weak include yesterday’s writer, the Asahi Shimbun, and the so-called cultural figures of postwar Japan.
Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami are representative examples.
Oe appeared to possess strong feelings for his own family and native region, as well as for China and the Korean Peninsula.
Yet his words and actions revealed a powerful hostility toward the actual Japan in which he lived.
His name repeatedly appeared among the organizers of campaigns that openly expressed hostility toward Japan.
These people possessed minds inferior even to those of kindergarten children.
They believed one hundred percent in the false rumors disseminated by GHQ in the truest sense of that term.
They were pitiful children indoctrinated by the occupation authorities.
Such is the true character of these people, the Asahi Shimbun, NHK, and the postwar intellectual establishment.
To be continued.