August 7, 2020.
NHK’s Rekishi Hiwa Historia: I-400, the Phantom Giant Submarine presented the Imperial Japanese Navy’s enormous I-400 submarine and its specially designed Seiran attack aircraft.
Placing that technological achievement alongside a dialogue between Takayama Masayuki and Otaka Miki concerning Japanese naval and aviation technology, the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, HMS Dreadnought, the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales, the GHQ occupation, and the WGIP, this article examines both Japan’s technological history and the historical consciousness that emerged after the war.

For some time, I had believed that the special series of dialogues between Takayama Masayuki, whom I regard as a journalist unique in the postwar world and one of the world’s foremost critics of civilization, and Ms. Otaka Miki contained facts, sentence by sentence, that should be known not only by the Japanese people but by people throughout the world.
Today, I finally carried that intention out and transmitted it to the world.
The friend who helped me with the publishing work apparently wondered, because of the sheer volume involved, whether I had lost my mind (laughs).
At almost the same time, I happened to see NHK’s Rekishi Hiwa Historia: I-400, the Phantom Giant Submarine.
The program, broadcast on August 5, 2020, examined the enormous I-400 submarine constructed by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
A hull 122 meters long.
Three specially designed Seiran attack aircraft stored inside a cylindrical hangar only about 3.5 meters in diameter.
As I watched the program’s account of the technological and conceptual ingenuity embodied in the vessel, I could not help feeling that there was a remarkable coincidence with the Takayama–Otaka dialogue I had just been publishing.
【Text】
For some time, I had believed that the special series of dialogues between Takayama Masayuki, whom I regard as a journalist unique in the postwar world and one of the world’s foremost critics of civilization, and Ms. Otaka Miki contained facts, sentence by sentence, that should be known not only by the Japanese people but by people throughout the world.
Today, I finally carried that intention out and transmitted it to the world.
The friend who helped me with the publishing work apparently wondered, because of the sheer volume involved, whether I had lost my mind (laughs).
After watching the Giants vs. Tigers game that day, I watched NHK’s News Watch 9, something I had rarely done normally in recent times.
I do not know the reason, but perhaps because Arima was absent, I did not have to watch it with the feeling of disgust I so often experienced.
I kept watching, and then Rekishi Hiwa Historia began.
I watched it thinking: what an extraordinary coincidence.
It was an extremely valuable program.
This is what NHK ought to be.
This is precisely the kind of programming on which NHK should concentrate its efforts.
What is utterly unacceptable is for its news programs to present views shaped by GHQ indoctrination, a self-denigrating view of Japanese history, pro-China and pro-Korea commentary, or reporting that resembles the work of Chinese agents.
Japanese viewers, like me, must have learned many of these things for the first time and at the same time been astonished by the technological capabilities Japan possessed in those days.
A total length of 122 meters!
By far the largest submarine in the world at the time.
Inside a cylindrical hangar only about 3.5 meters in diameter were three specially designed Seiran attack aircraft—something that, I believe, people other than the Japanese of that era would scarcely have conceived of, let alone completed.
Takayama:
Japan was always one or two steps ahead of Europe and America.
People say that one year of war equals ten years in peacetime, but it took Britain and America three years to catch up with Japanese aviation technology.
In other words, Japan was thirty years ahead.
Readers of this column who watched the program that day must have felt much the same as I did.
Takayama:
And yet the Japanese people, who had once been so strong, were deprived of that strength.
For two thousand years, Western nations had maintained a particular method of naval warfare.
Ships would close with the enemy, fire their secondary guns, and drive their bows into the sides of opposing vessels.
That was why their bows were fitted with rams.
But in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, Japan demonstrated a completely different method.
Without ever making physical contact with the opposing ships, Japan used the destructive power of its main guns to sink one vessel after another.
Moreover, during the Russo-Japanese War, special explosives caused 18,000-ton steel warships to burn and sink.
It was an extraordinary phenomenon.
Otaka:
So the world came to regard Japan as a threat.
Takayama:
Japan moved away from the ram-based naval tactics that had continued since the age of ancient Greece and transformed naval warfare around battleships using their main batteries.
Following that example, Britain produced the Dreadnought.
That was what came to be called the dreadnought battleship.
Larger and more powerful vessels became known as super-dreadnoughts.
By the time of the Second World War, the Prince of Wales was a 30,000-ton-class ship and was regarded as an enormous modern battleship.
It was supposed to have no enemy capable of defeating it, but when Japan fought Britain and America, Japanese aircraft sank it.
Japan was always one or two steps ahead of Europe and America.
People say that one year of war equals ten years in peacetime, but it took Britain and America three years to catch up with Japanese aviation technology.
In other words, Japan was thirty years ahead.
Otaka:
It was that revolutionary a method of warfare.
Takayama:
Therefore, just as had happened with the former Spanish Empire, once this powerful Japan had finally been forced to surrender, the question became how to prevent the country from rising again.
The answer was what I call the Las Casas method: portray the Japanese as a cruel people and destroy their morale.
That was why GHQ implemented the “WGIP.”
Japan was to be portrayed as an undemocratic and backward nation whose people had to escape from being a cruel and barbaric people and become individualistic.
They then looked among the Japanese for someone who could perform the role of Las Casas.
One could say that Ienaga Saburō and Azuma Shirō played that role (laughs).
＊After that, people such as Chikushi Tetsuya and Furutachi Ichirō, and later Ōkoshi Kensuke, Arima, Kuwako and others, came to play that role.