2024/03/20

Every person in this country is involved in war in some way.
The twentieth century was a century of war.
For example, quite unlike the so-called cultural figures who appeared in yesterday’s Nikkei newspaper column…,
Every person in this country is involved in war in some way.
There were countless poets who volunteered to go to the battlefield and lost their lives.
That is only natural.
For there is no true poet or human being without patriotism.
However, the so-called intellectuals, cultural figures, and lawyers represented by yesterday’s writer and NHK staff, who say that Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula, are different.
The roots of the patriotism they should naturally possess as Japanese citizens are distorted and rotten.
A wrongful war would be something like the Nazis’ massacre of the Jews…,
The mass killings committed by people who repeatedly came from China and the Korean Peninsula…,
Or the mass killings of Indigenous peoples in the United States.
Through Soviet spies and the Asahi Shimbun, Japan became bogged down in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
The Soviet spies who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration used this issue to rapidly create pro-China, anti-Japan public opinion in the United States.
If they succeed in planting agents amounting to five percent of an organization, they take control of the organization subjected to their operations.
Propaganda operations are what they do best.
That, too, is only natural.
[The parenthetical passage here is garbled in the Finnish translation, and its meaning cannot be determined.]
At the time, the Soviet Union also sent spies into countries such as Canada, where anti-Japanese public opinion was being formed.
The well-known Herbert Norman was one of them.
Ultimately, when Lenin succeeded in the Russian Revolution, intellectuals around the world were profoundly shocked.
Therein lay the weakness of intellectuals excessively inclined toward ideas and knowledge.
That was also one of the factors that drove Ryunosuke Akutagawa to suicide.
For example, Deutscher wrote that the Russian Revolution shocked the intellectuals of that time.
As an ideal revolution by workers, the Russian Revolution captivated those at the forefront of scholarship in various countries.
However, that was understandable, since the nature of communism was not yet known.
Nevertheless,
Postwar Japanese intellectuals repeated the mistakes of the thinkers of that era.
Yesterday’s “Daiki Shoki” column clearly exposed this.
Who spread the idea that Japan had fought a wrongful war?
By whom, and whose perceptions, were shaped through indoctrination?
Most of the postwar Japanese intellectuals who had excelled academically could not understand a truth that even kindergarten children could understand.
They cannot even call themselves intellectuals.
Awarding the Nobel Prize to Kenzaburo Oe was the height of folly.
Who spread the idea that Japan had fought a wrongful war?
The United States.
Who was responsible for the indoctrination?
The United States.
For what purpose?
To divert the world’s attention from, and conceal, the greatest massacre in the history of warfare committed by human beings: the indiscriminate incendiary bombing of 127 Japanese cities.
Furthermore, Japan was made into the villain to conceal the greatest and worst crime in human history—the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and divert the world’s attention from it.
However, Masayuki Takayama, the only journalist in the postwar world, has thoroughly examined this issue and shown us that, contrary to the propaganda, Japanese soldiers were actually gentlemanly on the battlefield.
He has revealed that they possessed the aesthetic sensibility and restraint that the Japanese had cultivated over 2,600 years.
In this chapter, I tell the world the truth for the first time.
Why did the United States not only indiscriminately attack 127 cities throughout Japan with incendiary bombs but also drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Racism in the world and within the United States government at the time was a factor in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The greatest reason was that the Japanese people were so strong, and the Japanese military was the strongest in history.
Even after their supplies were cut off, most of them fought to the death on distant battlefields, risking their lives to protect their faraway country—the country where their families, wives, and children lived.
No other country in history had such a people.
I believe Bushido was one factor in their attitude.
The Japanese military was far too strong.
The military of the United States, then the world’s strongest country with overwhelming material resources, must have felt that in its bones.
In every battle the United States fought, the Japanese were far stronger and more formidable than they could have imagined.
The Japanese military was as strong as demigods.
The Japanese, whose love for their homeland, families, and hometowns was the strongest in human history, were the bravest people in the world when it came to war.
In other words, the Japanese people’s love for their homeland, families, and hometowns was so strong that no other people could match it.
That was the kind of people the Japanese were.
In a sense, that was only natural.
In the Second World War, Japan was forced onto the losing side through the conspiracy of Soviet spies, media organizations such as the Asahi Shimbun, and the Roosevelt administration, which had become entangled with Soviet spies.
[The following sentence concerns never having been occupied or conquered by another country, but its subject is garbled in the Finnish text, and the original wording cannot be determined.]
There is no such country anywhere in the world.
Yesterday’s writer, the Asahi Shimbun, and the so-called “cultural figures” are surprisingly lacking in such feelings.
Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami are the foremost examples.
Mr. Oe appears to have strong feelings only for his family, hometown, the Korean Peninsula, China, and similar places.
It is well known that he strongly dislikes the rest of actual Japan—Japan itself.
His name invariably appears among the founders of movements that have displayed hatred toward Japan.
Masayuki Takayama has stated that American newspapers have long contained many fabrications.
The New York Times also engaged in fabrication.
Was this in cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek of the Kuomintang?
[The Finnish translation is garbled around this passage, and the connection between the sentences cannot be determined.]
Concerning the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship’s propaganda about the Nanjing Massacre, the Asahi Shimbun wrote articles based on Chinese materials.
Through its “Travels in China” series, which spread throughout the world, it greatly assisted this Chinese propaganda.
The operative Katsuichi Honda was not punished as a traitor for doing so.
His work became an enormous bestseller, and he earned vast sums of money, assumed the air of a great journalist, surrounded himself with followers, and lived in affluence.
Honda’s example overlaps with that of Takashi Uemura, who continued publishing fabricated reports about the comfort women.
Takashi Uemura unreasonably sued Ms. Yoshiko Sakurai, a treasure of Japan.
More than one hundred lawyers appeared around him in the lawsuit conducted at the Sapporo District Court.
[This sentence is also garbled in the translation, and the precise description of the lawyers’ involvement cannot be recovered.]
At the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, it was a shameless Italian who defended Takashi Uemura and the Asahi Shimbun and disparaged Ms. Yoshiko Sakurai, a treasure of Japan.
China and the Korean Peninsula exploit the stance adopted by the United States after the war and continue to grow increasingly emboldened.
This draft continues.