Using the Okinawa incident as a starting point, this essay contrasts a peacetime crime with the realities of occupied postwar Japan, criticizes the inability of certain media audiences to imagine historical context, and highlights Japan’s Buddhist-rooted spirit of forgiveness. It exposes how false narratives were constructed and disseminated as anti-Japan propaganda.

2016-05-22

If this had been Japan at a time when it had suffered a thoroughly devastating defeat and was under occupation, one can easily imagine what the situation would have been like—
This time, the Okinawa incident occurred entirely in peacetime.
If this had been Japan at a time when it experienced the first great massacre in human history, suffered a thoroughly devastating defeat, and was under occupation, then what it would have been like is a fact that anyone other than a person of extraordinary stupidity or one completely lacking imagination should be able to understand, yet readers of the Asahi Shimbun have come along knowing nothing of it at all.
I had, as expected, felt this vaguely, but Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, has also written magnificently about this matter as fact in his works.
However, the Japanese people (Japanese women) have never, up to now, harbored resentment over this matter or sought compensation for damages.
That is the national character of Japan, entirely different from that of Koreans and Chinese.
All of it was regarded as the result of war, something humanity has continued to wage throughout all ages and regions, culminating in a world war, and thus they held feelings of forgiveness toward the perpetrators.
That is likely because the Japanese are people who have the spirit of Buddhism at their very core.
As Professor Tsutomu Nishioka, a genuine scholar—rare in postwar Japan—who is carrying out the work that should be done as a scholar for the sake of the Japanese state and the Japanese people, has elucidated and taught,
the lie begun by a preposterous man named Song Duhoe, who refused both to return to the Korean Peninsula and to lose Japanese nationality, and who lived without paying rent—meaning he was illegally occupying—Kyoto University’s Kumano Dormitory, with which he had no connection,
was seized upon by a woman who headed a North Korea–affiliated organization in South Korea, and then seized upon again by an Asahi Shimbun reporter who, while studying in South Korea, had married this woman’s daughter, and the lie they constructed,
was not only spread to the United States as fact (perhaps because, in reality, they were spies for South Korea), but those such as Alexis Dudden and Carol Gluck, who repeatedly advanced anti-Japan editorials at every opportunity, must properly recognize how villainous they are, understand their own foolishness and ugliness, and feel shame.
To be continued.