This essay exposes how key figures and historical facts were systematically excluded from public awareness by Japan’s major media.
Drawing on Kenichi Ara’s research, it demonstrates the fragility of so-called Nanjing Massacre evidence and reveals facts still unknown to the world.

2016-10-09
As was the case for me when I learned it for the first time, it is likely that the majority of the Japanese people are also learning these facts for the first time.
Of course, the world knows absolutely nothing of them.
The reason I knew nothing about Kenichi Ara, a senior alumnus of my alma mater, was that I was a subscriber to the Asahi Shimbun.
For the same reason, until last year I knew nothing at all about Masayuki Takayama.
For the same reason, I knew nothing about those who had pursued the truth that the so-called comfort women issue was a lie.
In other words, the Asahi Shimbun was a newspaper that never allowed people who correctly and severely criticized its own errors to appear on its pages.
What follows is taken from the laborious work of my senior Kenichi Ara, published in March in Supplementary Seiron 26.
As I learned it for the first time, the majority of the Japanese people will likely be learning these facts for the first time as well.
Naturally, they are facts that the world knows absolutely nothing about.
[Omitted preceding text]
Chinese materials are open to rebuttal.
Even so, it was not impossible to block the registration.
This is because the incident itself is fictitious, and therefore there are no materials that should be registered.
At the time of application, the materials initially submitted by China included the Magee film, the diary of Cheng Ruifang, and the trial records of Lieutenant General Tani Hisao.
From the standpoint of historical materials, the Magee film and the Cheng Ruifang diary might qualify.
The Magee film was shot by Reverend Magee, who was in Nanjing at the time, and shows wounded persons in hospital rooms and private houses.
It was also introduced in the May 1938 issue of the American photo magazine Life, but what appears are only a few wounded individuals; these images, like other battlefield photographs, are commonplace and neither depict nor evoke a massacre.
They were not even submitted as evidence at the Tokyo Trials, which resembled a political show.
The Cheng Ruifang diary refers to the December diary of Cheng Ruifang, who was the dormitory supervisor of Ginling Women’s College, and records conditions at the college, which had become a refugee camp.
According to it, while rumors suggestive of killing are recorded, there is not a single case of murder that Cheng herself witnessed.
It merely states that nine incidents of rape and looting occurred.
If there had been a massacre of 200,000 people, the proportion of internees would suggest that roughly 10,000 killings should have occurred at Ginling Women’s College alone.
Likewise, given the judgment that there were 20,000 rapes, it would be natural for several thousand rapes to have occurred at Ginling Women’s College, which mainly housed young women.
However, the January 4 issue of the New York Times reported that at Ginling Women’s College a group of Chinese led by a Chinese army colonel committed rapes while making them appear to be the work of the Japanese army, raising doubts as to whether even the rapes cited by Cheng were committed by Japanese forces.
The looting said to have occurred in the same number of cases as the rapes consisted of food such as chickens and money.
Thus, neither of these constitutes historical material proving the incident.
Rather, they are evidence that Nanjing was an ordinary battlefield.
Lieutenant General Tani Hisao was taken to Nanjing after the war and executed by firing squad in 1947, but the 6th Division under his command entered the city only by several hundred meters, and within a few days the main force advanced toward the Wuhu area.
General Tani himself remained in Nanjing for only about a week to attend the entry ceremony.
Although the verdict stated that the Nanjing Incident continued into the following year, responsibility was nonetheless placed on General Tani, and he was tried without Japanese legal counsel.
According to General Tani’s rebuttal statement, he first learned of the so-called Nanjing Incident after the war through the “History of the Pacific War” published by the U.S. military.
It is nothing more than the record of such a war tribunal.
It is said that there were ninety-six applications for the Memory of the World register this time.
In early summer of 2015, a preliminary review was conducted by a subcommittee, and five to seven cases were judged problematic, prompting requests for additional materials.
The Nanjing Incident was one of them.
Given these facts, it should have been possible to rebut the claim in any number of ways.
To be continued.