This continuation of Kō Bun’yū’s essay analyzes Chinese-made wartime narratives that flowed into postwar Japan.
By examining why some stories became long-selling “hits” while others collapsed as failures, it exposes the mechanics of propaganda surrounding events such as the Yellow River breach, the Changsha fire, the Tanaka Memorial, and Unit 731.

2016-10-12
What follows is a continuation of a paper by 黄文雄, published in the March issue of the special Seiron 26, written with genuine intellect unlike the ignorance of the world. These are many historical facts that most Japanese people did not know at all, and of course many historical facts that people around the world did not know at all.
Chinese-made postwar hits and failures in Japan.
As stories of “the brutality of the Japanese army,” many war narratives flowed into postwar Japan from China.
There are hit works such as the “Nanjing Massacre,” the greatest and longest-selling of them all, but not everything succeeded in the same way.
In an attempt to stop the advance of the Japanese army, the Chinese side themselves destroyed dikes, drowning one million civilian nationals and producing six million victims, and tried to spread the “Yellow River breach” as “Japanese military brutality,” but within just a few days it was exposed by a French journalist as a “self-staged act of folly.”
Similar breach operations were carried out as many as twelve times, including failures, during what is called the “Eight-Year War of Resistance.”
The next failure following the “Yellow River breach” was the “Changsha Great Fire.”
The ancient famous city burned for three days and nights, producing more than twenty thousand deaths.
This was Chiang Kai-shek’s scorched-earth strategy directed at the Japanese army, and Chiang evaded responsibility by executing three men: the Changsha defense commander, the defense regiment commander, and the provincial police chief.
Xu Quan, chief of staff of the Changsha Defense Command and the arson executor, confessed in his memoir Zao Hun that behind the great fire there had also been a plan to burn to death Communist Party figures 周恩来 and Ye Jianying, who were hiding in Changsha.
Similar “city-burning” and “scorched-earth” failures were repeatedly carried out not only in Changsha but in many other regions.
Prime Minister 田中義一’s so-called “Tanaka Memorial,” attributed to the “posthumous strategy of the Meiji Emperor” and stating that “to conquer China one must first conquer Manchuria and Mongolia, and to conquer the world one must first conquer China,” was treated as documentary proof of aggression against China, but it was soon recognized as a fabrication, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested to the Kuomintang government.
It was not taken up at the Tokyo Trials.
Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party continues to take up this forged document every August. Other items spread by the CCP after the war include the “Three Alls Policy,” the “ten-thousand-person pits,” and the BC weapons of Unit 731.
Unit 731 once gained momentum, but it did not become a long seller.
There are many reasons. To begin with, Japanese people do not understand the meaning of “three alls.” In Chinese, the character “光” means “emptiness,” but in Japanese the word “hikari” does not carry that meaning.
“Burn all,” “kill all,” and “loot all”
—the so-called “Three Alls Policy”—was originally used by both sides in the Chinese Civil War to denounce the other’s “violence and atrocities,” but it was eventually transformed into something attributed to “the Japanese army.” The “ten-thousand-person pits” derive from the ancient Chinese “jingguan” mentioned earlier, and can be regarded not only as remnants of ancient battlefields but also as a custom of successive Chinese armies.
To anti-Japanese Japanese, this was something exotic, and they immediately seized upon it.
The BC (biological and chemical) weapons of “Unit 731” became a topic immediately after being written about in 森村誠一’s Akuma no Hōshoku (Kobunsha, 1981), and the Chinese Communist government and anti-Japanese Japanese joined hands to hold exhibitions throughout Japan.
In the first place, “Unit 731” was an “epidemic prevention and water supply unit.”
Immediately after the war, the U.S. military conducted interviews with unit leaders such as Surgeon General Ishii, and even produced the “Fell Report” and the “Thompson Report.”
Because the “Unit 731” spread through rumors was completely different from the facts, it did not become a second loach after the “Nanjing Massacre.”
This manuscript continues.