In his Shukan Shincho column “Henkens Jizai,” Masayuki Takayama recounts episodes from the Russo-Japanese War, including the experience of Sophia von Thiel in a Japanese POW camp.
Through these accounts he contrasts Japan’s wartime conduct with that of the United States, criticizing the bombing of civilians, the atomic bombings, and the narratives promoted in Japanese media regarding figures such as Seidensticker.

March 31, 2019.
Seidensticker was used as a narrative device in the column.
He is portrayed as if he were the conscience of America, yet this man landed in Nagasaki and witnessed the devastation of the atomic bomb but never spoke about it throughout his life.
And yet people cling to the name of such a coward while spreading anti-Japan sentiment.
I dislike that mentality and that shallowness.

The chapter titled as such, published on March 28, 2019, has entered the official hashtag ranking at number 20 in Israel.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column “Henkens Jizai” published in today’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
As I have already noted, I subscribe to Shukan Shincho in order to read the columns of Takayama and Yoshiko Sakurai.
This week’s issue once again proves that Takayama is the only journalist of his kind in the postwar world.
The world must award him the highest honor.

America’s war.

One morning Sophia von Thiel received news that her husband Vladimir had been wounded, captured by the Japanese army, and sent to the Matsuyama prison camp.
It was June 1904, shortly after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, when the preliminary engagements of the Port Arthur campaign had just begun.

She made her decision.
She would go to Japan and care for her husband.

People around her tried to stop her.
Japan was an enemy nation at war and a barbarous colored country, they said, and the attempt would be reckless.
The French envoy who mediated thought Japan would never accept such a request, but the answer that came back was simply, “Of course.”

Thus Sophia spent a month traveling from St. Petersburg to Kobe, and then by a small vessel reached Matsuyama, captivated by the picturesque islands and the cheerful people working along the way.

“Why did the giant Russian army lose to such small soldiers.
I finally understand.
This country is cultured and clean even down to its smallest villages.
In contrast the countryside of my homeland is muddy, the houses resemble pigsties, and the people are left in misery and illiteracy.”

The level of civilization was different.
She had brought a lamp for her husband, but the camp already had electric lights.
Under that light she reunited with her husband, who had somehow survived his severe wounds.

The Japanese allowed her to live freely, and she spent her days caring for her husband and nursing the wounded Russian soldiers who kept arriving.
Through their words she came to understand the true course of the war.

In early autumn the crew of the cruiser Rurik were brought in.
They had been sunk off Ulsan, and the Vladivostok fleet had effectively ceased to exist.

Soon wounded soldiers arrived from Liaoyang and from Port Arthur.
That fortress too had fallen.

The following spring the Russian army was annihilated at Mukden, and the Baltic Fleet, from which some still hoped for a reversal, lost all its main ships.
Russia’s defeat was decided.

That autumn she returned home with her husband, remembering the pure patriotism and kindness of the Japanese people.

The Russo-Japanese War was fought around Jinzhou and the outskirts of Mukden.
Naval battles were decided off Tsushima.

Decisive battles in history have often been fought after harvest seasons, such as Sekigahara, and Napoleon also fought the coalition forces at Waterloo.

Outside the battlefield at Sekigahara, farmers ate rice balls and watched the battle.
It was peaceful.

During the Russo-Japanese War Sophia came all the way to Shikoku.
The rear areas had long remained separated from the battlefield.

This form of war collapsed with the appearance of the United States.

Herman Melville compared Americans to “the Israelites entering Canaan” and justified the extermination of indigenous peoples, even their children.
In fact they were more ruthless than the Israelites, attacking settlements while the warriors were away and killing women and children.
Without women and children a tribe disappears.

When they fought Japan they did the same.
They flew over the soldiers waiting on the battlefield and bombed the Japanese mainland, killing women and children.

Matsuyama had been peaceful, but there was no such safe zone before the American military.

British commander Percival had been sent to a safe prison camp in Mukden, yet American aircraft bombed it and killed nineteen prisoners.
He himself narrowly escaped.

Twelve crew members of a B-24 shot down over Kure were being detained in Hiroshima when they were killed by the atomic bomb.

The American military — the only force in the world that killed civilians in the rear.

Shinji Fukushima of the Asahi Shimbun unusually criticized this brutality in his column “Flames of Memory.”
But the conclusion was the usual one — that Japan was the worst for forcing unarmed civilians to confront war through spiritual resolve.

Why is the self-defense of civilians worse than the American military that specializes in killing civilians.
I cannot understand it.

And speaking of that, the column used Seidensticker as its narrative device.
He is portrayed as the conscience of America, yet this man landed in Nagasaki, witnessed the devastation of the atomic bomb, and never spoke about it for the rest of his life.
And yet people rely on the name of such a coward to spread anti-Japan sentiment.
I dislike that mentality and its shallowness.