Based on Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column in Shukan Shincho, this essay examines Germany’s anti-Japan sentiment behind the Volkswagen emissions scandal and the distorted European view of Japan that has accumulated since the modern era.
By linking the Siege of Qingdao, the Bando POW camp, military support for Chiang Kai-shek, and the Volkswagen fraud exposed through Horiba’s measuring device, it sharply probes Germany’s deeper psychology and Europe’s sense of white superiority.

2019-03-26
Out of that anger as well, they gave standard German army rifles and helmets to the Chinese forces, and incited Chiang Kai-shek to attack the Japanese concession in Shanghai.
The Germans dislike Japan. The Russians are quasi-white, so even when they lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, they did not take it so much to heart.
The chapter I released on 2019-02-08 under that title has now entered Ameba’s official hashtag ranking at No. 17 for Volkswagen.
Masayuki Takayama has a serialized column that is a hallmark of Shukan Shincho.
The following is from this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
People all over the world will surely recognize that my evaluation of him as the one and only journalist in the postwar world is exactly correct.
In particular, it is an essay that those people who call themselves newspaper reporters at the Süddeutsche Zeitung must read.
Will Germany perish.
The factory of Volkswagen, the people’s car created by Hitler, was placed under Soviet control after the war.
Had that remained so, it should have been dismantled just like the thermal power plant at Sunwu in Manchuria, carried off into the Soviet Union, and only ruins would have remained.
Fortunately, Britain, which understood the high degree of Volkswagen’s perfection, took over its management and preserved it, and after the war it spread throughout the world as the people’s car.
Several years ago, an American environmental group began investigating automobile emissions and selected Volkswagen as one of the better samples.
One reason they did not choose a Japanese car was the pride of the white nations.
West Virginia University, which was entrusted with the investigation, was looking for a measuring device that seemed promising, and discovered, remarkably, that there was a measuring instrument the size of a suitcase.
With this, they thought, one could even measure the exhaust gas of a moving car.
Thus a measuring device made by Horiba was loaded into Volkswagen and other cars under investigation, and emissions testing during actual driving was carried out.
As a result, it was discovered that Volkswagen, which had produced the cleanest figures in stationary testing, emitted forty times the NOx standard during actual driving.
The environmental group immediately informed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
The EPA investigated and discovered that a chip had been embedded in Volkswagen’s control system that suppressed NOx emissions during testing.
Exhaust gas measurements are normally conducted while the car is stationary.
It was a deception designed in anticipation of that.
The EPA informed Volkswagen that its deception had been discovered and demanded corrective action.
However, it did not disclose the matter to the public at that point.
If one speaks out of resentment, if this had been a Toyota car or something similar, before asking for corrective action they would have made a huge uproar, calling it “sneaky, like Pearl Harbor,” and it would probably have turned into a movement to exclude Japanese cars.
It was that underhanded a method.
And yet, for some reason, Volkswagen did not respond.
After a year, the EPA, now furious, decided to make it public, reproached Volkswagen for its misconduct, and sought compensation running to astronomical figures.
Even thick-skinned Volkswagen at last bowed its head and was forced to deal with recalls and compensation lawsuits, but its feelings converged on resentment toward Japan, which had gone to the trouble of making a “small measuring device.”
The world’s common sense is that emissions testing facilities are as large as gasoline stations.
The established form had been to receive inspection in such a large facility.
Volkswagen cheated on the basis of that kind of world common sense.
In no country was the fraud exposed.
Everyone was satisfied with the existing method of measurement, so why did they make such a small measuring device.
If Horiba had not meddled, no one would ever have thought of measuring emissions during actual driving.
The Germans dislike Japan.
The Russians are quasi-white, so even when they lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, they did not take it so much to heart.
But in the Siege of Qingdao during the First World War, Germany suffered a crushing defeat, and everyone in the fortress was taken prisoner.
Their pride as a pure white nation was torn to shreds.
Moreover, instead of treating them cruelly, the barbaric Japanese even allowed them to take musical instruments, household goods, and everything else with them into the camp.
To the Germans, that magnanimity itself was rather a source of dissatisfaction.
Mercy and tolerance, they believed, were the special possession of white Christians, and to receive them from Japanese people was nothing but humiliation.
Even now they do not want to hear stories of how prisoners in the Bando camp performed Beethoven’s Ninth and even baked cookies.
Out of that anger as well, they gave standard German army rifles and helmets to the Chinese forces, and incited Chiang Kai-shek to attack the Japanese concession in Shanghai.
And then, on top of that, the misconduct of Volkswagen, their main pillar, was exposed.
The cost rose to as much as three trillion yen.
Again, it was the Japanese.
The Germans will never speak of how bitter they must feel, but instead the French, who dislike Germany, showed it through their actions.
In the midst of that uproar, the French Prime Minister went all the way to Horiba in Kyoto and embraced Chairman Horiba with a smile.
Officially it was said to be in thanks for the company’s expansion into France, but onlookers said the Prime Minister’s behavior was like the awarding of a national medal of merit.
Incidentally, the Prime Minister’s name was Valls.
It is the same as the word uttered by Princess Sheeta in Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky as the spell that destroys a nation.
Was the accumulated sentiment of France contained in that?