This article introduces the opening section of Masayuki Takayama’s Henkens Jizai: Russia and America, Which Is the Real Evil? and shows how modern journalism has deliberately embedded falsehoods in order to manipulate public perception.
Using examples such as the First Sino-Japanese War, the Port Arthur massacre narrative, fabricated Fukushima-related imagery, the Okinawa reversion secret pact case, and reporting on Nanjing, Takayama argues that not only China and the United States, but newspapers themselves, have written lies they knew to be false.
It is an essential text for understanding media distortion, political manipulation, and the falsification of historical memory across the prewar, wartime, and postwar eras.

2019-03-15
It is not only China and the United States.
Newspapers, too, actually scatter deceptive lies that they knowingly write.
I hope this book will help readers discern how to see through such insidious falsehoods.

Having been recommended by a book-loving friend, I am reading the Shincho Bunko edition of Henkens Jizai: Russia and America, Which Is the Real Evil? (490 yen).
This is one of the most astonishing books among all of his works.
I am convinced that it is precisely to his truly unparalleled erudition, which makes it no exaggeration to call him the finest researcher and examiner of modern history not only in Japan but in the world, that the Nobel Prize ought to be awarded.
For he has not only exposed the lies of the prewar, wartime, and postwar eras, but has also lived as a unique journalist in the postwar world.
Of course, he himself does not seek the Nobel Prize in the least.
He simply continues, for as long as he lives, the supremely noble work of exposing the lies of the world and making known the facts to Japan and to the world.

Introduction.
—Do Not Be Deceived by Newspapers That Casually Write Lies—

The First Sino-Japanese War began in July of Meiji 27.
The Japanese army landed south of Seoul, scattered the Chinese forces, and by September was already approaching Pyongyang.
For the Japanese army, this was its first battle against a foreign enemy in a long time.
Although the Chinese were not particularly strong, their cruelty was enough to astonish the Japanese forces.
They did not know the meaning of “prisoner.”
If they captured someone, they cut off noses, sliced off ears, gouged out eyes, cut off the male organ and stuffed it into the throat before killing, and then severed the limbs and hung them from the eaves along the roadside.

Yamagata Aritomo, immediately after landing, issued an instruction.
Since “the enemy nation has from ancient times possessed an extremely cruel nature.
If one should be taken alive, one will surely suffer cruel treatment, pain worse than death, and in the end be killed by barbarous and savage acts,” one should die honorably by one’s own hand.
At the foot of Jinzhou Castle, native inhabitants were seen swarming over Chinese soldiers struck down by the Japanese army, killing those who were near death and stripping them of everything they had.

Before winter, the Japanese army attacked the supposedly impregnable fortress of Port Arthur and captured it in a single day.
The city of Port Arthur below had already seen most of its civilians flee from the fighting.
The mopping up of the remaining enemy troops who had fled there was also quickly finished.

But two weeks later, the New York World carried reporter James Creelman’s “Japanese Army Massacre Report.”
It claimed that the Japanese army chased women and children, raped them, and killed them.
“Soldiers relentlessly fired into the children fleeing toward the water and hacked them to pieces.”
This became the source of the rumor now passed down as the “massacre of 60,000 at Port Arthur.”

The Japanese government was shocked by this baseless slander.
The World was owned by Pulitzer and was one of the so-called yellow papers.
It had previously specialized in lurid tales such as people being abducted by UFOs and raped by aliens.
But even so, the vividness of its description was so intense that it did not seem like something written merely from imagination.

Fortunately, this slander was refuted when the Belgian minister to Japan, Albert d’Anethan, interviewed French military observers and proved the innocence of the Japanese army.
It was understood to be a fabricated lie invented by Creelman.
But then what had inspired that strikingly realistic depiction.
In Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States, there is an account of massacres from the Indian Wars in America that continued until around the same time as the First Sino-Japanese War.
When one looks into it, the massacre of the Cheyenne at Sand Creek in Colorado is almost exactly the same.
The witness was Robert Bent, of mixed Cheyenne ancestry.
The account begins with 800 cavalrymen attacking a settlement at dawn when the male warriors were away.

The cavalry shot unarmed women and scalped them.
Another woman fled with her child.
“The mother who fled to the waterside tried to dig into the sandbank to hide her child, but she was shot in the back.
A six-year-old girl waving a white flag given to her by her mother was also mercilessly shot to death.
A pregnant woman had her belly slit open, and the fetus dragged out beside her was left discarded there.”
It is the same depiction as in Creelman’s article.

The Japanese army did not retaliate for the cruel treatment inflicted by the Chinese forces.
Nor did it harm those who surrendered.
That must have displeased them.
He intended to write that savage Japanese, being non-white and non-Christian, would behave in such a way.
But what is laughable is that the cruelty he could imagine was precisely what his own white race had done.

Even among lies, this was different from a simple lie such as, “I am not cheating on you.”
It was written as a lie knowingly.
I once thought this was the kind of lie Japanese people could never imitate, but the world changed.

Tetsu Kariya, the author of Oishinbo, who prides himself on being socially conscious, rode the anti-nuclear wave and had his protagonist suffer a nosebleed in Fukushima.

It was no more than childish imitation of the atomic bomb film Junai Monogatari, starring Hitomi Nakahara.
But when that became an issue, the comment from the editorial department of Big Comic Spirits was appalling.
According to the Asahi Shimbun, they said it was done “out of respect for the author’s intention that it might help deepen discussion on the effects of low-level radiation and on the state of government and media reporting.”
It was a lie told while knowing it was a lie.
How can discussion be deepened on the basis of such lies.
Only after excluding such vulgar falsehoods can a genuine debate on nuclear power begin.
This author and these editors are no different from Chinese who breathe out lies as if they were breathing.

The other day, in the issue of the secret Japan-U.S. agreement connected with the reversion of Okinawa, the Supreme Court rejected the claim of plaintiff and former Mainichi reporter Takichi Nishiyama.
The secret agreement case, which had taken forty years, finally came to an end.
But the reporting on this case was also strange.

Nishiyama approached a female Foreign Ministry clerk and entered into a sexual relationship with her in order to obtain the secret agreement.
He slept with her constantly.
One might say, was a reporter really so idle.
But leave that aside.
The point is that although he obtained the information from the woman, he did not write an article about it.

Half a year later, he brought it to Socialist Party figures Takahiro Yokomichi and Yanosuke Narazaki.
Narazaki was a central committee member of the Buraku Liberation League.
Then came the scene in the Diet chamber where Yokomichi proudly displayed the secret agreement.
Ordinarily, one would sense in Nishiyama’s conduct the intent of “bringing down the cabinet with the secret agreement issue.”
He was nothing more than a Socialist activist wearing the mask of a reporter.

What did the newspapers write about the Supreme Court ruling that drew the curtain on such a sordid affair.
Mainichi, the very paper in question, wrote of “Mr. Nishiyama, who reported the secret Japan-U.S. agreement.”
Asahi also wrote that “Mr. Nishiyama was the first to expose the existence of the secret agreement.”
If Nishiyama had actually “reported” or “exposed” it in a newspaper, this incident would never have happened.
It became such an uproar because he tried to turn it into a political struggle instead of reporting it.

As for the Asahi Shimbun, it described John Rabe of Siemens, one of those who created the lie of the Nanjing Massacre and who procured weapons for the Chinese army, as “an ordinary company employee.”
And the middle-aged Socialist-linked activist woman who proposed “the Nobel Peace Prize for Article 9 of the Constitution” was described by Asahi as “an ordinary housewife.”

It is not only China and the United States.
Newspapers, too, actually scatter deceptive lies that they knowingly write.
I hope this book will help readers discern how to see through such insidious falsehoods.

Summer, 2014.
Masayuki Takayama.