Behind the abnormal tone of anti-Japan reporting in outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post lies the spread of a particular historical narrative associated with figures such as John Dower.
Drawing on a roundtable discussion among Takashi Itō, Yoshitaka Fukui, and Ezaki Michio, this article examines the Tokyo Trial view of history, the debate over the GHQ-imposed Constitution, the Venona documents, and the broader regression of modern Japanese historical studies.
It is an important reflection on the structure of international narratives that unjustly degrade Japan.

2019-03-07
That is because I discovered an article in which a man now busily engaged in efforts to denigrate Japan in the international community is in dialogue with a man named Takagi, who is in an upper position in NHK’s production bureau.

I am republishing a chapter I originally posted on 2016-12-12 under the title:
“It Was This Man Who Lay at the Root of the Abnormal Reporting on Japan by The New York Times and The Washington Post.”

The reason is that while searching the Internet, I came across the name of Yōko Katō, a University of Tokyo professor, a person possessed of a masochistic view of history and anti-Japan ideology, someone recommended as chair or something similar to a U.N. body that is devoted to degrading Japan.
Her teacher, University of Tokyo Professor Emeritus Takashi Itō, had said that when she first came to his seminar she had been New Left, that while engaged in empirical research she became considerably more sound, but that the moment she left his orbit, she returned once again to the New Left.
She is that kind of person.

That is because I discovered an article in which a person who now busily devotes himself or herself to activities that denigrate Japan in the international community is in dialogue with a man named Takagi, who is in an upper post in NHK’s production bureau.

As for the person named John Dower, subscribers to the Asahi Shimbun probably at least knew his name, but the Asahi never told its readers what kind of man he actually was.
Through the extraordinary erudition unique to Masayuki Takayama, I learned that shortly after the war, while working as an English teacher in Kanazawa, he fully exercised the privileges of being an American man in a Japan then dominated by the “Give me chocolate” atmosphere.
The moment I learned that, I also understood what sort of person he was.
That is because Takayama said it precisely because he could not stomach the outrageous words and actions Dower is now directing against Japan in the United States.
It was the kind of criticism, like that of King Enma himself, that only Masayuki Takayama could direct against a truly outrageous figure.

How foolish this John Dower is.
And that it was this man who lay at the root of the abnormal reporting on Japan by The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The magazine Rekishitsū makes this clear in a featured roundtable discussion among University of Tokyo Professor Emeritus Takashi Itō, Aoyama Gakuin University Professor Yoshitaka Fukui, and commentator Ezaki Michio.
The emphasis within the text, other than the headings, is mine.

“Hear the ‘War Responsibility’ of the Victorious Nations.”
“When Will We Be Freed from the Tokyo Trial View of History.”

Omission of the opening section.

The recently fashionable view advanced by the Asahi Shimbun and others, that the Constitution of Japan was by no means imposed on Japan, is in one sense also a form of “historical revisionism” against the established theory of GHQ imposition.
But is that not little different from the absurd “historical revisionism” that claims there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
It might even be called “historical falsification” (laughs).

Conversely, the fact that Senator McCarthy, once despised as an agitator, is now increasingly regarded as having had grounds for his “Red Purge” because of the publication of Venona, which intercepted and deciphered Soviet spy communications, may well be called proper historical revisionism.
As for the presence of Soviet spies inside Roosevelt’s Democratic administration, Japanese translations have appeared of Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Firsov’s The American Communist Party and the Comintern: Records of Underground Activity and of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.
I also introduced “historical revisionism” in America in my own book The Falsehood of the Tokyo Trial View Seen from the American Side.

Fukui.
In my own book The Most Advanced “World History” Unknown to the Japanese, published by Shodensha, I also touched on “historical revisionism.”
I pointed out that the post-World War II orthodox view assigning sole responsibility to Germany for the outbreak of World War I has in recent years been undergoing revision.
It is entirely natural to revise previous historical understanding on the basis of newly discovered materials and evidence.
In that sense, the “Tokyo Trial view of history,” which says that Japan alone was entirely at fault in the last war, should likewise be revised on the basis of facts.

Itō.
Recently, the abdication of the Emperor during his lifetime has become a topic of discussion, but listening to what has been conveyed as the words of the current Emperor, one may suspect that he holds the “Tokyo Trial view of history.”
Furthermore, Prime Minister Abe’s “Statement on the Seventieth Anniversary of the End of the War” was also basically grounded in the Tokyo Trial view of history.
Authorized by the Emperor and successive prime ministers, the Tokyo Trial view of history remains mainstream in the Japanese historical establishment and the mass media.
To properly revise this historical view will require very difficult work.

My own book Japan’s Inside and Outside, which described in detail the illusions and disillusionments of communism in modern history, was completely ignored (laughs).
Up to the First World War, Japan had aimed to become a country that could contend with and stand alongside the Western great powers ruling the world.
In 1920, the League of Nations was established, and Japan became one of its permanent members alongside Britain, France, and Italy.
But after that, I believe the international community entered an era of struggle against communism, and in Japan’s Inside and Outside I focused in its latter half on such matters as Japan’s conflict with international communism in the twentieth century and Comintern operations.
But for communists and progressive intellectuals of the pro-communist liberal sort, that becomes an unacceptable form of historical revisionism.
They do not want it touched.
There was no criticism, but neither was there any evaluation.
It was completely ignored.
Even with Venona, which both of you often discuss, there are not many researchers in Japan who refer to it.
If one refers to these documents, one is probably labeled a revisionist.

Ezaki.
May Shobō has gone bankrupt.
The PHP book is out of print, and in used bookstores it is difficult to obtain and costs around 100,000 yen.
It has become a phantom masterpiece that one cannot read even if one wants to (laughs).

Fukui.
Professor Itō brought a fresh wind at an early stage into a historical establishment strongly influenced by Marxism, and from the late 1960s through the 1990s published the fruits of that work in Studies in Early Shōwa Political History and Politics in the Shōwa Era, as well as its sequel.
The new historical view presented there has not grown old even now.
Against the majority who too easily concluded that prewar Shōwa Japan was a fascist state, he empirically pointed out the lack of grounds for such claims.
And yet, since then, Japanese modern historical studies seem to have regressed.
It also seems that the Tokyo Trial view of history has grown even stronger.

Itō.
When a peace treaty is concluded after a war, the undesirable relationships of the past are normally settled.
But afterwards, issues such as the so-called “wartime comfort women” and the Nanjing Incident have increasingly been turned into later controversies.
What is also strange is that although the “authority” of communism has long since collapsed, even in Japan, some young people have become completely immersed in the Tokyo Trial view of history and one can even see a tendency for them to try to strengthen that view.
There are people like that among the graduates of my seminar as well (laughs).
I think they are bad revisionists.
Yoshiaki Yoshimi of Chūō University is one of them.
Even now, on the comfort women issue, he is doing things I still find difficult to understand.

To be continued.