Based on a chapter originally published on October 20, 2015, this passage offers a severe rebuttal to anti-Japan criticism surrounding the San Francisco city council and American textbook descriptions, arguing from the historical realities of indiscriminate bombing and the atomic bombings in the final stage of the war.
It criticizes the Asahi Shimbun’s reporting on the comfort-women issue and the Nanjing incident for having provided the world with material to unjustly denigrate Japan, while also stressing that postwar Japan refrained from attacking the United States and instead became one of the countries that most deeply understood and even loved America.
Contrasting this with the propaganda campaigns of China and South Korea, the chapter asks what would happen if the Japanese were to pursue America internationally in the same manner over its wartime conduct, thereby calling into question the level of American intelligence, fairness, and democratic sincerity.
It also serves as a lead-in to the following chapter, which introduces a notable argument by Sekihei on the difference between the Chinese and the Japanese.

2019-04-22
If we…
Were a people like them, what would become of your country?
Would it not be unable even to survive?
Just think about it.
If your country goes on brandishing stupidity and rudeness any further…

This is a chapter originally published on October 20, 2015.
Americans are broad-brushed, both in a good sense and in a bad sense.
That is where they resemble the Chinese, I recall being told by a person who had a famous university professor for a father in China, graduated from Doshisha University in Japan, and was working in Japan.
But the conduct of the San Francisco city council and the descriptions in McGraw-Hill textbooks are not matters that can be dismissed at that level.
What is at stake is the level of American intelligence, American fairness…
And, more than that, the genuineness of American democracy.
Do the people connected with the San Francisco city council not even possess the judgment and imagination that any ordinary human being has?
The twentieth century was the century of war.
The United States did not welcome Japan, which had defeated Russia, the first great power among the imperial nations to be beaten by a yellow race, and joined the ranks of the powers.
Why?
Because the United States, which had been late among the powers in wanting to expand its interests in China…
And Japan’s movement to liberate Asia, which had been colonized…
Were bound to collide.
The age was…
The age of oil…
The century of war.
The United States and Britain finally began an oil embargo against Japan, a country without resources.
In other words, they economically blockaded Japan.
In response, “Brutal America and Britain”…
Strike them at once, begin war at once, public opinion was fiercely inflamed,
And it was the Asahi Shimbun…
The newspaper that you now mistake for the conscience of Japan…
Though it is now like a left-wing gangster paper…
That pushed even the capable men in the military, who knew how reckless it was to confront the United States, then by far the richest nation in the world, into a situation from which there was no turning back.
It is a newspaper company in which ideas brainwashed by GHQ…
Leftist ideology, and pseudo-moralism are all mixed together in confusion…
And it is no exaggeration to say that it has sunk to a level of stupidity below even that of kindergarten children.
They seized on the story of a man who seemed born to lie…
Because it was ideal material with which to attack Japan and the Japanese government…
And they created the lie called the comfort-women issue.
Including several times when they treated it as a major scoop…
They printed it sixteen times and broadcast it to the world.
Besides that, they created numerous other lies, led by the so-called three hundred thousand victims in the Nanjing Massacre.
As a result of the complete success of GHQ’s occupation policy…
People claiming to be former soldiers…
Began telling lies like those of Seiji Yoshida.
Because they knew that the Asahi Shimbun…
Would eagerly seize upon them…
As ideal material for attacking Japan and the Japanese government.
But do you people have no knowledge, no imagination?
That the American occupation forces, in a very short span of time…
Continued committing enormous numbers of sexual crimes.
Only because MacArthur, who was also one of the greatest dictators in history…
Crushed the matter and prevented it from being made public.
In the readers’ column the other day, there was a review of a book by a French specialist scholar saying that the Normandy operation was…
At the same time…
Also a history of American soldiers violating French women.
Even setting those matters aside,
No matter how…
The Japanese military may have been the most disciplined and strong in the world…
Once all military supplies had been cut off, nothing could be done…
And in the final stage of the war, when defeat was obvious to every eye,
People of the San Francisco city council,
Your country carried out indiscriminate bombings against 127 cities across Japan, attacks contrary to humanity.
In these attacks, about three million people were killed in a very short period.
The vast majority were, needless to say, noncombatants.
That is, women, children, and the elderly.
Not only that, using incendiary bombs, which were themselves weapons contrary to humanity, your country reduced 127 cities to burnt wastelands.
Still not satisfied, your country dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…
And turned those beautiful cities into hell in an instant.
We passed seventy years after the war without uttering a single complaint to you.
Not only that, it is no exaggeration to say that we have been the nation that loved your country most, myself included.
China and South Korea invent obvious lies…
Or leap upon the lies of the Asahi Shimbun…
And persistently…
Defame Japan all over the world…
Even demanding reparations.
If we…
Were a people like them, what would become of your country?
Would it not be unable even to survive?
Just think about it.
If your country goes on brandishing stupidity and rudeness any further…
We may have to convene, before the world, a Tokyo Tribunal concerning the two matters above.
And what that would bring about would not remotely be contained within sums such as the reparations wrung from Toyota through the absurd and false bashing of recent years…
It would bankrupt your country,
And ensure that your country would never rise again…
There would be a condemnation and claims for damages on one of the greatest crimes against humanity in human history.
On the difference between the Chinese and the Japanese…
A matter that you do not know at all…
I will introduce in the next chapter, for the members of the San Francisco city council,
A magnificent argument from the final installment of the major essay series “The Chinese Who Learned ‘Modernity’ from Japan,” written in the monthly magazine Voice by Sekihei, a real elite from China who graduated from the philosophy department of Peking University, studied at Kobe University in Japan, and was naturalized in Japan twenty-eight years ago.