Originally published on April 22, 2019.
Drawing on a book by Masayuki Takayama, this essay examines the true nature of Sun Yat-sen, the illusions held by his Japanese supporters, anti-Japanese sentiment among Chinese actors, and the realities of modern history long concealed from the Japanese public.
It argues that Japan’s mass media, especially Asahi Shimbun, imposed a childish pseudo-moralism in place of fact, leaving the Japanese people trapped in profound historical misunderstanding for decades.

2019-04-22
Without reading Masayuki Takayama’s books, it would be no exaggeration to say that we had been left in a condition in which we knew virtually nothing of the truth of Japan’s modern and contemporary history.

What follows, too, is from Takayama Masayuki’s book, continuing from the previous chapter.
Upon reading this passage of his, almost all Japanese should surely think the same thing.
That we knew absolutely nothing about Sun Yat-sen.
Especially Japanese citizens in households subscribing to Asahi Shimbun….
They must have been made to carry vague notions that men like Miyazaki Tōten and Umeya Shōkichi were noble figures….
All without knowing anything of the true nature of Sun Yat-sen.
Since I myself was like that, many Japanese must have been the same.

No aid is needed for the Chinese who produced PM2.5.
In the absence of intellectual property, the only originality they display is in filth….
Sun Yat-sen laid bare his jealousy toward Japan.

Sun Yat-sen, from the Hakka people, spent his childhood in Hawaii relying on relatives there.
Even after finishing school, he could make nothing of himself over there.
He returned and worked as a doctor in Macao, but soon tired of that as well.
Then one day, on a whim, he planned an uprising to overthrow the Manchu dynasty, the Qing.

There remains a record from the time when Mao Zedong had seized power and was purging all those he disliked, that some twenty-six men were arrested after going around saying, “I am the Emperor,” and soliciting revolutionary funds to be repaid after their rise to power.
China always had many such irresponsible people.
Sun Yat-sen was one of them.

In Sun’s case, one of those to whom he appealed for funding betrayed him.
He fled for his life to Japan.
Sun Yat-sen ought to have been grateful that Japan, a place that freely accepted both criminals and revolutionaries, existed so close at hand.
What is more, its people did not know how to doubt.

As recorded in Sanjūsan-nen no Yume, Miyazaki Tōten and others were under the illusion that the Han people were great, and sincerely believed that they were pitiable people enslaved by the Manchu race.
He came to the filthy Huangpu River, no different from what it is now, and shed tears.
Without realizing that this was due to the mercaptan emitted by the sludge and the ammonia brewed by excrement and urine, he believed them to be tears of emotion at having arrived in the great land of China.

Umeya Shōkichi followed Tōten’s example and donated what would amount in today’s money to as much as one trillion yen.
Inukai Tsuyoshi was the same.
A vast mansion in Tsurumaki-chō, Waseda, was provided to Sun Yat-sen free of charge, and he lived there with his Japanese wife.

During that same period, Japan fought and won the Russo-Japanese War.
As one of the Han who had been slaves not merely to whites but even to the Manchus, Sun Yat-sen openly revealed his jealousy, saying, “Japan’s victory encouraged the peoples of Asia, who had believed they could never defeat the whites,” and yet, “What the Japanese can do, our Han people can of course do as well.”

He abandoned the Japanese wife who had cared for him.
And while sponging off Umeya Shōkichi and amusing himself in Europe and America, the Wuchang Uprising broke out.
It was the opening of the Xinhai Revolution.
But what the Han people do has not changed even now: there is neither thought nor logic in it.
Even in the Wuchang Uprising, when someone dropped a box of gunpowder in the arsenal and caused a huge explosion, everyone simply concluded that this must be the revolution and rushed to join it, and so by sheer drift the revolution succeeded.

But Sun Yat-sen himself was idling in America.
There was no leader for the revolutionary army.
So they installed as their chief none other than Li Yuanhong, a Qing commander who until the day before had been capturing revolutionaries and beheading them.
This is not something that can be brushed aside as mere carelessness.
That is why the Xinhai Revolution is even called the “Shingai Revolution,” a revolution of absurdity.

When Sun learned of it in Denver, he went around New York and London soliciting investors.
First of all, he meant to line his own pockets.
However, among the Han, a necessary condition for one who stood at the top was to be a civil official who had passed the imperial examinations.
A Hawaiian high-school graduate could not pass muster.
Sun Yat-sen was forced out, and Yuan Shikai, an important Qing official and civil bureaucrat, became president, only to try at once to make himself emperor and found the Yuan dynasty.
The irresponsibility of it all is such that one hardly feels inclined even to write about it seriously.

Around that time, John Powell, a reporter for the anti-Japanese journal China Weekly Review, financed by the U.S. government, met Sun Yat-sen and his wife in Shanghai.
His wife was no longer the Japanese woman who had cared for him, but Soong Ching-ling, whom he had married shortly before that interview, and the wedding had been held at the Tokyo residence of Umeya Shōkichi.

Mr. Takemura, meanwhile, worried about the desertification of China.

At that time, Powell wrote in Prewar Japan and China as Seen by an American Journalist that “Sun Yat-sen had an American bodyguard carrying a pistol.”
That guard was a bodyguard assigned by American financiers.
In other words, Sun had by then almost exhausted Umeya’s assets and was in this period shifting over to American sponsors.
That is why, when the subject of Japan arose in the interview, “Sun Yat-sen sharply pointed out the errors of Theodore Roosevelt’s policy toward Japan.”
Sun said that “if the United States had held firm and not allowed Japan into Korea, Japan would never have gained a foothold on the continent,” identifying where the buttons had first been fastened wrong.
If only the United States had properly contained Japan, there would have been no problem, he said.
I repeat: only a short time before that, Sun had been surrounded by Japanese benefactors and congratulated on his marriage.
And yet this was the way he spoke.

Japanese must never sympathize with the Chinese.
They possess the ability to find sponsors in Europe and America and skillfully deceive them.
In later years Miyazaki Tōten too came to know the true nature of Sun Yat-sen and the Han people, and became a chanter of naniwa-bushi.
I feel as though I can understand that mood.

Life there was wretched beyond measure.
The mountains were devastated, and even after half a century the rivers still stank as before.
Then Masayoshi Takemura appeared.
A man poor in both eyesight and intellect, to whom great Japan looked like the gold tooth in a set of dentures, and who uttered such foolishness as, “Even if small, it is enough to shine brightly.”
He worried not about Japan but about the desertification of China.
Saying things like, “Greening is a common interest of Japan and China,” he used government money to establish the Japan-China Green Fund and began planting trees in China.
The Chinese pulled them out one after another for firewood as soon as they were planted.
Even when they did grow, no water was given, so they withered where they stood.
For ten years, Japanese money was swallowed by the desert.

*Previously NHK broadcast a feature on Japanese people planting trees in China’s desert regions.
Contrary to NHK’s flattering narration, I remember watching the footage and wondering whether greening could really be accomplished under such conditions.
This, then, was what lay behind it.

Indeed, unless we read Masayuki Takayama’s books, it would be no exaggeration to say that we had been placed in a condition in which we knew virtually nothing of the truth of Japan’s modern and contemporary history.
Without properly conveying facts, and as I have mentioned repeatedly….
They imposed upon us their childish minds and pseudo-moralism.
In other words, it was not merely anti-intellectualism….
Unbelievably, we paid 5,000 yen every month for decades to subscribe to newspapers that were like the propaganda organs of South Korea and China.
It is only natural that the world has become so extremely unstable and dangerous.
For the evils of the countries I have referred to, together with the evil of Asahi, have spread over the world.
*To be continued.