Through a serialized column by Masayuki Takayama, this essay exposes the distortions in postwar Japanese historical consciousness embodied by figures such as Masayasu Hosaka and Kazutoshi Handō.
How did the habit of disparaging Japanese honor while uncritically accepting the history narrated by white Westerners and Americans lead Japan astray in its understanding of the past?
By revisiting Peleliu, Sun Yat-sen, Manchuria, and MacArthur, this piece sharply questions the essence of that mindset.

2019-04-04
Why did Hosaka not argue back against the swindler’s grandson?
Among his close anti-Japan storytellers is Kazutoshi Handō.

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column that crowns the end of this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho, released today.
All readers with discernment must surely have thought that there is such a thing as resonance between events.

The Flatterers of the Heisei Era

When Masayasu Hosaka speaks of history, he likes to keep it confined within Japan.
He thinks nothing at all about the outside world.
Some say it is like a history view from within an octopus pot.
If one reads works such as his Why Is Japan a Hated Nation?, that becomes very clear.

Take, for example, Peleliu, the site of a fierce battle.
Before facing the American forces, the Japanese military moved the islanders to a safe island and then fought to the last man and perished.
Compare that with the American troops in the Philippines.
As they fled to the Bataan Peninsula before the advancing Japanese forces, “whenever they encountered local people, they killed them all because they could not distinguish them from Japanese.”
That is the testimony of Lester Tenney, a professor at the University of Arizona.
The people of Peleliu still pass down stories of the compassion and nobility of the Japanese military, and even the American military engraved on a monument the words: “Remember how bravely the Japanese fought here and how they died.”
Those were the words of Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

But Hosaka is different.
He quotes from the memoir of an American soldier named Sledge who fought there, With the Old Breed, the passage saying that “the Japanese had cut off the heads of American soldiers, placed them on top of the torsos, cut off the genitals, and stuffed them into the mouths,” and eagerly nods along with the expression, “Americans know of no people this cruel.”
Even though Hosaka knows full well that such cruel acts, then and now, belong to Chinese or Koreans, he convinces himself that Japanese of his father’s generation “copied” them.
He is more eager to believe the words of American soldiers than those of Japanese.

Before convincing himself of that, I would have wanted him to read the records of the massacre of the Cheyenne at Sand Creek, records that even appear in testimony before the U.S. Congress.
There, the white men whom Hosaka trusts behave exactly like white Chinese.
They shot dead a six-year-old girl holding up a white flag, killed her mother too, slit open the belly of a pregnant woman and dragged out the fetus.
They cut off fingers to take turquoise rings, and to finish, gouged out the woman’s private parts and fixed them onto the pommels of their saddles.
That is the true face of the Sledges who insist that they are unrelated to cruelty.
Incidentally, placing a severed head on top of a torso is an Afghan custom.

Hosaka also accepts at face value what Sun Yat-sen’s grandson, Sun Zhiping, tells him: that “Americans feel closer to Chinese than to Japanese.”
Americans, once black slaves could no longer be used, brought in coolies instead and had them lay the transcontinental railroad.
After it was completed, the coolies, no longer needed, were killed.
Iris Chang exposed that and was driven to suicide.
Americans could never possibly have felt any affinity for Chinese.
Sun Yat-sen himself tasted discrimination in Hawaii and fled.
After returning, Sun Yat-sen reversed himself from the cause of reviving the Han people and swindled money out of the Japanese.
When, by a turn of events, the Qing dynasty of the Manchu people fell, Sun Yat-sen began saying, “The Qing domains, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet as well, all belong to the Han people.”
The Qing had formed a union with Mongolia and others.
Only the Han people were treated like slaves, and intermarriage with the Manchus was forbidden.
Sun Yat-sen’s assertion was equivalent to saying that colonial India should replace Britain as the leader of the British Commonwealth.
International society laughed at Sun Yat-sen’s words.

But once Japan rose, circumstances changed.
The United States, under Theodore Roosevelt, which thought “Japan is a threat,” accepted Sun Yat-sen’s nonsense and began saying that “Japan invaded Manchuria, which is Chinese territory.”
This was the Stimson Doctrine.
To strike Japan, the United States elevated China and had Chiang Kai-shek’s forces attack Japan.
That is how the Sino-Japanese Incident began.
Many historical facts point to that.

Why did Hosaka not argue back against the swindler’s grandson?
Among his close anti-Japan storytellers is Kazutoshi Handō.
The man who described Emperor Shōwa as “absurdly dutiful” venerates MacArthur on the other hand as “the greatest general in the history of the U.S. Army.”
The moment this general arrived at Atsugi, he wet himself on the airplane stairs and marked his first step in Japan with trousers soaked in urine.
He hurriedly banned publication of that photograph, and thereafter imposed censorship on a level worthy of 1984, while also ignoring the non-retroactivity of law and taking revenge on the Japanese.
Handō too, like Hosaka, bows before white men.
And yet these two men, in fact, had been giving all manner of lectures to the present Emperor.
One can only hope that their bad influence did not remain in the new imperial era.