An essay dated June 12, 2019.
This piece criticizes reporting by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Independent, the Asahi Shimbun, and Mike Honda on comfort women, Nanjing, and wartime conduct in Southeast Asia, arguing that they formed a structure of historical impression manipulation against Japan.
Touching also on the Chinese community in Singapore, it sharply questions how anti-Japan narratives were constructed in the postwar world.

2019-06-12
They remain entrenched in Singapore, conceal their identity as Chinese, sing a Malay national anthem, make Christian and Islamic feast days public holidays, and call themselves “Nngaporeans.”

Everyone who purchased the following book in response to my recommendation must have been astonished by his vast knowledge, discernment, superb verification, and high reporting ability.
At the same time, they will surely agree that my assessment of him as the one and only journalist in the postwar world is exactly right.
Who Is Mike Honda?
In the 1990s, that is, about half a century after the war, I went out as a correspondent to the United States.
What surprised me most at the time was the insidious way The New York Times wrote.
Whenever the word “Korea” appeared in an entirely ordinary editorial, it always attached the pillow phrase “where Japan once colonized.”
This was not about prewar history in particular, but commentary on the still ongoing famine in North Korea.
In the same way, whenever “Southeast Asia” appeared, it added “where Japan had conducted atrocities.”
The Netherlands colonized Indonesia for 400 years and yet built neither schools nor hospitals.
France, in Vietnam, built prisons instead of schools, and sold opium instead of medicine.
They call that colonialism.
Japan built schools in Korea, placed hospitals there, laid railways, and brought electricity.
By reducing all that to the single word “colony,” they were deliberately trying to implant the impression that Japan too had cruelly exploited Korea.
This is not limited to The New York Times.
The Los Angeles Times and the British paper The Independent are the same.
And what these newspapers write about most loudly are the Japanese military’s comfort women, the Nanjing Massacre, and atrocities in Southeast Asia.
In Nanjing, it is said that the Japanese military plundered at will, killed 7,000 civilians every day for six weeks, and raped 2,000 women every night.
If that were so, there should have been a stir over pregnancies carrying Japanese seed, which accompanies rape.
In fact, in Vietnam, where Korean soldiers served, they left as many as 30,000 mixed-race children, yet in Nanjing there is not even one person of Japanese mixed descent.
Nor have the bones of 300,000 people been found.
For some reason, the witnesses are also limited to a New York Times reporter, an American professor, and an Australian reporter from the Manchester Guardian.
As for Australia, it is a former convict state that curries favor with the United States.
The comfort women story was fabricated by Asahi Shimbun reporter Takashi Uemura, referring to Seiji Yoshida’s lie about the forced roundup of comfort women.
He wrote, “The Japanese military forcibly rounded up innocent Korean women and made them comfort women for soldiers on the battlefield.
They were called the Women’s Volunteer Corps.”
In reality, Korean pimps sold them to brothels.
This was then amplified by an Australian journalist, and U.S. Congressman Mike Honda went so far as to submit a resolution of condemnation on the basis that “the Japanese military made 200,000 Asian women into sex slaves.”
This man even looks as though he took the name Honda through sōshi-kaimei!?
“Plunder and atrocities in Southeast Asia” are also used in newspapers as a stock epithet for Japan, yet they entirely lack the ring of truth.
As mentioned above, it was Americans who committed the appalling atrocities in the Philippines.
It was the French who addicted the Vietnamese to opium.
It was the Dutch who stripped Indonesian women naked, whipped them, and rubbed mustard into their wounds.
Only in Singapore did the Japanese military kill Chinese residents.
Lee Kuan Yew, a Chinese resident himself, insists on that, but as he himself admits, when the Japanese military landed in Malaya, the Chinese fought on the side of their white masters, the British.
Just like the Indian soldiers and others.
But when the British army was defeated, some of the Chinese fled to Thailand, and the rest cast off their arms and pretended to be innocent civilians.
That is the so-called plainclothes corps.
They are more vicious than deserters.
Under the laws of war, being hunted down and executed is only natural.
Even so, the Japanese military did not kill them all.
It spared many of them, including Lee Kuan Yew.
In the end, that became a mistake.
After the war, they posed as victims, spread stories whether true or not, stayed on in Singapore, an island floating in a Malay sea, concealed their identity as Chinese, sang a Malay national anthem, made Christian and Islamic feast days public holidays, and called themselves “Nngaporeans.”
There are far too many lies in the words of those who insist on talking of massacre.
To be continued.