An essay dated June 11, 2019.
Through discussions of anniversary-of-the-war reporting, the Hiroshima atomic bombing, the destruction of Manila, the Bataan Death March, and the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, this piece criticizes anti-Japan historical narratives advanced by the Asahi Shimbun and The New York Times, and argues for the restoration of Japan’s honor.
It sharply questions both the history of white domination and the deceptions of the postwar media.

2019-06-11
The New York Times can keep as many Asian writers as it likes who curry favor with the United States, and at suitable moments have them fabricate “Japan’s great sins.”
White reporters too, whenever the occasion arises, write still more insidious accusation pieces about “Japan, the aggressor nation.”

Everyone who purchased the following book in response to my recommendation must have been astonished by his vast knowledge, discernment, splendid 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.
White People Are Always Black-Hearted.
A Comparison of Cruelty.
Every year when August 15 comes around, it seems to have become one fixed pattern for Japanese newspapers to run special features looking back on the last war.
The twentieth century was truly Japan’s century.
Because Japan broke the form in which white people reigned and ruled the world.
The “last war” that took place in the middle of the twentieth century was the confrontation between the white nations trying to stop that current and Japan.
After that, to borrow Owen Lattimore’s words, the white nations wanted to burn all of Japan to the ground and, as with Carthage, scatter salt over it and make it disappear.
But since this was different from Roman times, they could not quite so openly carry out an ethnic-cleansing operation.
Japan was supposed to be stripped even of its military and reduced to a defenseless agricultural country, but before anyone knew it, it had grown into the world’s second-largest economic power.
What was the last war?
There is meaning in looking back on it fully and verifying it.
A feature with that meaning I can understand, but take for example the Asahi Shimbun’s “Chemical Weapons Disposal Begins.”
It raises the lingering aftereffects of “Japan’s great sins,” as if to say that the Japanese military used poison gas weapons and then simply abandoned them.
In a column it also writes, without any real meaning, Hitomi Yamaguchi’s words, “The great good fortune of my life consists in having lost the war and in Article 9 of the Constitution.”
At the hundredth anniversary of the annexation of Korea, it gave the headline, “Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula and even took away its language and names.”
It was Japan that lit the fire of culture on that peninsula, which had been “a remote corner of the world” (Kō Bun’yū, Intensive Lectures on Modern and Contemporary History).
A people infatuated with Shina, who had changed their names into Shina-style names, then arbitrarily came to call themselves by Japanese names.
There is no verification of that sort either.
With one stroke they declare Japan to be “a perpetrator of great sins.”
It makes me want to ask what pleasure they find in degrading Japan, and to hear the psychology behind such conduct, but in fact this groundless condemnation of Japan is not limited to the Asahi Shimbun.
Ahead of the anniversary of the end of the war, The New York Times too, on the subject of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, had the Filipino writer F. Sionil Jose recall “being slapped by Japanese soldiers who entered Manila” and “the destruction of Manila,” thereby recollecting the cruelty of the Japanese military, and from that argued that “the Hiroshima atomic bombing was only natural,” denouncing Japan’s great sins in exactly the same tone as the Asahi Shimbun.
For the honor of the Japanese, let it be said that the one who indiscriminately destroyed Manila was MacArthur’s returning forces.
The Japanese military did not requisition Filipino homes, but camped in the city racetrack, and most had already gone outside the city before the American invasion.
When summer comes, this great Filipino writer will probably have his turn again.
For that time, I want to offer one warning.
He would do well to read the autobiography of Lester Tenney, who calls himself a victim of the Bataan Death March.
Tenney writes that while retreating to Bataan in an M3 tank, because “he could not tell Filipinos from Japanese,” he destroyed every village he passed through and killed everything that moved, in other words doing the same thing as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
He did something worse than a slap.
Or he could also read the records of the U.S. Senate hearings from when the United States invaded that writer’s country in the early twentieth century.
There are mountains of records there of an American military that cast aside all war ethics, including torture in which Filipino prisoners were forced to drink muddy water, and execution records in which bullets were fired one by one each day, deliberately avoiding the vital points, making them suffer and killing them on the fifth day.
In Batangas and Samar, the inhabitants were slaughtered, and the hearing record concludes that “even on a low estimate, 200,000 were killed.”
The New York Times can keep as many Asian writers as it likes who curry favor with the United States, and at suitable moments have them fabricate “Japan’s great sins.”
White reporters too, whenever the occasion arises, write still more insidious accusation pieces about “Japan, the aggressor nation.”
To be continued.