An essay dated June 11, 2019.
Focusing on Ryōtarō Shiba’s portrayal of historical figures, the Asahi Shimbun-style historical view, criticism of Meiji 150, foreign worship, and hatred toward modern Japan, this piece sharply exposes the problems through Masayuki Takayama’s argument.
It severely questions how the Shiba historical view and the masochistic postwar media narrative are fundamentally connected.

2019-06-11
But mixed into that historical view are hatred toward modern Japan and a childish level of foreign worship.
It is by no means a coincidence that it bears a strange resemblance to the Asahi Shimbun, which derides Meiji 150.

This is a chapter I published on 2018-09-29 under the title, Why Did Shiba Imitate Honda Katsuichi? Even His Way of Portraying People Went Beyond Ijichi Kōsuke.
Readers must have thought that there is something mutually understood between Masayuki Takayama and me.
Every week I buy Shukan Shincho in order to read the concluding serialized columns of Masayuki Takayama and Yoshiko Sakurai.
The serialized column in this week’s issue too splendidly proves his vast knowledge, discernment, superb verification, and high reporting ability.
Ryōtarō Shiba must have been for him a senior as a Sankei Shimbun reporter and also a familiar presence.
I am not boasting, but I have never read even one of his books… I have never had any desire to read them… and yet I knew a great deal about him.
Because for a very long time I regularly subscribed to Weekly Asahi… and because I read almost every week Shiba’s Kaidō o Yuku, which was that magazine’s signature serial.
At the same time, the reason I felt something like a connection was that I encountered him twice in the bar of Hotel Okura in Tokyo.
At the time I was chatting with a very close friend from Dentsu, while he was having meetings with people from the industry.
That is because we encountered each other twice at seats very near one another.
And I, not long after I unwillingly appeared in 2010 on the internet, the greatest library in human history, wrote a passage mocking him.
That was probably because it had something that communicated with Takayama’s splendid criticism in this week’s issue.
A friend of mine, one of the greatest readers around, teased me by saying that only Takayama and you can cut down Ryōtarō Shiba.
The emphasis in the text, except for the heading, is mine.
Masayuki Takayama
At Meiji 150
When I entered the Sankei Shimbun, Shiba Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku was being serialized in the evening edition.
I remember being deeply impressed by the depiction of the characters.
Around the time of the 1970 security treaty protests, Clouds Above the Hill was likewise serialized in the Sankei evening edition.
I could hardly wait for the evening paper to arrive.
Even my elder brother, who had been foolishly saying from that time, “A newspaper means Asahi,” switched to Sankei.
That was the effect of Saka no Ue.
But as the serialization went on, the character portrayals that had impressed me so much grew strangely heavy, and I even began to dislike reading them.
For example, regarding Nogi Maresuke, who produced many battle deaths in the assault on Port Arthur.
He savagely criticized him as incompetent and so forth.
And he hurled even more terrible abuse at the staff officer Ijichi Kōsuke.
I know no Japanese writer who insults people to this extent.
Recently Masayasu Hosaka wrote mercilessly about Hideki Tōjō.
I think Shiba ended up giving citizenship to that kind of un-Japanese, tasteless style of description, like South Korea’s criticism of Japan.
By the time the serialization ended, I was in the Haneda press club.
When I was going around the airlines, there was among Japan Airlines executives the grandson of Yasukiyo Abo, chief gunnery officer of the Combined Fleet.
He was the man who stood beside Tōgō Heihachirō and directed the concentrated artillery fire on the Baltic Fleet.
At All Nippon Airways, the grandson of Ijichi Kōsuke, whom Shiba had cursed so thoroughly, was head of the management office.
I asked both men their impressions of how their grandfathers had been portrayed, and there were truly mountains of objections.
I had wanted to ask Shiba directly about that area, but before I knew it he had moved from Sankei to Asahi and begun travel writing.
From around that time, a strangely Asahi-like color began to appear.
The “run them over and kill them” remark was from around that time too.
Before the end of the war, Shiba had returned from Manchuria and was at a tank-unit base in Sano City, Tochigi Prefecture.
There were also rumors of an American landing.
At that time, an Imperial Headquarters staff officer said that they were to go down from Sano and stop them at the water’s edge.
But the roads were full of evacuees.
When asked what to do, the staff officer said, “Run them over and kill them.”
It was exactly the sort of way of speaking one would expect from the “cruel Japanese military” officer created by Asahi, but I thought it was a little strange.
At the very time when the American forces were supposedly landing and everyone was fleeing from Tokyo, the tank unit was still lingering idly in Sano.
Could there really be a situation where one says, well then, shall we slowly move out now?
In fact, none of his tank-unit comrades heard that staff officer’s remark.
Why did Shiba imitate Honda Katsuichi?
Even his way of portraying people went beyond Ijichi Kōsuke.
In his travel account of Shimabara, he exhausted every word in condemning Matsukura Shigemasa, who suppressed the Christians, saying, “There is no one in Japanese history more detestable than he.”
The basis was records by a Portuguese captain and a Dutch trading post chief.
Things like, “He put straw raincoats on believers and set them on fire.”
But did he verify those records?
If he had, he should have known that they matched splendidly the descriptions in Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which was selling in Europe at that time.
This yellow country insolently said that Christianity was an evil religion that knew no mercy and shut it out.
It makes more sense to see it as a case of, Shall we thoroughly slander them in revenge, and then describing cruel Japan by mimicking Las Casas.
Asahi never ceases to worship white men like MacArthur.
Did Shiba too become infected by that?
In his European travel account, when Tokugawa Yoshinobu’s younger brother Akitake visited Belgium, he happily describes how King Leopold II “showed exceptional favor.”
But afterward that king plotted to make Japan a colony.
He also said, “The uncivilized lands of Asia will surely welcome European civilization.”
In the end, the king made the Congo his colony, cut off the wrists of half the inhabitants, and killed 70 percent of the population.
Yet there is not a single word of criticism of such a king.
Shiba appears to have completely adapted himself to the Asahi climate of being “severe toward Japanese and highly valuing foreigners, even Koreans.”
The Shiba historical view says that “after climbing to the top of the hill, Japan grew arrogant and moved toward ruin.”
This is the habitual historical view used by the left-wing documentary makers who parasitize NHK and live off tax money, and by NHK’s news division… perhaps Ryōtarō Shiba too was one of the approved cultural figures of the masochistic historical view that dominates NHK.
But mixed into that historical view are hatred toward modern Japan and a childish level of foreign worship.
It is by no means a coincidence that it bears a strange resemblance to the Asahi Shimbun, which derides Meiji 150.