The following is from “A Coward’s Ignorance,” the concluding installment of Masayuki Takayama’s serial column “Henken Jizai,” published in the November 6, 2025 issue of Shukan Shincho.
This article sharply criticizes the historical and psychological background behind Xi Jinping’s obsession with unifying Taiwan.
While ridiculing Asahi Shimbun reporter Hayashi Nozomu’s fine-sounding phrase, “the desire to overcome the negative history of semi-colonization,” Takayama declares that “if that is the case, the proper thing to do would be to take back Vietnam before Taiwan.”
Moving freely across the Sino-French War, the Sino-Vietnamese War, and colonial rule by the great powers, he exposes the cowardice of a dictator who does not know history.
His writing is a unique intellectual art of journalism in postwar Japan, and a scathing critique of civilization addressed to the international community.
Abe no Nakamaro, who was unable to return to Japan, served for six years as Military Governor of Annam in his later years.
January 10, 2024
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serial column that adorns the final pages of Shukan Shincho, released today.
This article, too, proves that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
It is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
To this article, I offer my own words: “Genius recognizes genius. The first-rate recognizes the first-rate.”
Every person of discernment should feel as though the scales have fallen from their eyes.
“Isn’t the reason Taiwan is the target simply that it looks like a place where he might be able to win?”
This is one of the finest manifestations of “vision” and “transcendence” in the postwar era.
This article is truly extraordinary!
*Every person of discernment should realize that the achievements Prime Minister Takaichi accomplished at the Japan-U.S. summit were truly remarkable.
[I hope that this time, at least, it will not turn out that way.]
September 30, 2025
The overwhelming majority of the people now clearly recognize that Sanae Takaichi is the person most suited to be Prime Minister of Japan.
That is precisely why they long for her to become Prime Minister.
The reason goes without saying. She is the most clear-minded, possesses genuinely first-rate intelligence, and at the same time has the courage befitting a Prime Minister of Japan.
She is the true successor to Shinzo Abe, whom it would be no exaggeration to call the greatest politician in the postwar world.
A Coward’s Ignorance
Why is Xi Jinping so fixated on Taiwan?
Asahi Shimbun reporter Hayashi Nozomu wrote that it is because Xi has a desire “to overcome the negative history of semi-colonization.”
Xi “became the first Party General Secretary to visit Weihaiwei, where he sank into deep contemplation,” Hayashi wrote.
That was the site of the final naval battle of the Sino-Japanese War.
Inside the harbor, protected by batteries, the battleships Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, which had survived the Battle of the Yellow Sea, had taken refuge together with three cruisers.
They thought there was no longer any danger of being sunk there, but Japanese torpedo boats charged in, finished off the Dingyuan with a torpedo, and then sank the three cruisers as well.
The Beiyang Fleet ceased to exist.
Seeing such an unimaginable ending, Admiral Ding Ruchang swallowed raw opium and killed himself.
Opium, after all, is also a deadly poison.
One can understand why Ding felt like dying.
Before this, at the Battle of the Yellow Sea, despite possessing heavy ships that overwhelmingly outclassed the Japanese fleet, two key cruisers lost their nerve and fled before the enemy, and because of that they suffered a crushing defeat.
With such a disgraceful defeat, it became clear that China was no “sleeping lion,” and Russia simply took Port Arthur and Dalian, Britain took Weihaiwei, France took Guangzhouwan, and Germany took Jiaozhou Bay.
Unlike them, Japan received Taiwan as legitimate wartime reparations, territory that the Qing dynasty itself had despised as “a land beyond civilization.”
I thought Xi Jinping had stood at the site of that shameful history and sighed over the hopelessness of the Chinese people—the Han Chinese.
But that was not what happened.
“Now that national power has grown, the time has come to overcome the history of suffering inflicted by the great powers and restore the country to the form it originally ought to have had,” he declares.
Hayashi Nozomu, with great emotional investment, writes of Xi’s determination and says that this means the unification of Taiwan.
Incidentally, Hayashi Nozomu is not a Chinese “Lin Wang,” but a Japanese man named Hayashi something.
It sounds plausible enough, but it is far from clear on what basis the Chinese Communist government claims latent sovereignty over Taiwan.
Japan’s possession of Taiwan involved no deception whatsoever.
It was far more moral than the United States’ annexation of Hawaii during roughly the same period.
Even if, for the sake of argument, one accepts the claim that Taiwan “was Qing territory and the Chinese Communist government is its successor, and therefore must take it back,” is there not somewhere that should be taken back before Taiwan?
Yes. Vietnam.
Taiwan, as the Qing dynasty itself said, was “a land beyond civilization,” where people scarcely went, but Vietnam had once been directly ruled territory where the Protectorate General to Pacify the South was established.
Abe no Nakamaro, who was unable to return to Japan, served for six years as Military Governor of Annam in his later years.
But shortly before the Sino-Japanese War, it was taken by France in the Sino-French War.
Franklin Roosevelt remembered that.
At the Cairo Conference, he therefore told Chiang, “If you want French Indochina, I’ll give it back to you” (Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan).
But it continues, “Chiang refused.”
It is said that he was probably afraid of de Gaulle.
FDR also intended to return Hong Kong to Chiang and tested British Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley by asking, “Wasn’t Hong Kong taken unlawfully?”
The British Colonial Secretary replied, “Yes. Around the time of the Mexican-American War, if I remember correctly.”
What he meant was: Didn’t the United States take California from Mexico by even more unscrupulous means?
If Xi Jinping is truly serious about “overcoming the history of semi-colonization,” then surely the proper order would be to take Vietnam back before Taiwan and restore the country to its “original form.”
As a matter of fact, China tried that once, in 1979.
The Chinese Communist regime is, in its own way, very particular about the Sinocentric order.
Angered that Vietnam had bullied the Khmer Rouge, whom China had favored, it went out to punish Vietnam.
That was the Sino-Vietnamese War.
Two hundred thousand People’s Liberation Army troops attacked, only to be beaten back, with nearly 30,000 killed in just two weeks.
In other words, China never wants to touch Vietnam again.
Likewise, it does not tell Russia to return the Russian Far East, which Russia took through coercion under the Treaty of Peking.
If it did, Putin being Putin, he might quite casually drop a nuclear weapon on Beijing as a fine example to the world.
China is too frightened to say it.
Why Taiwan? Isn’t it because Taiwan looks like a place where he might be able to win?
Come to think of it, China launched the Sino-Vietnamese War because it thought the same thing.
Cowards, above all, should study history.