2019/10/31
Sun Yat-sen’s grandson, Son Jihei, also told Hosaka that “Americans feel a greater affinity with the Chinese than with the Japanese,” and Hosaka accepted it without question.
I am republishing the chapter I posted on April 4, 2019.
The following is taken from Masayuki Takayama’s serial column that closes today’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
The Sycophantic Courtiers of Heisei
When Masayasu Hosaka discusses history, he wants to keep it confined within Japan.
He gives no thought to the outside world.
Some describe this as a tunnel-vision view of history.
Reading his book “Why Is Japan Disliked?” makes this clear.
Take, for example, Peleliu, the site of fierce fighting.
Before fighting the US military, Japanese forces moved the islanders to a safe island, then fought and died to the last soldier.
Compare this with American soldiers in the Philippines.
While retreating toward the Bataan Peninsula, pursued by Japanese forces, “when they encountered local people, they could not distinguish them from the Japanese and killed them” [testimony of Lester Tenney, a university professor in Arizona].
The people of Peleliu still speak of the Japanese forces’ compassion and integrity, and the US military also erected a monument declaring that it would “remember how bravely the Japanese forces fought here and how they died” [US Pacific Fleet Commander Chester William Nimitz].
Hosaka, however, is different.
From “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa” by Eugene Bondurant Sledge, an American soldier who fought there, he quotes a passage stating that “Japanese soldiers cut off American soldiers’ heads and placed them on their torsos, pushing severed penises into their mouths,” and embraces the assertion that “Americans know no people this brutal.”
Hosaka knows that those who commit such atrocities, both in the past and today, are Chinese or Koreans, but firmly believes that the Japanese of his father’s generation “imitated them.”
Hosaka wants to believe American soldiers rather than the Japanese.
Before reaching that conclusion, I wish he had read the accounts of the massacre of the Cheyenne at Sand Creek, for which testimony before the US Congress also survives.
There, the white people whom Hosaka believes behave like white Chinese.
They shoot dead a six-year-old girl carrying a white flag, kill her mother, and slit open a pregnant woman’s abdomen to pull out the fetus.
They cut off fingers to steal turquoise rings and gouged out a woman’s genitalia to attach them to a saddle’s pommel.
That is the true nature of those who insist that they have nothing to do with such brutality.
Incidentally, placing a severed head on a torso is an Afghan custom.
Sun Yat-sen’s grandson, Son Jihei, also told Hosaka that “Americans feel a greater affinity with the Chinese than with the Japanese,” and Hosaka accepted it without question.
Because Americans could not use enslaved Black people, they used coolie labor instead to complete the transcontinental railroad.
Once it was completed, the coolies who were no longer needed were killed.
Iris Chang exposed this and was driven to suicide.
There is no reason to believe that Americans feel an affinity with the Chinese.
Sun Yat-sen, too, fled after experiencing discrimination in Hawaii.
Returning to Japan, Sun Yat-sen used the revival of the Han people as a pretext to swindle money from the Japanese.
When the Manchu Qing dynasty eventually collapsed, Sun Yat-sen began claiming that “the Qing territories of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet belong to the Han people.”
The Qing had formed a federation with Mongolia and other territories.
The Han people, meanwhile, were treated like slaves and forbidden to marry Manchus.
Sun Yat-sen’s claim was equivalent to colonial India replacing Britain as the leader of the British Commonwealth.
The international community scoffed at Sun Yat-sen’s words.
However, the situation changed as Japan rose to prominence.
“I think Japan is a threat” [Theodore Roosevelt].
The United States accepted Sun Yat-sen’s nonsense and declared that “Japan has invaded Manchuria, which is Chinese territory.”
That is the Stimson Doctrine.
To defeat Japan, the United States elevated China and made Chiang Kai-shek’s forces attack Japan.
That is how the Second Sino-Japanese War began.
Many historical facts demonstrate this.
Why did Hosaka not challenge the swindler’s grandson?
Among his close friends is Kazutoshi Hando, an anti-Japanese storyteller.
This man, who described Emperor Showa as “so serious it was damn near excessive,” nevertheless believes that MacArthur was “the greatest general in US Army history.”
When this general arrived at Atsugi, he wet himself down to around his knees and took his first step onto Japanese soil in wet trousers.
He hurriedly prohibited the publication of photographs and subsequently retaliated against the Japanese through censorship reminiscent of “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” disregarding the principle against retroactive application of the law.
Hando, like Hosaka, grovels before white people.
They lectured the reigning emperor in various ways.
I hope their harmful influence does not linger into the new era.