2024/03/14

In this article, too, he proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
March 12, 2018
Masayuki Takayama writes a well-regarded regular column in the latter part of Weekly Shincho.
The following is from this week’s issue.
In this article, too, he proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Emphasis in the text, other than the heading, is mine.

When Striking Shina
To understand the people of Shina, analyzing Xi Jinping, who salutes with his left hand, may be useful, but examining a man named Li Yuanhong may offer an even better understanding.
Like many Chinese people, he could not swim.
Nevertheless, he aspired to join the navy and served aboard the cruiser Guangjia during the First Sino-Japanese War.
He confronted the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Yellow Sea, but both the captain and Li became frightened and made an unprecedented flight in the face of the enemy.
After the ship ran aground on its own, he escaped into the sea, only to realize that he could not swim.
His men rescued him as he was about to drown.
With that, he gave up the sea and became a brigade commander in a unit newly established by the Qing dynasty in Wuhan.
His job was to capture and execute revolutionary elements, including members of the Revive China Society, who challenged the Qing dynasty.
That day, too, he captured about a hundred people and had three of them shot in the evening.
Among those hundred people, however, were many soldiers under his own command.
Just how far had revolutionary ideology spread?
He had gone to bed with this anxiety when it happened.
A massive explosion erupted at an arsenal in Wuchang, one of the three towns of Wuhan.
Li instinctively thought that the revolutionaries had risen.
To them, he was the chief of their hated enemies.
Imagining himself dragged before a crowd, his ears sliced off, his eyes gouged out, and his body cut to pieces and killed, he lost control of his bladder.
He summoned his men.
Instead of ordering them to suppress the uprising, he begged them to find him a safe hiding place.
The explosion in Wuchang was not the work of revolutionaries.
It was an accident caused by a soldier dropping a barrel of gunpowder he was carrying, but the revolutionaries made the same mistake as Li Yuanhong.
“Our comrades have risen.”
By daybreak, Wuhan was overflowing with revolutionaries and people swept up in revolutionary fervor, and the city was in an uproar.
Among the Japanese who brought them together were the retired military officer Takeyoshi Ohara and Nagatomo Kayano, who knew Sun Yat-sen and had engaged in political activities on the Chinese mainland before the war.
The Qing forces, meanwhile, were organized by a German military advisory group.
The revolutionary turmoil began to take on the appearance of a proxy war between Germany and Japan, but then Li Yuanhong was discovered in his hiding place.
Should they make a blood sacrifice of him?
The revolutionaries, however, had no leader.
Sun Yat-sen had fled to the United States after his embezzlement was exposed.
What about this?
Although he was an enemy, why not put the well-known Li Yuanhong at the head of the revolutionaries for the time being?
The Xinhai Revolution had begun with a misunderstanding in the first place.
There was room for that much flexibility.
Li became the revolutionaries’ leader for the time being.
That was why it was called an “outrageous revolution.”
Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen was in Denver.
The funds for the uprising had come from a good-natured Japanese man, Shokichi Umeya.
Even after learning of the Wuchang Uprising in an American newspaper, he did not immediately return to China.
He went in the opposite direction, to New York, and then crossed to London, where he busied himself raising funds while presenting himself as the leader of a new China.
He had launched ten uprisings and failed ten times, but each time he found backers and emerged richer from the disaster.
Sun Yat-sen thought that this attempt would probably fail too, but that it did not matter as long as he could raise the money.
The American journalist George Bronson Rea, who knew Sun Yat-sen well, wrote in his book that this was the kind of man Sun was.
When Sun Yat-sen returned home, the revolution had unexpectedly succeeded.
Li Yuanhong held sway, and Yuan Shikai had also emerged.
There was no role left for the impostor Sun Yat-sen.
He did just one thing: he renamed the Wuchang Uprising, which the Chinese had called the “Xinhai Rebellion,” the “Xinhai Revolution,” following Japanese usage.
That was the only thing in which the people of Shina followed him.
Ever since, the people of Shina have called political acts of overturning the table “revolutions.”
The term was first used in revising the unequal treaties.
Japan negotiated with other countries to revise its treaties, but Shina proclaimed all unequal treaties null and void under the banner of “revolutionary diplomacy.”
It did the same with Japan’s interests in Manchuria, erasing the past and overturning the table.
Ever since, Shina has pursued revolutionary diplomacy single-mindedly, disregarding international rules.
Even when an international court ruled that China had no rights or interests in the Spratly Islands, China ignored the ruling in revolutionary fashion.
Even in Hong Kong, where “one country, two systems” was supposed to last for fifty years, it is attempting to switch unilaterally to a single system.
And our Senkaku Islands, too, are being turned into China’s core territory through a revolutionary view of history.
Japan, too, bears responsibility for Shina’s arrogant and high-handed conduct.
It is about time to deliver a hard blow with a fist.