December 23, 2022
Quite some time ago, an elderly female professor from Monaco’s Royal Ballet School, deeply respected by prima ballerinas around the world, visited Japan.
These are the words she spoke then about the significance of artists’ existence.
“Artists are important because they alone can illuminate truths that have been concealed or remain hidden, and give expression to them.”
Surely no one would dispute her words.
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that Masayuki Takayama is not only a journalist without equal in the postwar world but also an artist without equal in the postwar world.
Meanwhile, many of those who call themselves writers—Oe, Murakami, Hirano, and others—and imagine themselves to be artists do not even deserve the name.
For, far from illuminating concealed or hidden truths and giving expression to them, they have merely given expression to lies manufactured by the Asahi Shimbun and others.
The same must be true of people like them not only in Japan but in countries throughout the world.
In other words, true artists are exceedingly few.
This book, too, poignantly demonstrates the correctness of my assertion that no one in the world today is more deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature than Masayuki Takayama.
Are Japanese People the Only Ones Who Condemn “Attacks on Civilian Facilities”?
Seki Hei:
Incidentally, in Putin’s current war, too, Japanese people have been raising their voices in condemnation of Russia’s targeting of civilian facilities.
Generally, even in war, military facilities are attacked, but civilian facilities are not attacked very much.
Hospitals, for example, are not attacked.
I believe there are rules of that sort.
Yet those rules are being completely ignored, and shopping centers, schools, and even hospitals are being attacked.
What do you think of that way of waging war?
Takayama:
You even cherish Japan’s flowers and plants, Mr. Seki.
It seems that, in doing so, you have become Japanese at heart as well.
Generally speaking, it is only the Japanese who refrain from harming noncombatants.
That Japanese sensibility does not apply elsewhere in the world.
During the Pacific War, American B-29s repeatedly dropped bombs targeting Nagoya Castle, which was not a munitions factory.
They burned entire cities to the ground without considering civilian casualties.
Seki Hei:
In complete contrast, the Japanese military did not target civilian facilities.
Takayama:
There was a Hollywood film called Pearl Harbor.
It contains a scene in which Japanese aircraft bomb a hospital.
That is an outright lie.
But Hollywood deliberately creates such scenes on the assumption that “the Japanese are non-Christian barbarians, so of course they would go that far.”
Records remain of how Japanese aircraft carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor, and although nearly 200 vessels were crowded into the harbor, vessels bearing the Red Cross emblem were not hit by even a single machine-gun bullet.
The Pearl Harbor memorial also screens footage of the attack, and at the end a caption appears stating that “more than fifty civilians died.”
When you ask what this is based on, it turns out that civilians died not from Japanese aircraft attacks but because American antiaircraft fire fell on urban Honolulu, thirty-five kilometers away.
It is shabby of them not to state that honestly.
Seki Hei:
Japan is a humane country of bushido, where ordinary people do not participate directly in fighting.
Warriors fight other warriors—that is, combatants fight combatants.
In China, however, residents live within the fortified city, so naturally those residents also become targets.
In Japan, the castle and the castle town are separate.
Takayama:
But the peasants watch the situation closely and suddenly turn into bandits known as nobuseri.
The seemingly docile peasants are the most frightening of all.
That is how Akechi Mitsuhide was killed, too.
Seki Hei:
You mean hunting down defeated warriors.
Takayama:
That is a genteel way of putting it, but it happened not only to Akechi Mitsuhide.
The same thing happened when Shimazu Yoshihiro, who had sided with the Western Army at the Battle of Sekigahara, escaped by crossing directly in front of Tokugawa’s positions in what is called a “breakthrough through enemy lines.”
Most of his officers and soldiers managed to escape the battlefield, but afterward they were attacked by nobuseri—peasants—and suffered heavy casualties.
The very prevalence of hunting down defeated warriors conversely reflected the underlying assumption that ordinary civilians were not killed in battle.
If the warriors had been fighting in earnest, they would not have lost their lives so easily to those hunting them down.
Seki Hei:
The same was true of China’s Red Guards.
Once they thought they could openly “destroy things,” they gleefully ran riot.
They formed student activist groups called Long March units and began denouncing everything.
The government gave them extraordinary privileges, covering train fares, accommodation, and meals, and sent them throughout China.
Then it encouraged them to “smash all the Four Olds.”
In those days, the Red Guards were even given the authority to kill people.
Even if they killed someone, no one was held accountable as long as they declared the victim a “counterrevolutionary” and reported it.
That was because killing became a “revolutionary act.”
In that sense, there is one difference between the Han Chinese and the Russians—for example, between Mao Zedong’s purges and Stalin’s.
Stalin’s purges used police units and took the form of organized executions by shooting.
Mao Zedong’s purges, on the other hand, incited people’s hatred and made them kill one another.
So although hundreds of thousands were killed during the Cultural Revolution, most of the perpetrators were not police officers.
They were perfectly ordinary citizens and young people.
For example, it was commonplace for high school students to kill the teachers who had taught them.
In other words, compared with Stalin’s purges, Mao’s were more insidious.
He unleashed the ugliest side of human nature in the name of “revolution.”
Takayama:
And he let it run unchecked.
Seki Hei:
More than that, he expanded it further.
Everyone sometimes thinks, “I hate that person,” don’t they?
With “revolution” as a pretext, they could justify killing that person and take pleasure in it.
They could also exact revenge.
But in Japan, even if such an appeal were made, few people would act on it.
I think this is fundamentally a question of national character rather than merely a problem with the Communist Party system.
Speaking of the Communist Party, another bad thing the Russians did was that Lenin took communism, which Marx and Engels had devised half in play, seriously, turned it into a social and political movement, and built a communist dictatorship.
From that emerged the Chinese Communist Party and then the Workers’ Party of Korea, creating organizations that were extremely authoritarian and oppressive toward human beings.
They have also become a major threat to world peace.
Even the Korean War began with Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea, and if there had been no Communist forces on the Chinese mainland, the massacres of the Cultural Revolution would not have occurred.