Masayuki Takayama traces the origins of the Han Chinese, the fabricated narratives of the Records of the Grand Historian, and the brutality of Chinese dynasties, then links these historical patterns to Renhō’s dismissal of Japan’s “super levee” flood-control project. A sharp critique of historical consciousness and modern political failure.

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column that concludes the latest issue of Shukan Shincho, released yesterday.
This essay again proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for readers around the world.

The “Chinese” Renhō
Along the banks of the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River, lies the Central Plain, where many dynasties have set their capitals since ancient times.
The people living in this Central Plain were called “Shina-jin,” the Chinese.
The ethnicity corresponds to the Han people.
These Chinese appeared late on the grand stage of China’s 4,000-year history.
It was around the halfway mark of those 4,000 years.
Until then, they had long been ruled by foreign peoples—Yin, Zhou, Qin—living all the while as the ruled, that is, as slaves.
But when the First Emperor died and Qin collapsed, and strong outsider tribes were no longer present, for the first time a world of only the Chinese arrived.
Liu Bang and Xiang Yu competed for supremacy, and Liu Bang won and founded the Han dynasty.
The people, long oppressed, rejoiced.
A nameless slave people took the name “Han” after the new dynasty.
Wanting to record this joyous event for posterity, Emperor Wu of Han ordered Sima Qian to write the Records of the Grand Historian.
However, starting the narrative from their long subjugation under foreign rule was unpleasant, so they created the fiction that before Yin and Zhou there had been a Chinese dynasty called “Xia.”
Thus, the Records began with fabrication.
But for the 2,000 years from the legendary Xia’s fall to the rise of Liu Bang, there is no role for the Chinese people.
That too was inconvenient.
So Sima Qian continued inventing.
For example, near the end of Yin.
Let us insert a Chinese figure during the age of King Wen of Zhou.
King Wen hears of a wise Chinese man named Lü Shang.
When he visits him, Lü Shang is fishing.
This created the famous Taigong Wang scene, immortalized in the senryū “Approaching him with a ‘Catching anything?’ King Wen draws near.”
But the Yin dynasty only fell in the era of Wen’s son.
There was no actual role for Taigong Wang; the point was to create the episode “Wisdom belongs to the Chinese.”
The eastern Yi, the First Emperor, founded Qin and established a centralized state, standardizing script and weights and measures.
He was an excellent ruler, but in the Records he is described as “cruel, with a heart like a tiger or wolf.”
According to the Records, an outsider cannot be admirable.
Thus appears Jing Ke, the assassin of the tyrant Qin.
“The wind is bleak, the Yi River cold; the brave man goes, never to return”—one of the most famous scenes in the Records.
Yet the assassination fails, and history does not change.
So how was the first Chinese-run Han dynasty?
Like Xi Jinping today, Chinese people know well the power of authority but do not know noblesse oblige.
The history of Han begins with Empress Lü cutting off the limbs of Consort Qi, gouging out her eyes, plugging her ears, burning her vocal cords, and throwing her into a latrine.
Everything is cruel and bloody, and in a word, the Han era was “four hundred years of regicide and usurpation.”
The people became disgusted, but fortunately after the Han fell, the long-awaited foreign peoples arrived in droves.
As unified dynasties: Northern Wei and Tang of the Xianbei; Yuan of the Mongols.
After that, sandwiched between the nightmare Chinese Ming, came the Manchu Qing.
Except for the Ming, they were all good dynasties.
For example, Emperor Yang of Sui.
He was the one to whom Prince Shōtoku sent the line: “The Son of Heaven of the land where the sun rises addresses the Son of Heaven of the land where the sun sets.”
This emperor built a 2,500-kilometer Grand Canal spanning the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in just six years.
Transportation increased dramatically, and the economy flourished, but the people hated him.
Six million residents were mobilized for the project and could not return home for half a year.
Like the First Emperor, Emperor Yang also poured effort into building the Great Wall, and the people were conscripted again—hence his reputation as one of history’s worst tyrants.
During that nightmarish Democratic Party administration, Renhō cut the “super levees,” designed to withstand once-in-200-years flooding, calling them a waste.
The total budget was 12 trillion yen, and she could not understand spending such a massive sum to prepare for floods whose timing is unknown.
Perhaps in her consciousness lay the memories of a people forced for ages to build walls against unpredictable barbarian invasions, bury terracotta warriors, and dig canals.
But Tokyo residents fear floods more than tyrants.
I wonder if she understands that.