This is a full English rendering of key sections from historian Tanaka Hideo’s essay in the January issue of WiLL, titled “The Testimony of F. V. Williams: Behind the Chinese War-Time Propaganda.”
The article critiques China’s “victory over fascism” narrative, revisits the role of communism and Manchukuo as an anti-communist bulwark, and summarizes F. V. Williams’s 1938 book, which exposed Chinese and missionary-driven propaganda such as early Nanking Massacre reporting and highlighted events like the Tongzhou Incident and the 2/28 Incident in Taiwan.
Tanaka argues that Japan remains weak at propaganda, particularly on the comfort women issue, praises Williams as an early anti-communist voice who tried to warn the United States about the danger of Red expansion in Asia, and calls for a renewed Japanese and global reassessment of his work.

The Japanese Are Poor at Propaganda.
Is It Acceptable To Go On Being Condemned Over the Comfort Women Issue by South Korea and China?

“Reflect on your ‘history of aggression’?”

China is fiercely reacting to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s policy speech and her statement in the Diet regarding a “Survival-Threatening Crisis Situation.”
They are objecting to her concerns about the military activities of China, North Korea, and Russia, as well as her remarks on the Taiwan issue.
I will leave commentary on that point itself to others, but what concerns me is the Chinese side’s view of history.
I am referring to the lecture given by Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun:
“This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japan and the World Anti-Fascist War.
We urge Japan to deeply reflect on its history of aggression, to adhere firmly to the path of peace, to exercise prudence in word and deed in the area of military security, and to avoid further losing the trust of neighboring Asian countries and the international community.”
It is true that Japan was defeated in war eighty years ago, but the power we lost to was the United States, not China.
You could say we lost to the Allied Powers, but Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party, spent the war years dozing in the caves of Yan’an, and the Communist forces fought the Japanese mostly with guerrilla warfare.
We did not lose to the Nationalist armies either.
The concept of fascism is a kind of “term of abuse” that can be used however one likes, and it would not be an overstatement to describe the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, as a fascist state.
Who could possibly say that a country which brought about a horrifying catastrophe like the Cultural Revolution is not a fascist state?
Brian Rigg, author of the much-discussed Japan’s Holocaust, claims that the Japanese army carried out a Holocaust of thirty million people in Asia, yet even he says that Mao Zedong killed seventy million people in his own Holocaust.
China tells us to reflect on a “history of aggression,” but Japan understood the danger of communist ideology spreading across the Chinese mainland and wanted to prevent it; we were not waging war against the Chinese people themselves.
This is precisely what Frederick V. Williams insists in Behind the Chinese War-Time Propaganda.
“There is no doubt that the great majority of the Chinese people hope for peace.
But politicians and warlords will not allow it.
Japan is fighting these politicians and warlords, not the people.”
There is no need to reflect on a “history of aggression.”
I will return to this point later.
The Takaichi Cabinet’s defense concept is the natural duty of an independent state, but China’s intention to keep Japan impotent forever under the shackles of Article 9 of the Constitution is obvious.
Likewise, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian has said that this year also marks “the eightieth anniversary of Taiwan’s ‘restoration’ (the liberation from Japanese colonial rule).
Japan carried out colonial rule in Taiwan and committed countless crimes.”
But this is absurd.
If Japan had committed such atrocities against the Taiwanese, there would be no way to explain why the majority of Taiwanese still like Japan even now.
The ones who “committed countless crimes” against the Taiwanese were the armies of the Chinese Nationalist Party.
That is the February 28 Incident.
Newsweek’s special correspondent reported how they beheaded Taiwanese and then cut off their genitals (in the April 7, 1947 issue).
This is a particularly gruesome custom characteristic of the Han Chinese.
In Tongzhou, Hebei Province, there was an incident in which Chinese soldiers brutally murdered more than two hundred Japanese.
Williams writes in Behind the Chinese War-Time Propaganda that “as the name of the darkest town in China, Tongzhou will be recorded for centuries to come.”
He himself went to Tongzhou to report on it and to pay his respects.
What is even more important is his observation that, even after news of the barbaric Tongzhou Incident spread in Japan, not a single danger befell the Chinese residents living in Japan.
In that book Williams praises the nobility of the Japanese people.
Reacting excessively to Prime Minister Takaichi’s remarks, the Chinese government has now warned Chinese citizens to refrain for the time being from traveling to Japan, claiming that crimes targeting Chinese are occurring frequently in Japan.
Perhaps their logic is that since Japanese have been killed and injured inside China, the same thing must naturally be happening in Japan as well.
It may be that they intend this as a way of rattling the Takaichi administration, but for the Japanese it is nothing more than a cause for laughter.
Although Behind the Chinese War-Time Propaganda was published in the United States in 1938, its content connects directly to today’s politics.
That is why I decided to translate it.

A Brief Biography of F. V. Williams

Williams, born in 1890, seems to have become known as a journalist from around 1930, when he shed light on the movement of communism in Mexico.
Given that Marx’s communism declares that “religion is opium” and insists on materialism, it was only natural that Williams, a devout Catholic, judged it to be dangerous.
It was also only natural that, when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident broke out in 1937, he reacted quickly and set out to cover the China Incident.
As he writes in Behind the Chinese War-Time Propaganda, he was able to see with his own eyes, behind the incident, the danger of communism that was trying to sweep across Asia.
In contemporary Japan, the China Incident—beginning with the Manchurian Incident and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident—is generally regarded as an act of aggression against China.
Most textbooks describe it that way, but is that really true?
The East Hebei Anti-Communist Autonomous Government established in 1935 was created in the eastern part of Hebei Province, along the border with Manchukuo.
It was founded under the banner of “anti-communism.”
Its capital was established in Tongzhou, the very place where the Tongzhou Incident occurred.
If you look at a map, anyone can understand that Manchukuo, formed between China and the Soviet Union, was a bulwark to prevent the establishment of a communist regime on the Asian continent.
The formation of the East Hebei Anti-Communist Autonomous Government simply meant that this anti-communist defensive line was spreading.
It was in such circumstances that the Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred.
Williams explains in clear terms who started it.
He also highly praises Manchukuo.
He even tried to meet Emperor Puyi.
After the China Incident began, and after he had finished reporting from China and Manchukuo, he took a ship from Shanghai and crossed over to Nagasaki.
There he met Bishop Yamaguchi Aijiro, a Catholic.
Their friendship lasted a lifetime.
Williams was deeply moved by the fact that Nagasaki is the holy land of Catholicism in Japan.
He even planned to organize an American pilgrimage group to visit Nagasaki.
But deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States prevented that from happening.
Stopping the deterioration of Japan–U.S. relations itself had been his heartfelt desire.
Yet it did not come to pass, and once the war between Japan and America began, he was arrested on suspicion of being a Japanese spy and sentenced to prison.
After the war, he mourned the fact that Nagasaki, which he had praised as the “Rome of Japan,” had been turned into ruins by the atomic bomb.
His publication of The Martyrs of Nagasaki in 1956—essentially a joint work with Yamaguchi Aijiro—must be understood in that light.
In that book, he strongly criticizes the United States for dropping the atomic bomb.

Japan Is Poor at Propaganda

Once the China Incident began, China tried by every possible means to condemn Japan and to draw the United States to its side.
One of those means was the Nanking Massacre.
Some people argue that the Nanking Massacre was fabricated after the war, but in fact it was already being used at the time as a battering ram against Japan in Western newspapers.
The architects of that propaganda were the missionaries living in Nanking.
Why those missionaries began to follow the intentions of the Nationalist government and raised a great chorus of condemnation against the Japanese army is something Williams clarifies through his direct interviews with them in Nanking.
To see how the mechanisms worked, I would like readers to consult the book itself.
The commander who took Nanking was Matsui Iwane.
When the war with the United States began, the commander who took Hong Kong was Sakai Takashi, the one who took Singapore was Yamashita Tomoyuki, and the one who took the Philippines was Honma Masaharu.
All of them were sentenced to death in war-crimes trials, but the reason was that they had occupied capitals and strategically vital colonial strongholds, and the other side sought revenge.
The stories that massacres and atrocities took place under their command are nothing more than propaganda to conceal the humiliation of defeat.
I cannot fathom how anyone can still believe such stories as fact.
As we see, propaganda is inseparable from war, yet the Japanese, even now, seem not to fully understand this reality.
In his book, Williams repeatedly laments that “the Japanese are poor at propaganda.”
Even today, Japan is being criticized by South Korea and China over the so-called comfort women issue.
Pitifully, comfort woman statues are being erected all over the world.
The 1993 statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei is nothing short of disgraceful.
Yet even on this issue, Williams makes clear based on his own reporting that the “business of enslaved girls” was of Chinese origin.
In a book published already in 1938, he vividly describes the cruel reality of China’s violation of women’s human rights.
We have to say it is a precious historical record.
His statement that “the Japanese are poor at propaganda” reflects his sense of crisis that Chinese anti-Japanese propaganda was deeply permeating the United States.
If that trend went too far, it would lead to a Japan–U.S. war.
That is in fact what happened, but it occurred because the American side lost sight of its true enemy.

Williams maintained that America could participate in the development of Manchukuo.
But in the United States, reacting to China, anti-Japanese organizations such as the “Committee to Not Collaborate in Japan’s Aggression in China” were being formed.
Its honorary chairman was former Secretary of State Henry Stimson, which gave it considerable authority.
We can say that Williams was fighting against such organizations.
He insisted that America’s real enemy was communism, but the Roosevelt administration in practice pursued a pro-Soviet policy.
What naive fools they were.
In the end, that, more than anything, was what allowed communism to sweep across the Asian continent.
America acted like a huge fool.
Already in 1938, Williams fully understood that reality and, on behalf of the Japanese who were so poor at propaganda, appealed in the United States about the danger of the “Redization” of Asia.
We must once again feel gratitude toward Williams and reevaluate him.