A detailed annotation explaining Japan’s unprecedented postwar financial and technological assistance to China and South Korea, and how selective historical narratives have been used internationally to sustain anti-Japan propaganda.

This section provides an explanatory annotation for international readers, detailing Japan’s postwar economic and technological assistance to neighboring states and the strategic deployment of historical analogies.
It argues that sustained propaganda relies on selective omission and rhetorical borrowing from European postwar discourse.

2017-04-17
For people around the world, this may not be self-evident, so I will add the following annotation.
Germany’s Goethe-Institut, established to promote the German language and German culture, follows the same pattern.
Until I read this book, I was completely unaware of this fact.
Figures such as Kang Sang-jung, who have continued to utter the truly laughable claim that Japan should learn from Germany, along with so-called cultural figures and the media led by the Asahi Shimbun, not a single one of them ever said that Japan should learn from Germany in this sense.
In other words, the time has come for all Japanese citizens and people around the world to know that everyone who has continued to insist that Japan should learn from Germany is, in fact, an Ozaki Hotsumi of the present day.
Those with keen insight will understand everything I am trying to say from this alone, but since that will not be the case for people around the world, I will add the following annotation.
First, the financial assistance Japan has provided to China since the war constitutes the largest amount of aid given to another country in human history.
Not only financially, but under the banner of Japan–China friendship, Japan also provided technological assistance generously.
The China of today exists precisely because of this fact, yet people around the world do not know it.
As for South Korea, at the time of the Japan–Korea normalization treaty, Japan provided financial assistance equivalent to three times South Korea’s national budget at that time.
People around the world also do not know that this created the so-called Miracle on the Han River and built today’s South Korea.
The governments of China and South Korea deliberately do not teach these facts to their citizens.
As a result, the majority of their populations know nothing about them.
Moreover, China and South Korea have continued anti-Japan propaganda in the international arena for seventy-two years after the war in order to keep Japan, which merely lost a war, and which was merely placed on the defeated side by the United States, in the status of a political prisoner.
What they have arbitrarily, that is, conveniently exploited for their own purposes is the speech by German President Richard von Weizsäcker.
They have continued to say that Japan must learn from Germany and apologize forever.
The conduct of China and South Korea is itself nothing but bottomless malice and plausible falsehoods.
The time has long since come for people around the world to know that their viciousness is without parallel in human history.
Whether because his mind is formed by Asahi Shimbun editorials or because he is a modern-day Ozaki Hotsumi, Haruki Murakami claims that Japan must continue apologizing forever to China and the Korean Peninsula, and in his new work he is even attempting to spread the claim of 400,000 victims in the Nanjing Massacre.
To be continued.