This section examines the complete silence of Japanese media regarding General MacArthur’s decisive testimony before the U.S. Senate, in which he stated that Japan entered the war largely out of security necessity. The author defines this deliberate omission as the “Ibuse Masuji Phenomenon.”

2017-06-15
The following is a continuation of the previous section.
The suppression of the truth: the “Ibuse Masuji Phenomenon.”
In the second stage, people must be taught what the Tokyo Trial actually was.
In ordinary courts, a trial whose jurisdiction is not clearly defined would immediately be dismissed, yet the Tokyo Trial was conducted without relying on international law and with its jurisdiction left undefined.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was established, and its judges appointed, by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur himself was later recalled to the United States, and on May 3, 1951, he gave extremely important and decisive testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Joint Committee on Armed Services and Foreign Relations.
Unlike Japan’s House of Councillors, which is often derided as an “appendix,” the U.S. Senate is composed of representatives elected from each state and deliberates on matters of common concern to all states.
What it deliberates on are military and diplomatic affairs.
For that reason, the Senate’s Joint Committee on Armed Services and Foreign Relations is regarded as the most authoritative committee.
There, MacArthur delivered a decisive statement.
In response to a question from Senator Hickenlooper, he testified as follows: “You must understand that Japan had a vast population approaching eighty million people crowded into four islands.
Nearly half of them were engaged in agriculture, and the other half in industrial production.
Japan had virtually no indigenous resources other than its silk industry.
They had no cotton, no wool, no oil production, no tin, no rubber.
They lacked many other essential raw materials.
All of those resources, however, existed in the waters of Asia.
They feared that if access to these resources were cut off, between ten and twelve million people would become unemployed.
Therefore, the motivation that drove them into war was, for the most part, compelled by the necessities of security.”
In other words, Japan went to war for reasons of self-defense.
Not a single media outlet at the time reported this extraordinarily important statement.
When this testimony was given, Japan was still under occupation, so there may have been fear of censorship.
But why was it not reported after the occupation ended?
What the Japanese people most wanted to hear at the time was something the media uniformly failed to convey.
I call this phenomenon the “Ibuse Masuji Phenomenon.”
To be continued.