Drawing on Masayuki Takayama’s work, this essay examines how Japan dismantled white global dominance in the 20th century—and why Japanese media persistently portray that history as a “national crime.” It questions the motives behind media-driven self-denigration and selective historical judgment.

April 28, 2016

The following is from Asia’s Liberation Was, in Truth, Thanks to the Japanese Army (WAC, 930 yen) by Masayuki Takayama, from the section titled “White People Are Always Black-Hearted.”

A comparison of brutality.

Every year when August 15 comes around, Japanese newspapers seem to follow a set pattern of running special features reflecting on the last war.

The twentieth century was, in truth, Japan’s century.

That is because Japan shattered the system in which white people reigned supreme and ruled the world.

The confrontation between white nations seeking to halt that trend and Japan was what became the “last war” in the middle of the twentieth century.

Afterward, borrowing the words of Owen Lattimore, the white nations wanted to burn Japan to the ground, scatter salt over it as Rome did to Carthage, and erase it from existence.

However, unlike in Roman times, they could not openly carry out ethnic cleansing.

The plan had been to “strip Japan of its military and reduce it to a defenseless agricultural nation,” yet before they realized it, Japan had grown into the world’s second-largest economic power.

What, then, was the last war?

It is certainly meaningful to look back on it and examine it thoroughly.

If that were the purpose of such features, it would be understandable.

But instead, for example, Asahi Shimbun runs headlines such as “Chemical Weapons Disposal Begins,” implying that the Japanese military used poison gas weapons and simply abandoned them, portraying lingering “great crimes of Japan.”

In its columns, it casually prints words by Hitomi Yamaguchi—“the greatest fortunes of my life were losing the war and Article 9 of the Constitution”—without any real context or meaning.

On the centennial of Japan–Korea annexation, it ran the headline, “Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula and deprived it of its language and names.”

It was Japan that lit the flame of culture on the peninsula, which had been a “remote backwater of the world” (Kō Bun’yū, Intensive Lecture on Modern History).

A people infatuated with China, who adopted Chinese-style surnames and given names, later arbitrarily began using Japanese names.

No such examination is conducted.

Instead, Japan is summarily condemned as a nation that committed “great crimes.”

One might like to ask what pleasure is gained from running Japan down, and what kind of psychological behavior drives it, but in fact this groundless Japan-bashing is not limited to the Asahi Shimbun alone.

To be continued.