This chapter challenges narratives promoted by The New York Times regarding Hiroshima and Japanese wartime conduct, presenting historical evidence that shifts responsibility for Manila’s destruction and exposes documented U.S. military atrocities long omitted from mainstream discourse.

April 28, 2016

This follows the previous chapter.

This chapter, too, should contain facts that the vast majority of the Japanese people are learning for the first time.

Ahead of the anniversary of the end of the war, The New York Times also addressed the Hiroshima atomic bombing by having the Filipino writer F. Sionil José recall that he was “slapped by Japanese soldiers who advanced into Manila” and that “Manila was destroyed,” invoking the alleged brutality of the Japanese military and, in the same tone as the Asahi Shimbun, accusing Japan of great crimes and asserting that “the Hiroshima atomic bombing was therefore justified.”

For the sake of the honor of the Japanese people, it should be stated that the indiscriminate destruction of Manila was carried out by the forces of General Douglas MacArthur after his return.

The Japanese military did not requisition Filipino homes; they were quartered at the city’s racetrack and, for the most part, had already withdrawn from the city before the American advance.

When summer comes, this Filipino writer will likely be called upon once again.

For that time, I would like to offer one piece of advice.

He should read the autobiography of Lester Tenney, who claimed to be a victim of the Bataan Death March.

Tenney writes that while retreating through Bataan in an M3 tank, because he “could not distinguish between Filipinos and Japanese,” he destroyed every village he passed through and killed everything that moved—essentially doing the same thing as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

That was worse than a slap.

Alternatively, he should read the records of the U.S. Senate hearings from when the United States invaded his country in the early twentieth century.

Those records are filled with accounts of U.S. troops, having utterly discarded any notion of war ethics, torturing Filipino prisoners by forcing them to drink muddy water, and executing them by deliberately firing one shot a day—avoiding vital organs—to prolong their suffering, finally killing them on the fifth day.

In Batangas and Samar, entire populations were massacred, and the hearing records conclude that “even by conservative estimates, 200,000 were killed.”

The New York Times maintains an ample stable of Asian writers willing to flatter the United States, and at opportune moments has them fabricate accounts of “Japan’s great crimes.”

White reporters, too, at every opportunity write even more insidious articles accusing Japan as an “aggressor nation.”

To be continued.