This chapter exposes how major Western newspapers systematically frame Japan as a perpetual aggressor by attaching loaded phrases to unrelated modern events, while ignoring the historical realities of European colonialism and the absence of material evidence behind sensational wartime allegations.

April 28, 2016

This follows the previous chapter.

This chapter, too, presents facts that almost all Japanese citizens are encountering for the first time.

The same is likely true for most people around the world.

Who, then, is Mike Honda?

In the 1990s—half a century after the war—I was dispatched to the United States as a correspondent. What shocked me most was the insidious style of writing employed by The New York Times.

Whenever the word “Korea” appeared in an otherwise ordinary editorial, it was invariably preceded by the phrase “where Japan once colonized.”

This was not in reference to prewar history, but in commentary on the ongoing famine in North Korea.

Similarly, whenever “Southeast Asia” appeared, it was accompanied by the phrase “where Japan had conducted atrocities.”

The Netherlands colonized Indonesia for four hundred years, yet built neither schools nor hospitals.

France, in Vietnam, built prisons instead of schools and sold opium instead of medicine.

They call this colonial rule.

Japan built schools in Korea, established hospitals, laid railways, and brought electricity.

Yet all of this was deliberately compressed into the single word “colonization” in order to implant the impression that Japan, too, brutally exploited Korea.

This is not limited to The New York Times.

The Los Angeles Times and the British paper The Independent do the same.

And what these newspapers write about most loudly are Japanese “comfort women,” the Nanjing Massacre, and alleged atrocities in Southeast Asia.

In Nanjing, according to these accounts, the Japanese army freely engaged in looting, killed 7,000 civilians every day for six weeks, and raped 2,000 women every night.

If that were so, there should have been cases of pregnancy resulting from those rapes.

In fact, in Vietnam, where Korean troops were present, as many as 30,000 mixed-race children were left behind.

Yet in Nanjing, there is not a single Japanese mixed-race child.

Nor have the bones of 300,000 victims ever been found.

And for some reason, the “witnesses” are limited to The New York Times’ own reporters, American professors, and journalists from Australia’s Manchester Guardian.

Australia, it should be noted, is a former penal colony that curries favor with the United States.