This chapter reveals how fabricated atrocity stories—first used as wartime propaganda in Europe and later revived during the Gulf War—were repurposed by Japanese media and academics to portray Japan as uniquely barbaric, thereby validating long-standing criticism of Asahi Shimbun.

April 28, 2016

This follows the previous chapter.

This chapter, too, presents facts that many people around the world will be learning for the first time—facts that are astonishing nonetheless.

At the same time, it also proves with one hundred percent certainty that my criticism of the Asahi Shimbun has been correct.

A Chinese-like Image of the Japanese

In the first place, Southeast Asia was a region where Western powers had long ruled with brutality, so in order to denounce the Japanese army, it was necessary to fabricate incidents that sounded plausible.

Doing this in place of those lacking imagination were figures such as Hirofumi Hayashi, an academic favored by the Asahi Shimbun.

He picked up stories from Chinese residents in Malaya claiming that “Japanese soldiers tossed babies into the air and stabbed them with bayonets,” and added them to the catalogue of Japan’s supposed great crimes.

This “babies on bayonets” story closely resembles claims from World War I that German troops attacked a maternity hospital in Brussels, raped pregnant women, and tossed infants from nurseries into the air to be stabbed with bayonets.

The German army was also accused of cutting off the wrists of Belgian boys—future enemies—so they could never hold guns, allegations that became a pretext for U.S. entry into the war.

Germany was defeated after the United States entered the war, but postwar investigations revealed that both the “babies on bayonets” story and the “children’s wrists cut off” story were fabrications created by Britain (Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime).

It is laughable for the United States—a country that massacred Native Americans and kept Black slaves until just yesterday—to speak of humanitarianism, but laughable as it may be, the pretext for entering the war was fraudulent all the same.

In fact, during the Gulf War, a young girl testified before a U.S. congressional hearing that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers carrying out the same “babies on bayonets” atrocities.

Once again, Iraq’s army was declared barbaric.