This chapter exposes how major Western newspapers deliberately reduced Japan’s governance of Korea to the word “colonization,” planting the impression of brutal exploitation while erasing concrete historical facts such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure development.

April 29, 2016

This follows the previous chapter.

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

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

Who, then, is Mike Honda?

In the 1990s—roughly half a century after the war—I was dispatched to the United States as a correspondent.

What shocked me most at that time 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 about prewar history, but 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 that colonial rule.

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

Yet by reducing all of this to the single word “colonization,” they deliberately sought 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 military “comfort women,” the Nanjing Massacre, and alleged atrocities in Southeast Asia.

According to their accounts, in Nanjing the Japanese army looted freely, killed 7,000 civilians every day for six weeks, and raped 2,000 women every night.

If that were true, there should have been pregnancies 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 reporters from The New York Times, American professors, and Australian journalists from the Manchester Guardian.

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

To be continued.