This chapter examines how an unverified claim about East Timor—welcomed because it criticized Japan—was amplified by media and academia, then selectively used by Western outlets to sustain a brutalized image of Japan.

April 29, 2016

This follows the previous chapter.

East Timor was a colony of neutral Portugal, and there were no conflicts whatsoever between the local population and the Japanese army.

Nevertheless, Waseda University professor Ken’ichi Goto wrote in the Asahi Shimbun that the Japanese army looted the islanders and killed fifty thousand people.

Asahi welcomed any lie, so long as it was criticism of Japan.

This story was then reprinted in Time Almanac 2006, published by Time magazine in the United States, stating that “fifty thousand islanders died during the period of Japanese occupation.”

Once again, Japan was portrayed as brutal.

However, the islanders had lived under harsh Portuguese rule, surviving with nothing more than a loincloth.

Even the possession of saws or sickles was prohibited, on the grounds that such tools might become weapons of resistance.

If the Japanese army had looted them, one must ask: what exactly could they have taken?

It later became clear that Goto Ken’ichi fabricated this story after being told by Australian diplomat James Dunn that “the island’s population had declined after the war.”

Yet even Portugal, the colonial ruler, had never conducted a population census.

There was absolutely no factual basis for the careless remark of an Australian diplomat.

On the contrary, there is testimony that relations between the Japanese and the islanders were friendly, and that “the Japanese army and the islanders cooperated to capture infiltrating Australian military spies and continued to transmit false information using the spies’ own codes” (according to Shinji Yamashita, who served there as an enlisted soldier and later became a professor at Showa Women’s University).

Even Time magazine, which enthusiastically welcomed any criticism of Japan, eventually recognized that Goto’s article was pure fiction and dropped it from the 2007 edition.

As mentioned earlier, The New York Times has for half a century used the phrase “the Japanese army committed atrocities in Southeast Asia” as a standard modifier whenever referring to Japan.

Yet it provides no concrete examples—only the modifier itself.

What ultimately emerges is a structure in which Asahi Shimbun reporters and Asahi-affiliated scholars fabricate plausible-sounding stories, and the American side then makes use of them.

Why are they so determined to depict an image of Japanese people as if they were “Chinese-style barbarians,” freely indulging in massacre, looting, and rape?

To be continued.