Based on an investigative article by Sankei Shimbun, this piece examines how Asahi Shimbun ignored protests and rebuttals, publishing unverified claims in “Travels in China” that harmed the reputations of named individuals.

2016-05-04

The following is from page three of today’s Sankei Shimbun.

Toshio Tanabe, who has studied modern Japanese history, is one of those who are outraged at former Asahi Shimbun reporter Honma Katsuichi, the author of Travels in China, and at Asahi Shimbun, which published the serialized articles as hardcover and paperback books.

“Despite the many protests and rebuttals that must have existed, Asahi Shimbun treated them lightly, damaged the reputations of people named in Travels in China, and pinned false accusations of a great massacre on the Japanese people,” Tanabe says.

The “great massacre” Tanabe refers to here is not the Nanjing Incident. It refers to the “Mass Graves (Mankō)” that Honma prominently featured in the first half of his series.

From late June to early July of 1971, Honma reported on his coverage of northeastern China in the first half of a four-part series. “Mass Graves” was the title of Part Two.

“A ‘Mass Grave’ is a gigantic ‘human dumping ground’ where the bodies of massacred Chinese were gathered and buried in the thousands or even tens of thousands” (Asahi evening edition, September 13, 1971).

“In China, especially in the Northeast, mass graves were inevitably created at mines and large construction sites. They are hills of the bodies of thousands or tens of thousands of Chinese” (evening edition, October 6).

Honma thus conveyed that during the war, at mines and large construction sites run by Japanese companies in former Manchuria, Chinese laborers who were ‘worked to death’ under harsh conditions, or those who had ‘worn out and could no longer move,’ were buried alive by the tens of thousands in ‘human dumping grounds,’ which were ‘always’ present and called ‘mass graves.’

The series took up the Fushun Coal Mine (Fushun, Liaoning Province) operated by the South Manchuria Railway Company, and the magnesite mine at Dashiqiao operated by South Manchuria Mining Company.

More than thirty mass graves were reported in Fushun, and three in Dashiqiao.

Honma explained as follows:

“Let us assume an average of twenty people are ‘consumed’ per day. In one hundred days, that becomes two thousand; in one year, 7,300. If, as the term ‘mass grave’ implies, one mass grave equals ten thousand people, then it would take roughly four years to create the three mass graves (thirty thousand people) in Dashiqiao” (evening edition, October 11).

One of the Dashiqiao mass graves is the ‘Hushigou Mass Grave.’

Passing through an entrance bearing the words ‘Never forget class struggle,’ Honma saw a ‘thick layer’ of skeletal remains and recorded his impressions:

“I have never seen the site of the Nazi killing factory at Auschwitz. Therefore, such a terrifying sight as this mass grave was the first of its kind in my life.”

Photographs of skeletal remains were also published in Asahi’s pages.

Tanabe, who harbored strong doubts about the ‘mass graves,’ began his investigation.

This article continues.