This 2016 essay examines how the wartime slogan “Devilish America and Britain, one hundred million die together” shaped Japanese public psychology and directly influenced civilian behavior during the Battle of Okinawa. It traces the role of wartime media propaganda, postwar moralism, and later narratives such as Kenzaburō Ōe’s Okinawa Notes, revealing a continuous structure of ideological manipulation.

2016-09-11
The phrase “Devilish America and Britain, one hundred million die together” is something that even I, who was born after the war, know with absolute clarity.

Before World War II, Japan began to adopt rhetoric resembling fascism and launched a war against the United States, which was then already the world’s largest and most powerful nation.

This occurred at a time when the United States did not move even as Hitler ravaged Europe, and when anti-Jewish sentiment was strong in America, with Charles Lindbergh as a leading figure.
Had the United States remained in splendid isolation, Britain’s invasion by the Nazis would have been inevitable.
For this reason, Britain mobilized its world-class intelligence services in full to influence the United States.

Even the great writer S・モーム was among them.
By pointing this out, I sounded an alarm for Japan about the true nature of intelligence operations.

There was also a truly malicious scholar who proclaimed, “Learn from Germany.”
He spoke with the authority of a University of Tokyo professorship.
Yet a simple internet search reveals traces suggesting his contacts with South Korean intelligence during and after his university years.
Nevertheless, Japan’s mass media, led by the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, continued to promote this man for nearly twenty years.
His role in Japan’s lost decades, the rise of Samsung, China’s expansion, and the situation we face today must have been greater than even I can estimate.

To return to the main point.

Britain’s intelligence operations succeeded.
That the American leadership of the time despised Japan or viewed it through the lens of the “Yellow Peril” was taught to us by Masayuki Takayama, a uniquely singular journalist in the postwar world.

Japan’s victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars occurred in an era powered by coal.
By the First World War, however, the world had shifted to an oil-powered age.
Japanese military observers who witnessed the fighting in Europe reportedly turned pale.

Japan rapidly converted its industry and military to an oil-based system.
Yet Japan was not an oil-producing country.
It depended on imports from the United States.

Ultimately, the United States imposed an embargo on Japan.

At that moment, Japan’s mass media, led by the Asahi Shimbun, repeatedly broadcast the slogan “Devilish America and Britain, one hundred million die together,”
cutting off any retreat for those in the military who wished to avoid war with the United States.

This phrase is something even I, born after the war, know clearly.

When U.S. forces landed in Okinawa in the final stages of the war,
the fundamental basis of the actions taken by the Okinawan people lay in this slogan.

All Japanese citizens, and people around the world, must clearly understand this fact through my essay.

Once they do, they will silently grasp how vicious the Asahi Shimbun was,
and how deep the sin of its pseudo-moralism truly is.

The gravity of the crimes of Okinawa Notes, written by Kenzaburō Ōe—who absorbed the ideology of the Asahi Shimbun—
becomes self-evident when one observes the conduct of the current Okinawa governor and the female lawyers who appear to manipulate events from behind the scenes.

To be continued.