When Japan entered Manila, it refrained from requisitioning civilian homes and even released detained American civilians. The U.S., however, indiscriminately bombed the city, killing 100,000 people, then blamed Japan. Masayuki Takayama exposes a core lie embedded in postwar history.

2017-08-09.
In contrast, even after entering Manila, Japan did not requisition Filipino homes and instead camped at a racetrack.
I have repeatedly stated that Masayuki Takayama is the only unparalleled journalist in the postwar world.
He writes a leading column for the monthly magazine Sound Argument, and in the latest issue released recently, he has written a brilliant essay proving that my assertions were entirely correct.
Emphasis in the text is mine.
“Japanese were clearly a cruel and brutal people,” Helen Mears writes in Mirror for Americans: Japan.
On what grounds does she assert this so definitively.
She cites MacArthur’s claim that “before the U.S. landing on Leyte, Japanese troops attacked Filipino villages and massacred 2,000 people including children, and although U.S. forces rushed in, they were too late.”
Nonsense.
After all, the massacre of Filipinos has always been an American specialty.
Even Leyte Island, where MacArthur landed, was the site where just forty years earlier MacArthur’s father Arthur ordered the extermination of islanders together with neighboring Samar Island.
He added the condition “limited to those aged ten and over,” yet post-operation reports stated that “there was not a single person under ten years old.”
Including infants, the U.S. military slaughtered 100,000 people on both islands.
The same pattern continued in son Douglas’s era.
When U.S. forces heard of the Japanese landing, they panicked and fled to the Bataan Peninsula and even to Corregidor Island.
Lester Tenney, a tank crewman who had falsely claimed “I marched in the Bataan Death March,” recently passed away.
In his autobiography, he confessed that during Bataan, “we shot every Filipino we saw, because we could not distinguish them from Japanese,” and that “whenever there was a settlement, we destroyed each house with tank guns and slaughtered all who lived there.”
In contrast, even after entering Manila, Japan did not requisition Filipino homes and instead camped at a racetrack.
As the decisive battle with U.S. forces approached, Japan released approximately 3,500 detained American civilians.
The U.S. military indiscriminately bombed Manila after only Filipinos and Japanese troops remained, killing 100,000 people, and then claimed at the Tokyo Trials that “Japanese troops carried out a massacre of Manila civilians.”
Helen Mears is said to be reasonable, yet due to her lack of study, she made a grave error.
A country that exterminated Indians and shamelessly exploited black slaves could never be mirrored by Japan.
MacArthur, upon arriving in Japan, struggled with how to deal with these lies.
What the cunning man devised was impression manipulation.
Using the Asahi Shimbun, he had it loudly proclaimed that Japan had been brutal, while simultaneously having it plausibly written that “the United States protected Kyoto,” claiming it was because U.S. forces followed Harvard professor Langdon Warner’s cultural property list and excluded Kyoto from carpet bombing.
The truth is that Kyoto was the primary candidate for atomic bombing, with the drop point decided to be above the Umekoji rail yard.
That is why conventional bombing was avoided.
Even such lies easily deceived the Japanese, who went so far as to erect commemorative monuments in Nara and Kamakura thanking Warner and believing that “Americans are good people.”
The Japanese did not know that Americans were even greater liars than the Chinese.
Then China claimed that its own scholar Liang Sicheng had appealed to the U.S. military and saved Nara from bombing.
They even proposed donating a statue of Liang to commemorate this.
However, since the claimant was Chinese and the intermediary was their agent Ikuo Hirayama, no one trusted the story.
People believe “white Chinese” but do not believe “yellow Americans.”
This is a striking example of Japanese white-worship.
To be continued.