Drawing on an essay included in Masayuki Takayama’s Henkens Jizai in the Shincho Bunko edition, this piece argues sharply about anti-Japanese education in China, the brutality of crimes committed by Chinese nationals, the crisis management needed for Japanese residents in China, and the dangerous complacency of Japanese society toward China.
Referring to cases such as the Fukuoka family murders, the Nanpei supermarket killings in Hachioji, and other violent crimes in Hiroshima and Osaka, it warns that Japanese residents in China should be equipped with open tickets on foreign airlines as an emergency means of evacuation.

2019-03-20
Japanese residents in China should make sure their families hold open tickets.
But not on JAL or ANA.
They should hold tickets on foreign airlines that can still fly even if anti-Japanese demonstrations break out.

Masayuki Takayama’s famous serialized column in Shukan Shincho, “Henkens Jizai,” has been published in Shincho Bunko.
This is one of the very best volumes among his works.
What follows is from that book.
Not only the people of Japan but people all over the world will surely nod in silent agreement with my assessment that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Japan will become a paradise for Chinese criminals.
Yuliang’s father was the president of a civil-engineering company in Jilin Province, and he had grown up in a wealthy family by Chinese standards.
Because of that, he was able to study abroad at a language school in Fukuoka when he was twenty.
Wei Wei, whom he met there, was also the son of a wealthy family from Henan Province.
The two invited Yang Ning, a private-university student, first to break into the language school they attended and steal, and then to attack a fast-food restaurant and take a large sum of money.
They kept committing crimes with the same casualness with which Japanese students might go to Starbucks.
With that same lightheartedness, they decided to commit robbery and murder.
The house they targeted was home to a family of four.
After killing them, they planned to dump the bodies into the sea with dumbbells as weights.
When they forced their way in at night, the mother was bathing, and the eleven-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter were already asleep.
Dividing the tasks, one of them killed the son by breaking his neck.
The daughter was beaten unconscious.
The mother was attacked in the bathroom.
After raping her, they slashed her with a knife and sank her into the bathtub.
When the father came home, he was beaten down with an iron pipe and forced to watch his daughter being tormented to death before he himself was strangled and killed.
That is the outline of the Fukuoka family-of-four murders from ten years earlier.
After the crime, Yang and Wang fled back to China, but were soon arrested, and Yang has already been executed.
Wei also received a death sentence in Japan.
The not-very-sound Asahi Shimbun reported that in China they had been decent young men raised in decent families.
And yet toward Japanese people they behaved with this degree of cruelty.
And it is not only them.
Just the other day, at an ironworks in Osaka Prefecture, a Chinese migrant worker, angry at being dismissed, shot his superior to death with a handgun.
He had brought the gun with him from the time he came to Japan, supposedly for self-defense.
That is a fine thing to call self-defense.
This spring, at an oyster-farming company in Hiroshima, a thirty-year-old Chinese trainee stabbed to death two people including the company president, and injured six others to varying degrees.
Not long before that, an elderly man in Oita, known as “the father of foreign students” for caring for Chinese students, was killed by one of those very students, and his elderly wife was seriously injured.
Some point to the anti-Japanese education that Jiang Zemin began in the 1990s as the reason they can become so cruel toward Japanese people.
Jiang Zemin says this.
That the Japanese military diligently killed 300,000 people in Nanjing over six weeks, carried out devilish human experiments in Manchuria, and burst the banks of the Yellow River.
At school they are told that Japanese are cruel, and when they return home television broadcasts images of the same kind.
So of course Chinese people come to think, “Those hateful Japanese.”
There are even figures that appear to support this.
After the Fukuoka case, a survey on attitudes toward war was conducted on Sina.com, run by the son-in-law of Hu Xiaotao.
To the question, “If permitted, would you kill prisoners, women, or children?” 68 percent answered yes.
The striking part is that it asked about permission, not orders.
It shows well a national character itching to kill.
There was also a question about Japanese people, and 28.4 percent answered, “If it is a Japanese person, I would kill them immediately.”
That means one in four Chinese is always thinking of killing Japanese people.
It may be called a sure fruit of anti-Japanese education.
But we must not forget the case in the 1990s at the Nanpei supermarket in Hachioji, where three people, two female high-school students working part-time and one female part-time worker, were shot to death.
The perpetrator ordered the female part-time worker to bind the two high-school girls back to back and tape their mouths shut, and then told her to open the safe.
Not knowing the code, she panicked.
The perpetrator shot the two girls to threaten her, but of course that still did not make her able to open the safe.
In the end he shot her in the head and fled.
The perpetrator, thoughtless and simply cruel, was again Chinese.
One of the two culprits will soon be transferred from Canada.
This crime occurred at a time when anti-Japanese education was not yet fully entrenched.
In other words, their cruelty is better seen not as the result of education but as an ethnic trait inherent to Chinese people.
And now anti-Japanese education has fully ripened and is stimulating that ethnic trait to the utmost.
It would not be surprising if another Tongzhou Incident, in which Japanese people were massacred, were to be repeated at any time.
The Asahi Shimbun, which had long written that China was a good country, recently had a former director of the Northeast Asia Division of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry speak of the emergency situation by saying, “Japanese residents in China should make sure their families hold open tickets. But not on JAL or ANA. They should hold tickets on foreign airlines that can still fly even if anti-Japanese demonstrations break out.”
At last it conveyed the truth.
But will it still be in time?
(Issue of November 21, 2013)