Based on an essay discovered online, this piece introduces how Baron Albert d’Anethan, Belgium’s minister plenipotentiary to Japan, saw through the exaggerations and fabrications of American newspaper reports on Port Arthur during the Sino-Japanese War, and accurately understood the discipline and reality of the Japanese army.
By linking China’s “panda diplomacy” with “black propaganda,” it examines international opinion manipulation surrounding the Port Arthur incident, Baron d’Anethan’s reports, and the background of the outrages suffered by Japanese soldiers and the fury they carried into battle, thereby portraying both Chinese brutality and the actual Japanese side.

2019-03-20
The soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army continued to fight while bearing their fury at such outrages.

The following too is an article I discovered on the Internet the other day.
Baron Albert d’Anethan of Belgium.
2014-04-11.
This is a reposting of yesterday’s news article, because I had not read the latter part carefully enough and so have uploaded it again.
Can Belgium once again discern the barbaric nature of China.
2014.4.10 msn Sankei News.
I found myself entertaining the notion that the origin of the word “panda” might perhaps be “propaganda,” which also means the guiding of international public opinion.
The “panda diplomacy” displayed in Belgium at the end of March by Xi Jinping, President of China, during his tour of Europe, was eerie enough to invite such a misunderstanding.
The classification that calls fact-based information the “white propaganda” of the good side and information laced with falsehoods the “black propaganda” of the bad side only makes one think all the more of the black-and-white spotted panda.
Japan too has already experienced this, but the lovable panda makes China feel close at hand and arbitrarily creates a peaceful impression.
However, Belgium is also the country that produced Baron Albert d’Anethan, Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan, who was not deceived by black propaganda.
I would like Belgium once more to see through the barbarity of China, which hides behind pandas while massacring minorities and depriving its own citizens of freedom.
I want to see the pride of modern Europe, so sensitive to human-rights oppression.
The insight of Baron Albert d’Anethan.
Baron Albert d’Anethan stayed in Japan for the long period from 1893 to 1910.
During that time, he completely discerned and trusted the conduct and disposition of the Japanese people.
During the Sino-Japanese War, 1894 to 1895, he possessed the insight not to be deceived by the black propaganda that threatened to drive the Empire of Japan into international isolation.
The crisis was caused chiefly by the spread of fabricated articles in American newspapers.
At the time of the occupation of the naval port of Port Arthur, they reported that “the Imperial Japanese Army massacred 60,000 non-combatants, women, and children of the Qing Empire, and only 36 people escaped.”
The baron, who understood the discipline of the Imperial Japanese Army, must surely have intuitively sensed the obvious dubiousness of the figure of 60,000, even in light of the area and population of Port Arthur.
He began an investigation and sent a report to his home country.
“Japan takes care of its wounded, the Red Cross performs its work to perfection under the patronage of Her Majesty the Empress, and the Geneva Convention is being observed.”
(Japan too joined in 1886 for the purpose of protecting the wounded in land warfare.)
“According to what I heard directly from Viscount de Labry, the French military attaché who was present on the scene, those killed were soldiers who had taken off their uniforms, and it is not true that women and children were killed. The residents had evacuated before the occupation, and only soldiers and arsenal workers remained in the town. The Japanese soldiers, while looking at the corpses of their comrades who had been treated in a gruesome manner, somehow limited themselves to taking the enemy prisoner.”
Soldiers of the Qing army killed soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army, cut their bodies apart, and hung them from trees and eaves.
Certainly, the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army continued to fight while bearing their fury at such outrages.
This article will continue.