Drawing on Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column in Shukan Shincho, this essay examines the Volkswagen emissions scandal as a lens through which to interpret German sentiment toward Japan and the deeper historical psychology of Europe.
The immediate trigger was the use of a compact emissions measurement device made by Horiba of Kyoto in an American environmental investigation, which exposed the fact that Volkswagen vehicles emitted drastically higher levels of NOx while driving than they had shown in conventional stationary testing.
An EPA investigation then revealed that Volkswagen had embedded control technology designed to suppress NOx emissions only during testing, leading the company into massive recall efforts and enormous compensation costs.
The author connects the resentment this caused in Germany to older historical memories, including Germany’s humiliation in the First World War at Qingdao and the lingering discomfort many Germans felt even toward the generosity shown by Japan to German prisoners at the Bando camp.
He further interprets the visit of the French prime minister to Horiba during the height of the scandal — and his warm embrace of Chairman Horiba — as a symbolic act that carried significance beyond its official diplomatic explanation, suggesting the persistence of deeper Franco-German historical feeling.
The essay vividly presents a structure in which technology, national pride, historical memory, and international rivalry intersect through the simple fact that Japanese technology exposed German fraud.

2019-03-16
In the midst of that uproar, the French prime minister went out of his way to visit Horiba in Kyoto and embraced Chairman Horiba with a smile.
Officially, it was said to be in thanks for the company’s expansion into France, but the prime minister’s gestures were something else entirely.

The chapter I published on 2019-02-08 under the title, Germans Dislike Japan. Russians, Being شبه白人, Did Not Take It So Personally Even When They Lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, entered the official hashtag ranking at No. 20 for Volkswagen.
Masayuki Takayama has a famous serialized column in Shukan Shincho.
What follows is from this week’s issue of that magazine.
People all over the world will surely recognize that my assessment of him as the one and only journalist in the postwar world is exactly correct.
It is an essay that those who call themselves newspaper reporters at the Süddeutsche Zeitung in particular ought to read.
Will Germany Perish?
The Volkswagen factory, the producer of the “people’s car” created by Hitler, came under Soviet control after the war.
If things had continued that way, it would have been dismantled like the thermal power station at Sunwu in Manchuria, carried off into the Soviet Union, and left behind nothing but ruins.
Fortunately, Britain, which understood the high degree of technical completion of Volkswagen, took over its management and maintained it, and after the war it spread throughout the world as the people’s car.
A few years ago, an American environmental group began an emissions study of automobiles and chose Volkswagen as one of the good samples.
The reason they did not choose a Japanese car also had something to do with the pride of a white nation.
West Virginia University, which had been commissioned to carry out the study, was looking for suitable measuring equipment and discovered, astonishingly, that there existed an emissions measuring device the size of a suitcase.
With this, they realized, they could measure the exhaust of a car even while it was actually driving.
Thus measuring devices made by Horiba were loaded into Volkswagen and the other vehicles selected for investigation, and emissions testing during driving was carried out.
As a result, it was discovered that Volkswagen, which had produced the cleanest numbers in stationary testing, was emitting NOx at forty times the standard while in actual motion.
The environmental group immediately informed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
The EPA investigated and found that Volkswagen’s control system had been fitted with a chip that suppressed NOx emissions only while a test was in progress.
Exhaust gas testing is ordinarily conducted while a vehicle is stationary.
It was cheating that had anticipated exactly that.
The EPA informed Volkswagen that its deception had been discovered and demanded action.
However, it did not make the matter public at once.
To speak with some bitterness, had this been a Toyota vehicle or the like, before even asking for corrective action they would have made a huge uproar about it being “as sneaky as Pearl Harbor,” and it might well have become a movement to exclude Japanese cars.
That was how underhanded the method was.
And yet Volkswagen, for some reason, did not respond.
After a year had passed, the EPA finally lost patience and decided to go public, denouncing Volkswagen’s misconduct and demanding compensation in astronomical amounts.
Even the thick-skinned Volkswagen lowered its head at last and was forced into dealing with recalls and compensation lawsuits, but its resentment converged on Japan, which had gone and made that “small measuring device.”
The world’s common sense is that an emissions testing facility should be as large as a gasoline station.
The established form had been to receive inspection in such a large facility.
Volkswagen cheated on the assumption of just such world-standard practice.
In any country, the fraud would not have been discovered.
Everyone was satisfied with the existing method of measurement, so why had anyone gone and made a small measuring device?
Had Horiba not done something extra, no one would ever have thought of measuring exhaust gases while driving.
Germans dislike Japan.
Russians, being near-whites, did not take it so hard even when they lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.
But in the capture of Qingdao during the First World War, Germany suffered a complete defeat, and every man in the fortress was taken prisoner.
The pride of being a pure white nation was torn to shreds.
On top of that, instead of treating them cruelly, the barbaric Japanese allowed them to bring musical instruments, household goods, indeed whatever they wished, into the prison camp.
To Germans, that generosity was itself a source of dissatisfaction.
Mercy and tolerance were supposed to be the special virtues of white Christians, and to receive them from the Japanese was nothing but humiliation.
Even now, they do not want to hear stories about how prisoners at the Bando camp performed Beethoven’s Ninth and even baked cookies.
That resentment also lay behind their giving standard German rifles and helmets to Chinese forces and encouraging Chiang Kai-shek to attack the Japanese settlement in Shanghai.
And now, on top of all that, the misconduct of Volkswagen, their central pillar, had been exposed.
The cost would rise to three trillion yen.
Again, it was the Japanese.
Germans would never openly say how bitter they were, but instead the French, who dislike Germany, showed it through their actions.
In the midst of that uproar, the French prime minister went out of his way to visit Horiba in Kyoto and embraced Chairman Horiba with a smile.
Officially, it was said to be in thanks for the company’s expansion into France, but onlookers say the prime minister’s gestures looked more like the conferral of a national order of merit.
Incidentally, the prime minister’s name was Valls.
It is the same word Princess Sheeta speaks in Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky as the spell that destroys a kingdom.
Was there perhaps in it the accumulated feeling of France over many long years?