Originally published on April 21, 2019.
Drawing on an essay by Masayuki Takayama, this piece criticizes the postwar regime created by the United States to conceal its own brutal wartime conduct, and condemns Asahi Shimbun for believing in it, preserving it, and expanding it even more fervently than America itself.
It argues that postwar historical narratives about Japan, including the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women issue, were built upon transparent falsehoods, and that the unawareness of the Japanese and global majority who sustained those fictions is precisely what helped create today’s deeply unstable world.

2019-04-21
This is the world that pseudo-moralists have run wild and helped create…。
What has allowed the spread of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” and has produced an extremely unstable world, is this.

The following is from a chapter I published on October 12, 2015.
This essay too is a brilliant, eye-opening piece.
It is a model of what it means to speak the truth.
In other words, he is hurling the soul of a journalist directly at us.
The time has surely come when the people of Japan, and people throughout the world as well, ought to read his essays.
This is the world that pseudo-moralists have run wild and helped create…。
What has allowed the spread of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” and has produced an extremely unstable world, is this.
It is because the great majority of people in Japan and in the world never knew the man who kept speaking the truth about the postwar era.
This too is from the same book of his as in the previous chapter.
From pp. 132 to 135.
The bold emphasis other than the title is mine.

Asahi Shimbun rode gleefully along with America’s postwar regime, which defined Japan as an evil country.

To put it by way of analogy, Japan was said to have been something like the violent gang known as the Kanto Rengo.
Strutting about with shoulders squared, mercilessly beating people down with metal bats, looting, and raping.
So handcuffs were put on it to make sure it could never again commit wrongdoing.
That, they said, was the postwar regime.

The idea came from the United States.
It exterminated the Indians, used slaves, and deceived the Philippines into becoming its colony.
In the end, it even mercilessly dropped atomic bombs on a Japan already half-dead.
Vulgar and cruel.
Unable to walk about in the world without some excuse, it rewrote history by making Japan out to be a country even worse than America, saying that Japan had committed the Nanjing Massacre and therefore had to be punished.
The postwar regime was built upon transparent lies.

And the one that believed in it and upheld it even more rigidly than America was Asahi Shimbun.
Even if one asks why Asahi believed such lies, there is no answer except that it was foolish.

When the first Abe administration said it was time to stop believing such lies, this newspaper threw away even the fairness of journalism and toppled the government with abuse and falsehoods.
The newspaper convention immediately afterward turned into a victory celebration for Asahi Shimbun, and they awarded the Newspaper Culture Prize to former president Toshitada Nakae.
He was the man who had his subordinate Takashi Uemura, who had a Korean wife, together with Chuo University professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi, carry out that comfort women campaign.
In other words, he was honored as a man of merit for having defeated an enemy of the postwar regime and for having helped expand that regime.
In the flush of victory, Asahi Shimbun ran a two-page spread dialogue between Tetsuya Chikushi and Wakamiya Yoshibumi, in which they complacently explained the mechanism by which they had managed to bring down the government.
To be continued.