Published on April 21, 2019.
Drawing on a piece from the October 23, 2014 issue, this essay examines the Dutch posture toward Japan across the wartime and postwar eras through a connected pattern of retaliatory executions, repeated reparations demands, discourtesy toward Emperor Shōwa, and persistent use of the comfort women issue.
Through such episodes as the execution of Colonel Toyoaki Horiuchi in Menado on Celebes Island, the conduct of the Dutch royal family, Queen Beatrix’s remarks at an imperial banquet, and Foreign Minister Timmermans’s statements on the comfort women issue, it asks what has consistently underlain Dutch conduct toward Japan.
The piece argues critically that beneath the language of morality and human rights there may lie a continuing intention to extract money and attack Japan.

2019-04-21
That must mean that the new king too intends to demand money at the imperial banquet.
I would not be so surprised even if I were told that the ancestors of the Dutch were Koreans.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
In the end, the Dutch, who had idled their way through until the end of the war, afterward picked quarrels over how they had been treated by the Japanese side and carried out retaliatory executions of 226 people, the highest number among the Allied forces.
The last to be executed was Colonel Toyoaki Horiuchi.
He had been the commander of the naval paratroop unit that dropped into Menado on Celebes Island, and he had taken prisoner the local commander, Colonel F. Tiwon, who had run about in flight.
After the war, this man accused Colonel Horiuchi on false charges and, making himself the judge, sentenced him to death.
When a Japanese defense lawyer asked why the sentence had to be death, Tiwon replied, “Because he is Japanese.”
Prince Takamatsu pleaded with Queen Juliana to spare the colonel’s life, but the Queen ignored him, and the colonel was executed in Menado on September 25, 1948.
I know of no other scoundrel as vile as Tiwon.
The Netherlands also displayed more than enough nastiness in postwar reparations.
At first, wearing the face of a gentleman, it publicly declared that it would waive reparations, while behind the scenes it took 3.6 billion yen in the money of the time.
Furthermore, in 1991, Queen Beatrix, visiting Japan, made the discourteous remark at the imperial banquet that “Japan has a duty to pay reparations,” and extracted a second round of compensation.
Two years before that, at the state funeral of Emperor Shōwa, only the Dutch royal house was absent.
For that matter, Emperor Shōwa visited the Netherlands in 1971, but the Dutch welcomed him by throwing raw eggs and iron hot-water bottles at his car, and even by pulling out and snapping the sapling he had planted.
Ahead of the new Dutch king’s visit to Japan, Foreign Minister Timmermans said at a press conference the other day, “The comfort women issue and the Kōno Statement are still alive.”
He was speaking of the Dutch position in response to the Asahi Shimbun’s confession regarding the fiction of the comfort women issue, and the Foreign Minister added, “From now on as well, in talks between senior officials of both countries, we will always raise the comfort women issue” (Asahi Shimbun).
That must mean that the new king too intends to demand money at the imperial banquet.
I would not be so surprised even if I were told that the ancestors of the Dutch were Koreans.
(Issue dated October 23, 2014)