Starting from the Volkswagen emissions scandal, this essay shows how Horiba’s measuring technology exposed a global fraud, while also probing the historical distortions and anti-Japanese sentiment said to underlie the German response.
Through Masayuki Takayama’s commentary, it sharply illuminates the reality in which technology, history, and national emotion intersect.

2019-04-04
West Virginia University, which had been entrusted with the investigation, was looking for a promising measuring device and discovered, to its surprise, that there existed a measuring instrument the size of a suitcase.
With this, even the exhaust emissions of a car in motion could be measured.

A chapter I posted on 2019-02-08 under the title, “Germans dislike Japan. Russians, being quasi-whites, did not take it so badly even when they lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War,” has entered the official hashtag ranking at No. 5 for Volkswagen.

Masayuki Takayama has the famous serialized column in Shukan Shincho.
The following is from this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
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 right.
This is especially a must-read essay for those who call themselves newspaper journalists at the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Will Germany Fall?

The factory of Volkswagen, the people’s car created by Hitler, was placed under Soviet control after the war.
Had matters remained that way, it should have been dismantled just like the thermal power plant at Sunwu in Manchuria, transported into the Soviet Union, and left behind nothing but ruins.
Fortunately, Britain, which understood the high degree of Volkswagen’s technical perfection, took over its management and preserved it, and after the war it spread throughout the world as the people’s car.

Several years ago, an American environmental organization began investigating vehicle exhaust emissions and chose Volkswagen as one of the better samples.
Part of the reason they did not choose a Japanese car was the pride of white nations.
West Virginia University, which had been entrusted with the investigation, was looking for a promising measuring device and discovered, to its surprise, that there existed a measuring instrument the size of a suitcase.
With this, even the exhaust emissions of a car in motion could be measured.
Thus a measuring device made by Horiba was loaded into Volkswagen and the other target vehicles, and emissions tests while driving were carried out.
The result was that Volkswagen, which had shown the cleanest figures in stationary testing, was found to emit NOx at 40 times the standard while actually driving.
The environmental group immediately informed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
The EPA investigated and discovered that a chip had been embedded in Volkswagen’s control device to suppress NOx emissions during testing.
Exhaust measurement is normally done while the vehicle is stationary.
This deception had been designed in anticipation of that.

The EPA informed Volkswagen that its fraud had been exposed and asked it to take corrective action.
However, it did not make the matter public at once.
To put it bitterly, if this had been a Toyota or some other Japanese car, there would have been a huge uproar about it being “as sneaky as Pearl Harbor,” even before asking for corrective measures, and it might well have led to a movement to drive Japanese cars out.
That was how underhanded the method was.
Yet for some reason Volkswagen did not respond.
After a year, the EPA finally lost patience, went public, denounced Volkswagen’s fraud, and demanded astronomical compensation.
Even brazen Volkswagen had no choice but to bow its head and rush to deal with recalls and compensation lawsuits, but its bitterness converged on resentment toward Japan, which had gone out of its way to make “a small measuring device.”

The world’s common sense is that exhaust-measuring facilities are as large as gas stations.
Testing at such huge facilities had become the established form.
Volkswagen cheated on the basis of that world standard.
In no country had the fraud been exposed.
Everyone was satisfied with the current testing method, so why did anyone make a small measuring device?
If Horiba had not meddled, no one would ever have thought of measuring emissions while the car was in motion.

Germans dislike Japan.
Russians, being quasi-whites, did not take it so badly even when they lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.
But in the Battle of Tsingtao in the First World War, Germany suffered a crushing defeat, and everyone in the fortress was taken prisoner.
Their pride as a pure white nation was torn to shreds.
What is more, those supposedly barbaric Japanese, far from treating them cruelly, allowed them to bring instruments, household belongings, and all manner of things into the camp.
To the Germans, that very generosity was rather displeasing.
Mercy and tolerance were supposed to be the special possession of white Christians, and to receive them from the Japanese was nothing but humiliation.
Even now, they do not want to hear stories about prisoners performing Beethoven’s Ninth and baking cookies at Bandō camp.

That resentment also played a part in why Germany gave standard German rifles and helmets to the Chinese forces and incited Chiang Kai-shek to attack the Japanese settlement in Shanghai.
And now, on top of that, the fraud of Volkswagen, one of Germany’s main pillars, had been exposed.
The cost amounted to 3 trillion yen.
Once again, it was the Japanese.
The Germans are hardly going to speak openly of how bitter they felt, but in their place the French, who dislike Germany, showed it through their actions.
In the midst of that uproar, the French Prime Minister went all the way to Horiba in Kyoto and embraced Chairman Horiba with a broad smile.
Officially, it was to thank the company for expanding into France, but outsiders say the Prime Minister’s gestures looked almost like the awarding of a national order of merit.
Incidentally, the Prime Minister’s name was Valls.
The same word Princess Sheeta utters in Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky as the spell that destroys a kingdom.
Was there perhaps a long-accumulated French feeling behind it?