Written on May 16, 2019, this essay examines narratives surrounding the Nanjing Massacre, Katsuichi Honda, John Dower, Yoshihide Soeya, Ken’ichi Gotō, and Hirofumi Hayashi, and sharply criticizes Asahi Shimbun for spreading a masochistic view of history in postwar Japan and eroding the confidence and independence of the Japanese people.

2019-05-16
The article discussed in the dialogue, which insisted that the lipoma taken up in the conversation was a lump from sixty years ago, is, like Katsuichi Honda, a transparent lie written for the purpose of portraying Japan as cruel.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The Nanjing Massacre too was made into proof, in Honda Katsuichi’s writing, that the Japanese had been this cruel.
This enormous lie jointly produced by Americans and Chinese was amplified by Katsuichi Honda, yet even in 2017 the Tensei Jingo column wrote, “This month marks 80 years since the Japanese military massacred many Chinese people in Nanjing.
It is difficult to remember, and dangerous to forget.”
Before writing, this author should have gone to his own company’s research department.
There would have been on hand the field reports of senior reporters who had remained with the troops from the time they entered Nanjing, as well as photographs of the city of Nanjing taken day after day by more than eighty senior cameramen and reporters.
There are explanatory notes for the genuine photographs from before Honda rewrote them.
There are only the smiles of citizens rescued from the terror of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, and nothing reporting any massacre.
One should naturally wonder why a story of a great massacre would emerge from such a place.
After all, it was Asahi that had dispatched the greatest number of reporters to the scene.
What they witnessed is precisely the truth.
The article discussed in the dialogue, which insisted that the lipoma taken up in the conversation was a lump from sixty years ago, is, like Katsuichi Honda, a transparent lie written for the purpose of portraying Japan as cruel.
While revering as a norm the masochistic view of history adopted after the war, and because judgments of good and evil are subordinated to the norms of the Asahi to which they belong, as long as the condition that “the Japanese military was bad” is satisfied, whether something is true or not does not matter.
When it comes to this point, it is already deliberate.
There are scholars whom Asahi likes to use.
For example, there is John Dower, whom we also mentioned in the dialogue.
Dower is precisely a representative American who wants to rewrite history conveniently and make Japan out to have been in the wrong.
Why did Japan go to war.
Regarding the course by which America set things up and drove Japan into Pearl Harbor, Dower writes roughly the following at the beginning of Embracing Defeat.
“The Japanese acquired white civilization with astonishing speed and developed, but one day suddenly went mad, became cruel, underwent a complete change of character, and began aggression.”
Don’t be ridiculous.
I am sick of the white supremacist mentality that looks down from above, but as for why they supposedly went mad in the first place, that reason is not written anywhere even if one keeps reading this book.
At most, what appears is the claim, in a book called War Without Mercy, that the Japanese were cast out from the club of white nations, that is, because they could not become white and were refused entry into the club, they became abnormal.
What nonsense.
Before the war, the Japanese never once sought to become white.
They advocated racial equality.
They objected to the existence of racial barriers, and never once begged to be admitted into the white club or asked to be treated as quasi-white.
The fact that John Dower dares to indulge in such a twisted speculation shows what a servile sort of person he is, and yet it is Asahi that values him highly.
Another figure Asahi likes to use almost as much as Dower is Yoshihide Soeya, professor at Keio University and an international political scientist.
He first appeared in the Nikkei in June 1999, and was immediately favored by Asahi Shimbun and began to appear there as well.
What he writes is much the same in different wording: Japan does not need to be a great power.
It is fine for Japan to remain a second-rate nation, and to serve under China, the great power, and support it.
Why.
Because, he says, at the starting point of postwar Japanese diplomacy there was “deep self-reflection on the history of aggressive war.”
On that premise, he writes, Japan should continue making amends.
He shares the same masochistic view of history as the Social Democratic Party and the Constitutional Democratic Party, and he too returned from study in America, at the University of Michigan graduate school.
Another scholar is Ken’ichi Gotō, professor emeritus at Waseda University.
In 1986, he announced that the Japanese military built a fortress on Sumatra and, after its completion, in order to protect secrecy, threw three thousand Indonesian laborers who had worked on it into a pit and massacred them.
According to people involved at the time, what was built was not a fortress but an air-raid shelter, not a single person died during construction, and the laborers engaged in the work were paid daily wages.
And those workers were still alive and testified to that effect.
Separately from this, in an August 1999 article in the Asahi Shimbun titled “The History of Harsh Wartime Rule,” Gotō announced that about forty thousand islanders had died in East Timor.
He claimed that the distorted demographic structure of the local population was because the Japanese military had killed them.
Or again, Hiroshi Hayashi, professor at Kanto Gakuin University, spread the fabricated story that the Japanese military tossed Malay babies into the air on the Malay Peninsula and stabbed them with bayonets.
The problem with their claims, like lies manufactured in America, is that they seek to deprive the Japanese of the power to stand independently by making them lose confidence in themselves, making them believe that whitebun-tachi may remain second-rate, and continuing to brainwash them into thinking that no matter how many decades pass, they must atone for the crime of aggressive war.
However, after continuing the same thing for seventy years, people have naturally begun to grow tired of it.
There are increasing situations in which readers no longer follow Asahi’s methods.
This is a major achievement of the Abe administration.
This essay will continue.