Originally published on June 23, 2019.
This essay fundamentally criticizes the postwar belief that Japan fought an “evil war,” arguing that it was spread through American propaganda, the GHQ historical narrative, and the influence of postwar intellectuals and the media.
Focusing on the indiscriminate firebombing of 127 Japanese cities, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet intrigue, the role of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, the strength of the Japanese military, and the patriotism of the Japanese people, it reexamines the truth of the war and the postwar view of history.

2019-06-23
Even when the supply of materiel was cut off, in order to protect the distant country where their own families, wives, and children lived, most of them fought on faraway battlefields, staking their lives and fighting until they died.

The following is a revised version of a chapter I originally published on 2019/1/15.
The twentieth century was a century of war.
For example, entirely unlike the so-called cultural figures who contributed to yesterday’s Nikkei newspaper column, every person in the countries concerned was involved in the war in one form or another.
There is no end to the number of poets who volunteered to go to the battlefield and died in action.
That is only natural, because there can be no such thing as a true poet who is not also a patriot.
But those so-called intellectuals and cultural figures represented by the writer of yesterday’s Nikkei column, the so-called lawyers, and the NHK employees who calmly say that Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula, are different.
The very root of the natural and self-evident patriotism they should possess has been distorted, or made rotten.
What should be called an evil war is the Nazi slaughter of the Jews.
It is the repeated massacres of their own people carried out by China and the Korean Peninsula.
Or the American slaughter of the Indians.
Japan was driven into a quagmire in the Sino-Japanese War by Soviet spies and the Asahi Shimbun.
Using this as material, it was Soviet spies who had ensnared the Roosevelt administration that rapidly created pro-China and anti-Japan opinion within the United States.
The sudden worsening of American public sentiment toward Japan in opinion polls in the United States during that period is almost unbelievable.
In other words, their operations achieved an unprecedented success.
If communists succeed in sending in a five-percent element, they will without fail dominate the organization they are targeting.
Since propaganda operations are the supreme mission of their work, and since they have no other kind of intelligence, perhaps that is only natural.
At that time, the Soviet Union also planted spies in countries that formed anti-Japanese opinion, for example Canada.
The famous Herbert Norman was one of them.
After all, when Lenin succeeded in the Russian Revolution, intellectuals all over the world were profoundly shocked, precisely because of the top-heavy weakness that intellectuals possess.
To such an extent that it was even one factor in the suicide of Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
For example, Deutscher wrote that the intellectuals of that time were deeply shocked by the Russian Revolution.
The brilliant minds in the studies of each country perceived the Russian Revolution as though it were an ideal revolution carried out by workers.
Since no one yet understood what communism actually was, that is not entirely surprising.
But,
those who repeated the mistake of the intellectuals of that time were Japan’s postwar intellectuals.
Yesterday’s Nikkei column vividly revealed exactly that.
Who spread the claim that Japan fought an evil war?
Whose brainwashing was it?
The truth, which in reality could be understood even by a kindergarten child, was something that the great majority of Japan’s postwar intellectuals completely failed to understand.
To award the Nobel Prize to Kenzaburo Oe, who is hardly worthy even of calling himself an intellectual, is the height of folly.
Who spread the claim that Japan fought an evil war?
Needless to say, it was the United States.
Whose brainwashing was it?
That too was, needless to say, brainwashing by the United States.
For what purpose?
In order to divert the eyes of the world away from, and to conceal, the greatest slaughter in the history of warfare committed by man, namely the indiscriminate attacks on 127 cities throughout Japan by incendiary bombs.
Furthermore, in order to divert the eyes of the world away from, and to conceal, the greatest and worst crime in human history, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was made into the arch-villain.
And yet the facts that Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, has truly examined and revealed to us are the exact opposite of such propaganda.
Rather, he has shown that no soldiers were more gentlemanly on the battlefield than the Japanese soldiers.
He has revealed that they were men possessed of the aesthetic sense and sound moral judgment cultivated over 2,600 years among the Japanese people.
In this chapter, I tell the truth to the world for the first time.
Why did the United States go beyond the indiscriminate attacks on 127 cities throughout Japan with incendiary bombs and even carry out the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Part of the reason may have been that it wanted to show the world that it had taken the lead in the race to develop nuclear bombs.
There may also have been the factor that the world at that time, and the American administration, possessed a sense of racial discrimination.
But the greatest reason was that the Japanese people, that the Japanese military, were such a strong force that they may well be called the strongest in history.
Even when the supply of materiel was cut off, in order to protect the distant country where their own families, wives, and children lived, most of them fought on faraway battlefields, staking their lives and fighting until they died.
In truth, there had been no such people anywhere in the world in all of history.
Bushido, rooted in the hearts of the Japanese people, was no doubt one factor as well.
The Japanese military was far too strong.
The American military, then the strongest military in the world with overwhelming material power, must have felt this in its very bones.
In every battle the United States fought, the strength and tenacity of the Japanese military far exceeded their imagination.
The Japanese military was as strong as demons and gods.
The Japanese, a people who in human history possessed the strongest love for their country, their family, and their native place, were, once it came to war, the bravest people in the world.
In other words, the Japanese people’s love for their country, their family, and their native place was stronger than that of any other people in the world by a margin beyond comparison.
That is what the Japanese were as a people.
In one sense, that was only natural.
Japan, in the Second World War, was maneuvered into having no choice but to end up on the defeated side by Soviet spy plots, by media such as the Asahi Shimbun, and by the Roosevelt administration, which had been ensnared by Soviet spies.
That was because, until it lost a war for the first time in its history and came under occupation and control by another country, it had, for more than two thousand years of recorded history, never experienced occupation or invasion by another country.
There is no such country anywhere else in the world.
Yesterday’s column, the Asahi Shimbun, and the so-called cultural figures are those in whom that feeling is astonishingly weak.
Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami are representative examples.
Oe apparently feels strongly only about his own family and native place, and about the Korean Peninsula and China,
but it is a well-known fact that he harbors intense hatred toward the rest of Japan, the real Japan, the actual Japan.
That is also clear from the fact that his name can almost always be found among the initiators of movements that openly express hatred toward Japan.
In other words, they possess minds beneath even those of kindergarten children.
They are pitiful infants who have splendidly believed one hundred percent in what GHQ spread, which in the truest sense of the term was itself a wild false rumor, and who were brainwashed by it.
That is the reality of them, of the Asahi Shimbun, and of NHK.
To be continued.