Using an editorial by Junji Tateno, the Asahi Shimbun’s Washington bureau chief, as its point of departure, this essay criticizes the masochistic view of history and the sanctimonious moralism that have clung to postwar Japan, and argues for the necessity of conveying the reality of Korea to the world.
It positions Japan as a true democracy possessing intelligence and freedom on a level with the United States, and sharply questions the distortions of postwar discourse.

2019-06-18
You must convey to America and to the world the dreadful reality of Korea…its unforgivable fascism.
That is your job…

This is a chapter I posted on 2012-08-28 under the title, “To Junji Tateno, Asahi Shimbun, Chief of the American Bureau.”
On page 8 of this morning’s Asahi Shimbun, Mr. Junji Tateno, the chief of its American bureau, has an editorial article of his own that also serves as an introduction to the contents of the proposal to Japan issued on August 15 jointly by Armitage and Joseph Nye in the United States.
At its end he concludes, “I think that a true second-rate country is one that cannot even draw its own self-portrait.”
But…
once again, astonishingly, the country he has in mind is surely…
Japan, criticized through nakedly masochistic historical views born of “sanctimonious” moralism, or perhaps moralism itself.
Mr. Tateno.
Would you not first, as I did yesterday, search for “Republic of Korea” on Wikipedia…
read it, and then speak?
Even now in the twenty-first century there is a fascist country, and though people abandoned that country because it was hard to live in and emigrated to the United States, those educated as fascists in Korea continue persistently to attack Japan all across America.
That is what should be treated as the problem.
No, this is the great problem.
Mr. Tateno,
a true second-rate country is not merely one that cannot even draw its own self-portrait…
it is Korea, which has fabricated its self-portrait and exists in the twenty-first century as a fascist country.
You should stop at once looking at Japan through self-tormenting emotions while soaked in the “sanctimonious” moralism of the sixty-seven years since the war.
Why?
Because there is a monster of a country next door…
and there is no longer anywhere any time left to go on holding such feelings…
this is an emergency so urgent that every moment counts.
This indeed is the struggle against fascism…
and you must convey to America and to the world the dreadful reality of Korea…its unforgivable fascism.
That is your job…
whereas to go on indulging in self-denigration of Japan, a true democracy possessing the highest intelligence and freedom in the world alongside the United States…
would mean that your mind is sixty-seven years out of date.