Published on July 14, 2019.
This article introduces a passage from Masayuki Takayama’s new book, covering his experience in Bangladesh, Islamist terrorism, Japanese victims, and a critique of The Asahi Shimbun’s masochistic historical view that treats foreign countries as “good countries.” It presents the essay as essential reading for Japanese people who must face the reality of the world.

July 14, 2019.
Every Japanese citizen who can read printed words should go to the nearest bookstore and buy it.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s new book.
Every Japanese citizen who can read printed words should go to the nearest bookstore and buy it.
The masochistic view of history held by Asahi Shimbun reporters who write that every foreign country is a “good country.”
Even when Japanese people were sacrificed in the Bangladesh terrorist attack, they wrote, “Japan was at fault.”
“You will be killed” merely for hitting a cow.
If one goes south along the coastline of Bangladesh, there is one place in this country where white sand and a blue sea spread out.
The beach is still called White Beach, as it was during British rule.
When I visited, girls were playing with the waves on the beach.
Islamic teachings do not permit women to expose their skin.
They wore hijabs and saris that covered them down to their ankles.
The wet saris clung to their skin and, on the contrary, made them look alluring.
Islam also forbids women to speak with men other than their husbands, but they chatted with me about various things while still wearing their wet clothes.
They giggled, saying they wanted to swim in bikini swimsuits.
After this rare experience, on the way back to Dhaka by car, a cow that had been grazing on the right side of the road suddenly jumped out.
It was a big cow.
There was no time to avoid it, and we hit it.
In the rearview mirror, I saw the cow rolling away like a ball.
I stopped the car and looked back, and the cow was slowly getting up.
At the very next moment, just as I thought, “Good,” the Bangladeshi guide in the passenger seat barked.
“Hurry.”
“Run,” he said, his face bright red.
When I looked, crowds of people were springing up here and there from the rural scenery where not a single figure had been visible.
They were surging toward us.
At a rough estimate there were 200 people, no, perhaps twice that number.
But we were the ones who had hit it, and we had to compensate them…
“What are you babbling about? You’ll be killed,” the guide said.
His face was truly terrified.
As I was told, I started the car.
Fortunately, the engine did not seem to have been damaged by the collision with the cow.
I accelerated.
I could see many reddish-brown bodies clambering up from the left and right sides of the road ahead.
I, too, accelerated in fear.
The tragedy that befell a German diplomat.
There is no stone in this country, which sits on the delta of the Ganges River.
No matter how far one digs, there is only mud.
So roads are made by laying down bricks fired from that mud.
Concrete is laid over that, but since there are no pebbles or crushed stone to mix into the cement, crushed bricks are used instead.
But because squalls fall, the mud layer under the road becomes distorted.
The road also bends.
It is like driving over rolling waves, and the car leaps and bounces around.
If we were to leave the road and crash somewhere, they would catch up with us.
At any rate, we managed to escape by sheer desperation.
When I returned to Dhaka and told the Japanese ambassador this story, he said, “You were right to run,” and told me the tragedy of the German diplomat.
That tragedy occurred in the center of Dhaka.
A car with diplomatic plates, carrying a young diplomat couple working at the German Embassy and their seven-year-old daughter, hit a child.
This country is densely populated.
In an instant, the car was surrounded by onlookers.
Even in the countryside, that many people had sprung up.
In the city, it is frightening even to imagine it.
The driver quickly fled.
The diplomat couple and their daughter, left behind, were dragged out of the car, and in revenge for the girl who had been hit, the couple’s daughter was assaulted and killed.
Excusing the barbarity of Islamist extremists.
Thinking as one would in Japan, I had stood on that country road and waited for the crowd to rush in, thinking, “We hit the cow.”
“I hope it was not badly injured.”
“I would like to apologize for that.”
I shuddered at my own foolishness for having thought such a thing even for an instant.
The background to such a thought was that, while driving around Dhaka, I had been addressed in Japanese by quite a few people.
“I worked in Japan. With that as my capital, I am now doing big work,” some said.
“Japanese people are all good people,” or “I want to go again,” others said.
They spoke in a friendly way.
One is naturally moved by their words and ends up thinking that Bangladeshi people are good people.
In the film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which I saw as a child, they were depicted as a brutal people who drove wooden skewers into Gary Cooper’s fingernails, but I had even come to think that this was Hollywood prejudice.
However, Cooper was right.
In that Bangladesh, in July of this year, there was an Islamist extremist terrorist attack, and twenty people, including seven Japanese, were killed.
The six perpetrators, including teenagers, tortured the hostages and finally cut off their heads with machetes.
Witnesses testified that they were laughing.
Personally, thanks to the “cow” incident, I was not that surprised, but the newspapers were different.
Asahi and others received it with “surprise,” saying that this country was a “pro-Japanese country full of good people.”
Such a good country commits terrorism.
Moreover, because Japanese people were selected and killed, it wrote, “Could it be that Japan was at fault?”
That was the article “The War on Terror: Japan Also Becomes a Target” by reporter Yotsukura Motoki.
Perhaps Japan is counted as one member of the Western powers that oppress and exploit people in the Islamic world.
The tone was that Abe’s diplomacy, which made people think so, was to blame.
Asahi’s theory that “this country is full of good people” is not a method that began only now.
It made Afghanistan, which is several times more ferocious than Bangladesh, into a “country of good people,” and made Dr. Nakamura Tetsu, who dug wells there, into a star of friendship.
Foreign countries are “good countries”: that is Asahi’s company creed.
But in reality, two teachers from Hiroshima who entered the country believing it to be a “good country” were killed just after crossing the border, and one of the volunteers who had been digging wells was also abducted and killed.
The problem is that Asahi wrote the opposite in its articles while knowing that it was dangerous.
In the Afghan case, just before the teachers were killed in Spin Boldak village, a TV Asahi crew was abducted there and released after a substantial ransom was paid, but Asahi Shimbun, one of their own, covered that up.
Around the time of the volunteer’s murder, the aforementioned Yotsukura himself was shot in Peshawar and was carried in, pale-faced.
In the masochistic view of history that Asahi worships, only Japan is bad.
If “the peace-loving peoples of the world” are bad, the masochistic view of history does not add up.
Therefore, all foreign countries must be kept as “good countries.”
That is because it is the company creed.
Even if readers are deceived by that and killed, Asahi thinks, well, it cannot be helped.