Published on December 3, 2019.
This is a republication of a chapter originally posted on May 6, 2017.
Citing Masayuki Takayama’s column in Shukan Shincho, it examines Dutch prisoners, local people, half-caste communities, and Japanese military and civilian personnel in the Dutch East Indies, criticizing the contradictions in Asahi Shimbun’s reporting creed that the Japanese must always be portrayed as villains.

December 3, 2019.
The Japanese must be villains.
That is the editorial creed of the Asahi Shimbun, but if that is the case, things inevitably cease to add up.
This article seems to have proved exactly that.
Is it not far too convenient to declare war on your own, hardly fight at all, and then say, now please feed 80,000 of us in comfort?
I am republishing the chapter I posted on May 6, 2017, under that title.
In Shukan Shincho’s Golden Week special issue as well, Masayuki Takayama fully displays his true worth as the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
The following is from his famous column, which closes that weekly magazine.
A Lament for Half-Castes.
The last war began with Japan’s declaration of war against Britain and the United States.
Then the Netherlands declared war, as if to say, “I too am a white nation that hates Japan.”
In the Dutch East Indies there were great oil fields such as Palembang and Balikpapan.
Their output more than covered Japan’s annual consumption.
After taking Singapore and the Philippines, Japan had intended to negotiate with the Netherlands to purchase oil.
Then the other side declared war.
One might call it convenient, or say that it saved the trouble of negotiation.
So, as soon as the capture of Singapore came into view, Japan began its invasion of the Dutch East Indies.
The 80,000 Dutch troops were holed up in the Bandung fortress.
The British used Indians as their vanguard, and the Americans used Filipinos, but the Dutch had treated the local people brutally for 400 years.
As a result, when the war began, “all the local native soldiers fled.”
R. Gausbroek, The Loss of Western Colonies and Japan.
Only white people remained in the fortress.
When the Japanese army began its attack, they immediately raised their hands.
They knew that the German soldiers taken prisoner in the siege of Qingdao 30 years earlier had enjoyed an elegant life in internment camps.
Perhaps we too would be treated with the same care.
But that war had begun because Japan had been cornered and could no longer feed itself.
Is it not far too convenient to declare war on your own, hardly fight at all, and then say, now please feed 80,000 of us in comfort?
Moreover, they were not the only ones who had to be supported.
There were also 40,000 Dutch civilians in the Dutch East Indies.
The Japanese army educated the local people and had them look after the Dutch.
“The local people whom we had cruelly abused made us work without giving us decent food.”
Japanese officers and men were rough, but still had common sense.
“When we violated discipline, they forbade us to take showers for several days.
The Japanese did not even know that we had no custom of taking baths, and believed it would be a punishment.”
The other day, the Asahi Shimbun wrote that Dutch anti-Japanese feeling was caused by this “abuse by the Japanese army,” but Gausbroek analyzes that half of what they felt as abuse came from the white consciousness of being ordered about by “yellow, bow-legged monkeys.”
There is another thing that neither he nor Asahi deliberately mentions.
At that time, there were “white people” who were not placed in the camps.
“They were children born to Dutch men and local women, and were called half-castes.
The women were more beautiful than the Dutch women,” Noboru Yamaguchi, a former All Nippon Airways managing director who had served in the Southern Army, told me long ago.
The mixed-race men, as was the case with Xanana Gusmão of East Timor, became soldiers who protected their white fathers and abused the local people on their mothers’ side.
The women too had entered and lived in white society, but the outbreak of war threw everything into chaos.
Their biological fathers did not take them to the internment facilities, partly because of their regular families.
The local people hated them, and they could have been killed as in East Timor.
The women sought the protection of the Japanese military personnel, civilian employees attached to the military, and trading-company men who had advanced into the area.
“There were many cases in which they married them or lived with them,” the same source said.
The Hakuba-kai, presided over by Soichi Oya, also had these Javanese half-castes as its purpose.
Whatever may be said of Oya, the civilian employees attached to the military who lived locally were all serious people.
After Japan’s defeat, many of the 2,000 military personnel and civilian employees who joined Indonesia’s war of independence and died there had such ties.
In order to gloss over Seiji Yoshida’s lies, the Asahi Shimbun has loudly propagated the ugly “sexuality of the battlefield” of the Japanese.
One example is its series claiming that “the Japanese army did not only do this to Koreans; in the Dutch East Indies too, it violated Dutch women.”
This time, reporter Maki Okubo tells the story of “the daughter of a Dutch woman and a Japanese civilian employee attached to the military” who came to Japan and met her paternal family.
In the article, she quietly reveals that the women were not Dutch, but abandoned half-castes.
The Japanese must be villains.
That is the editorial creed of the Asahi Shimbun, but if that is the case, things inevitably cease to add up.
This article seems to have proved exactly that.
It cannot write about good Japanese people.
What a sad newspaper it is.
The Turntable of Civilization (id), six years ago, Follow this blog.