This chapter contrasts European and American colonial rule in French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines with Asahi Shimbun’s historical portrayal of Japan as an aggressor against Asia.
Taking up Manchuria, China, the Jinan Incident, and the Tongzhou Incident, it asks what “multiple perspectives” should mean in historical reporting.

The following is a continuation of the preceding chapter.
The Chinese “Read Haruki Murakami Too”?!
France, for example, imposed a poll tax even on ten-year-old children in French Indochina, taxed funerals, and profited by establishing government opium monopolies in villages.
The Netherlands took oil from Indonesia, imposed forced cultivation, and even caused people to die of starvation.
The United States colonized the Philippines and killed 400,000 people who resisted its rule.
That is what I call “inflicting harm.”
Japan fought against those Western colonial powers.
On what grounds, then, is Japan said to have inflicted harm on Asia?
Articles are written after excluding “multiple perspectives” and beginning instead from the “preconception” of a self-denigrating view of history.
But Japan invaded China, did it not? said an Asahi Shimbun editorial dated January 8, 2015, after the New Year holidays had ended.
It went on to say that, out of a “sense of atonement for the war of aggression,” both the Japanese government and private sector had spared no effort in supporting China, and that it was therefore undesirable that “more than 80 percent of Japanese now feel no affinity toward China.”
The wording itself is strange.
Why write that people “feel no affinity toward China” instead of simply saying that they “dislike China”?
And what exactly is this “atonement for a war of aggression”?
From the time of Qin Shi Huang, the country of the Chinese had existed within the Great Wall.
Yet, blinded by territorial ambition, the Chinese began unilaterally claiming that Manchuria and the Uyghur regions were also theirs.
A Japanese person might have told them not to talk nonsense, yet Asahi has instead said, “That is right.
Japan invaded Manchuria, which was inherently Chinese territory.”
Here again, the “multiple perspectives” Watanabe speaks of have been forgotten.
The editorial goes on to portray the Chinese as good people who “read Haruki Murakami too.”
But has Asahi ever subjected them to the “fair and accurate reporting” it claims to practice?
Any accurate examination of China cannot simply pass over the horrific Jinan and Tongzhou incidents.
In the former incident, a 24-year-old woman was raped, a rod was inserted into her genitals, her abdomen was cut open, both arms were severed, and she was killed.
Because the scene was so atrocious, the autopsy photographs were not made public in Japan.
The Chinese, taking advantage of that fact, later used the image in textbooks as though it depicted “vivisection by the brutal Japanese Army’s Unit 731,” turning it into material for anti-Japanese education.
That is what I am referring to when I speak of the Chinese.
To be continued.