Kissinger’s “Ignorance” Threw Japan and the World into Confusion — The Media Praise Him, but He Misjudged the Arrogance and Rudeness of the Chinese
On the occasion of Henry Kissinger’s death, Masayuki Takayama cuts through the truth of the U.S.-China rapprochement, which should be reexamined as a “failure” of postwar diplomacy.
What the “historic meeting” with Mao Zedong brought about was the arrogance of Chinese people devoid of culture and worldwide confusion.
The ending of the Vietnam War was also filled with deception, and Japan and the world are still paying the price.
January 1, 2024
The following is from this month’s issue of THEMIS, a monthly magazine available only by subscription.
I subscribe to it in order to read Masayuki Takayama’s regular column.
This article, too, proves that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
After reading this article, a close friend of mine said:
“I am convinced that you and Masayuki Takayama resonate with one another.”
Kissinger’s “Ignorance” Threw Japan and the World into Confusion
The Media Praise Him, but He Misjudged the Arrogance and Rudeness of the Chinese
The Chinese, Farthest Removed from Culture and Civilization
Henry Kissinger died the other day at the age of 100.
Perhaps intimidated by the weight of his name, Japanese newspapers wrote plausible-sounding accounts saying that he brought Mao Zedong’s China into the free world and brought the Vietnam War to an end.
Among them, only the Sankei Shimbun was interesting in having Yoshihisa Komori, who had been its Saigon correspondent during the Vietnam War, write under the headline “The Great Failure of Kissinger Diplomacy” about an arrogant and overbearing man who was fundamentally mistaken.
To begin with, China at that time was closed off, and Chinese people were unable to leave the country.
It was because of Kissinger that Chinese people began coming even to Japan.
Immediately, crimes such as lock-picking and ATM theft surged, Japan was swindled out of 3 trillion yen in ODA, and on top of that even the Senkaku Islands were effectively stolen.
As Pillsbury himself later admitted, the United States also had its intellectual property and military secrets stolen, and the only people who profited were Kissinger and the Clintons.
Today the world is fed up with arrogant and ill-mannered Chinese people.
All of this happened because Kissinger did not understand the true nature of the Chinese people—the Han Chinese.
They had spent 4,000 years of Chinese history as slaves, and so they stood farthest removed from culture and civilization.
Their only culture was foot-binding.
They were true barbarians.
Yet he believed such Chinese people to be respectable.
In that sense Kakuei Tanaka bears the same guilt, but he settled the cost of his lack of judgment with 3 trillion yen in ODA.
The Vietnam peace settlement was also terrible.
Komori says that the substance of the Paris negotiations consisted only of “the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces and the release of 600 American prisoners of war,” and that not a single word was said about the security of South Vietnam.
“In short, it was peace only for the United States,” he writes.
He says that hardly deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.
North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho honestly refused the Nobel Peace Prize and continued attacking the South for another two years, taking control of the entire country in April 1975.
The final scene in which Viet Cong tanks drove into the former U.S. Embassy in Saigon still remains in memory.
As a result, it is understood that “the South, too, was communized, the people suffered terribly, and many fled the country as boat people.”
Komori’s column says the same thing.
At the time, I was a reporter in the city news department.
I believed foreign dispatches as they were and thought the same thing.
There were also cases in which boat people drifted into the Sea of Japan, were rescued, and then flew to the United States, which was where they wanted to go.
But even if they rowed out from Vietnam, ocean currents would not carry them to Japan.
They should have been carried back, like Abe no Nakamaro, and I thought something was strange, and sure enough it was eventually discovered that Chinese people from around Fujian were disguising themselves as boat people and illegally entering the United States via Japan.
First of all, far from being a gloomy communist state, that country was filled with love hotels, restaurants were packed, and everyone was enjoying life.
And one more thing.
They hate China.
Women Are Exceptionally Strong in Vietnam
Later I moved to the foreign news department and traveled through postwar Vietnam from Dong Dang in the north to Trang Bang in the south.
I later revisited the country with Masahiro Miyazaki and others.
And I saw a Vietnam completely different from what had been reported.
First of all, far from being a gloomy communist state, that country was filled with love hotels, restaurants were packed, and everyone was enjoying life.
And one more thing.
They hate China.
The claim that Kissinger paved the way to peace through Mao Zedong is an outright lie.
In the film Rambo, women are abused, but in this country women are extraordinarily strong.
“Men are no good,” says Nguyen Thi Thi, a former female Viet Cong fighter.
She was the first woman to cross the 17th parallel and meet Ho Chi Minh.
After reunification she served as mayor of Saigon and ran 80 companies, including the Japan-Vietnam joint venture Saigon Satake.
All of the company executives were women.
Hollywood films show female snipers terrifying American soldiers, but that was based on reality.
This country is sustained by women.
The two years of war after the withdrawal of U.S. forces were in fact fought to recover the homeland.
During the period of French Indochina, the French used Chinese people to rule the Vietnamese.
In addition to a poll tax, taxes were imposed on marriage, childbirth, and funerals, and Chinese people collected those taxes.
They also sold opium, and the Chinese formed a quasi-ruling class.
After the war, the Vietnamese drove out the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
Next came intervention by the Kennedy administration, which misunderstood Vietnam as part of the communist camp.
What is commonly called the Vietnam War began, but this too ended with the withdrawal of U.S. forces after nearly ten years of fighting.
And the final two years were fought in order to gain complete control of the homeland and remove the Chinese who had put down deep roots in Vietnamese society.
As its first step, reunified Vietnam took control of Cholon, the Chinese district next to Saigon, tore apart the walls and ceilings of houses, and confiscated the gold, silver, and valuables hidden there.
Chinese people competed with one another to escape by sea.
The term “boat people” in fact referred to Chinese people who had fled.
Chinese pirates from the mainland attacked them.
Sometimes they killed them.
It reveals the national character of the Chinese very well.
When I revisited the country with Masahiro Miyazaki, our interpreter was a Chinese man from Cholon.
His father had been a government official and his mother a teacher, but both were dismissed and lost their jobs.
The walls and ceilings of their house were stripped away, the family lost its property, and he lamented that because of his Chinese origins, “I could not even go on to university.”
Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration, later said, “We did not know the history of Southeast Asia. We misunderstood it.”
He acknowledged that the Vietnam War had been a struggle for national self-determination to recover the homeland from foreign powers.
Thirty Years of Fighting to Defeat France, America, and China
The Vietnamese fought for 30 years and defeated and expelled the foreign enemies of France, America, and China.
There is no reason they should be friendly with China.
Incidentally, the Cambodians also watched the Vietnamese struggle and tried to recover their own homeland.
That became the killing fields of the Pol Pot faction, in which 1.7 million people died.
The targets were Chinese and Vietnamese people who had entered Cambodia as agents of the French during the period of French Indochina.
They had controlled both Cambodian politics and the economy and exploited the Cambodian people.
The aim of the Pol Pot faction was national self-determination, and ironically, the Vietnamese who had demonstrated that example became targets of purges there.
Yet newspapers still do not report either the true identity of the boat people or the intentions of the Pol Pot faction.