The Japanese Government Was Astonished by the Slander.
Every December, German television stations broadcast “The Nanking Massacre,” based on John Rabe’s fabrication-filled original account.
Each time, favorable impressions of Japan collapse.
I am republishing the chapter I published on June 11, 2020.
Thanks to Maemi Kawaguchi’s article entitled “German Popular Newspaper Declares War on Xi Jinping,” published in the monthly magazine Hanada, the Japanese public, myself included, learned a certain fact for the first time.
Every December, German television stations broadcast “The Nanking Massacre,” based on John Rabe’s fabrication-filled original account, repeatedly bringing favorable impressions of Japan crashing down.
They also cultivate anti-Japanese thinking among the German people.
The Japanese media have never once reported this absurd yet utterly unforgivable reality in Germany.
On the contrary, the Asahi Shimbun, the so-called cultural figures who sympathize with it, and television broadcasters, including NHK, have said “Learn from Germany” at every opportunity.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Asahi Shimbun is the most foolish media outlet in the world, and that all those who make their living through it are traitors to Japan.
It is only natural that China—a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, compounded by the evil of the Chinese Communist Party—has exploited Japan as it pleases.
South Korea, a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, has continued its anti-Japanese education, which could be described as Nazism itself, and has constantly slandered Japan in the international community.
The Asahi Shimbun reported to the world Seiji Yoshida’s fabrication about military comfort women; Yoshida was a fraud who could be called Japan’s John Rabe.
And Etsuro Totsuka, who had been an executive of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations—a group that could, without exaggeration, be called a group of traitors—took advantage of this lie and declared at the United Nations, “They are not comfort women, but sex slaves.”
These have become ideal material for degrading Japan.
How infuriating it is to have to write such unpleasant things in the morning.
For example, the Asahi Shimbun described Siemens’s John Rabe, one of those who fabricated the lie of the Nanking Massacre and a supplier of arms to the Chinese military, as “an ordinary company employee.”
For the German people, I am republishing the chapter entitled “Who Was John Rabe?” that I published on March 15, 2019.
The German people, incidentally, know who John Rabe was.
He was a Nazi Party member and the representative in China of Siemens, which was then one of Germany’s largest military suppliers.
At the time, Germany, having lost the First World War, was prohibited from exporting weapons.
John Rabe violated that prohibition and sold military-related supplies to the Kuomintang.
On the recommendation of a book-loving friend, I purchased the Shincho Bunko edition of Henken Jizai: Russia and America—Which Is the Real Evil? (490 yen).
This is one of his particularly important books.
He is more than the one and only journalist in the postwar world to have exposed the lies told before, during, and after the war.
It is no exaggeration to say that he is now the finest researcher and examiner of modern and contemporary history, not merely in Japan but in the world.
The Nobel Prize should be awarded for truly comprehensive knowledge and a formidable memory.
Of course, he himself has no desire for a Nobel Prize.
Yet, for as long as he lives, he continues to perform the noblest work for humanity: exposing the world’s lies and making the facts known to Japan and the world.
To Begin With
Do not be deceived by newspapers that tell lies without hesitation.
The First Sino-Japanese War began in July 1894.
Japanese forces landed south of Seoul, routed the Chinese troops, and by September were already approaching Pyongyang.
It had been a long time since Japanese forces had fought a foreign enemy.
The Chinese enemy was not strong, but its brutality astonished even the Japanese troops.
They did not understand the meaning of “prisoner of war.”
When they captured someone, they cut off his nose and ears, gouged out his eyes, severed his genitals and stuffed them down his throat to kill him, cut off his limbs, and hung him from the eaves along the road.
Aritomo Yamagata stated, “The enemy nation has been exceedingly brutal since ancient times. Anyone captured alive will inevitably be subjected to brutal treatment, suffer pain worse than death, and finally be killed through barbarous and vicious acts.”
In Jinzhou, local residents were seen swarming around Chinese soldiers felled by the Japanese forces, killing the dying soldiers and stripping them of their clothing.
Before winter arrived, Japanese forces attacked the fortress of Port Arthur, said to be impregnable, and captured it in just one day.
In the city of Port Arthur below, most civilians had fled to escape the fighting, and the remaining enemy troops who had taken refuge there were quickly cleared out.
Yet two weeks later, New York’s World newspaper published James Creelman’s “Report on the Japanese Army’s Massacre.”
It stated that Japanese troops had pursued and raped women and children.
Japanese troops pursued women and children, raped them, and killed them.
Soldiers chased children fleeing along the water’s edge, mercilessly showered them with bullets, and tore them to pieces.
The Japanese government was astonished by the slander.
The World was owned by Pulitzer and was one of the so-called “yellow papers.”
It was a newspaper specializing in sensational stories of the kind that might have claimed someone had been abducted by a UFO and raped by aliens.
Even so, the descriptions were so vivid that it was difficult to believe they had been invented.
Fortunately, Albert d’Anethan, the Belgian minister to Japan, interviewed French military officers who had observed the war and established the Japanese military’s innocence.
Once it was clear that Creelman had fabricated the story, the question remained: what had inspired those convincing descriptions?
Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States describes massacres during America’s Indian Wars, which continued until roughly the same period as the First Sino-Japanese War.
I noticed that its account of the massacre of the Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado, was virtually identical.
The witness was Robert Bent, a man of mixed Cheyenne ancestry.
The account begins at dawn, when 800 cavalrymen attack a village whose male warriors are away.
A cavalryman shoots an unarmed woman and scalps her.
Another woman flees with her child.
One mother escapes to the water’s edge and tries to hide her child by digging into the sand on the bank, only to be shot in the back.
A six-year-old girl waving a white flag given to her by her mother is also shot without mercy.
A pregnant woman has her abdomen cut open, and her fetus is dragged out and discarded beside her.
Japanese forces did not retaliate for the atrocities inflicted on them by Chinese troops.
Nor did they harm those who surrendered.
Perhaps that was what he disliked.
He probably wrote it believing that this was how barbarous Japanese people, who were neither white nor Christian, must behave; ironically, however, the atrocities he imagined were acts that white people themselves had committed.
Even among lies, this one, written with the knowledge that it was false, differs from a simple lie such as “I am not having an affair.”
If one considers it a lie that Japanese people could not imitate, one’s view of the world may change.
Tetsu Kariya, the author of Oishinbo, describes himself as a social activist.
Drawing on his anti-nuclear sentiments, he made the protagonist suffer a nosebleed in Fukushima.
It was a childish imitation of the atomic-bomb film Jun’ai Monogatari, starring Hitomi Nakahara.
Yet when it became controversial, the editorial department of Big Comic Spirits issued an appalling comment.
According to the Asahi Shimbun, the editors said they had “respected the author’s intention to help deepen discussion about the effects of low-dose radiation and the conduct of government administration and news reporting.”
It was a lie told with the knowledge that it was a lie.
How can discussion be deepened on the basis of such a lie?
Only when such despicable lies are eliminated can a proper discussion about nuclear power begin.
This author and these editors are no different from Chinese people who lie as naturally as they breathe.
The other day, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by former Mainichi Shimbun reporter Takichi Nishiyama concerning the secret Japan–U.S. agreement associated with the reversion of Okinawa.
The secret-agreement case, which had dragged on for forty years, had finally been settled.
Yet the reporting was also strange.
To obtain the secret agreement, Nishiyama made advances to a female Foreign Ministry employee and entered into an extramarital affair with her.
He spent three days with her.
Some may say, “Reporters do not have that much time to spare,” but let that pass.
However, despite obtaining information from the woman, he did not write an article about it.
Six months later, he took it to Takahiro Yokomichi and Yanosuke Narazaki of the Socialist Party.
Narazaki was a central committee member of the Buraku Liberation League.
The story then moves to Yokomichi proudly displaying the secret agreement on the floor of the Diet.
Ordinarily, one would perceive in Nishiyama’s actions an intention to “use the secret agreement to bring down the cabinet.”
He was merely a Socialist Party activist posing as a reporter.
What did the newspapers write about the Supreme Court ruling that brought this sordid affair to a close?
The Mainichi Shimbun wrote, “Nishiyama reported on the secret Japan–U.S. agreement,” while the Asahi Shimbun wrote, “Mr. Nishiyama first revealed the existence of the secret agreement.”
If Nishiyama had “reported” or “revealed” it in the newspaper, this incident would never have happened.
It caused such an uproar precisely because he sought to make it a political issue instead of reporting it.
The Asahi Shimbun described Siemens’s John Rabe, one of those who fabricated the lie of the Nanking Massacre and a supplier of arms to the Chinese military, as “an ordinary company employee.”
It also described a Socialist Party activist who called for Article 9 of the Constitution to receive the Nobel Peace Prize as “an ordinary housewife.”
It is not just China and America.
Newspapers, too, knowingly write and spread deceptive lies.
This book will help readers see through such insidious lies.
Summer 2014
Masayuki Takayama