2024/03/22

Foreigners in Japan Are Completely Safe Even in Wartime.
March 20, 2019
The following continues the previous chapter.
It discusses an article concerning Uotsurishima.
During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), European newspapers also reported that “Japanese hatred of foreigners is growing, and if Japan and Russia go to war, foreigners in Japan will be massacred,” but he issued a rebuttal to this as well.
“There is no hatred or hostility toward foreigners in Japan.
Foreign women travel throughout Japan alone or accompanied only by a maid.
Even if Japan enters a state of war, foreigners in Japan will be completely safe, just as they were during the Sino-Japanese War.”
After hostilities began, he also issued a report correcting false reports that Russian prisoners of war were being mistreated.
“The two men who died were buried according to Russian Orthodox rites.”
More than a century later, in 2012, the Chinese ambassador to Belgium submitted an article entitled “Why Do We Say Uotsurishima Is Chinese Territory?” to a French-language newspaper, French being one of Belgium’s official languages.
The Senkaku Islands, including Uotsurishima, are Japanese territory.
Nevertheless, the article begins with an account of the ambassador finding a map drawn by a colonel of the French military’s Joint Staff at the Schwilden bookshop in Galerie Bortier, Brussels.
The map supposedly proves that “China had already discovered and administered Uotsurishima in the early fifteenth century.”
The article then goes on at length, patching together historical facts and advancing enormous lies.
Naturally, the familiar Chinese narrative also includes references to “the massacre of Chinese people” and “Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Hitler.”
However, its concluding clincher, “the moving story of a Chinese woman studying abroad during the Second World War,” was an extremely effective presentation, although whether it was black or white propaganda, and whether the story was true, remained unclear.
It tells of a woman who summoned her courage and wisdom to rescue 97 citizens taken hostage by the Gestapo, the secret police, in retaliation for the assassination of a senior German military officer.
Europe Being Drawn In
In this way, Europe lowers its guard regarding China’s human rights issues and security implications, allowing itself to be drawn in by China’s attractive economic and financial power.
Xi Jinping visited a “Swedish” Volvo factory in Belgium.
However, Volvo had been acquired by a Chinese automaker in 2010.
Major business deals were also concluded in the countries he visited, including sales contracts totaling 2.57 trillion yen and the purchase of 70 Airbus aircraft.
The nightmare for Japan and the United States—the lifting of the arms embargo on China that Europe had maintained since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989—was looming just ahead.
Xi Jinping is probably laughing at the sight of Europe shamefully abandoning its own convictions.
In a speech in Belgium, he declared that “China does not imitate other countries’ systems,” thereby justifying his country’s atrocities.
At the EU (European Union) headquarters, which he visited for the first time as China’s president, there was talk of “the power of cooperation between the two great civilizations (?) of China and the EU.”
Yet the EU’s “civilization” and China’s “absence of civilization” are incompatible.
At the 2013 Belgian painting competition held in January, “Unnecessary Death,” a work depicting the persecution of Falun Gong in China, received the highest award.
The eyes of the mother holding her daughter, who died as a result of persecution, convey profound anguish.
Although Falun Gong itself has faced criticism, the artist’s forceful criticism deserves to be presented.
“Falun Gong practitioners have been unlawfully detained, beaten, abused, and subjected to cruel punishment.
This has continued for a long time, and their treatment has been brutal.
The cracks depicted in the painting’s background symbolize a future in which the Chinese Communist Party destroys itself through its repeated crimes.”
In this painter’s spirit, I see the DNA of Baron d’Anethan, who rests in Tokyo’s Zoshigaya Cemetery.
I eagerly await its “self-destruction.”
(Hiroyuki Noguchi, Senior Correspondent, Political News Department)