2019/10/31
The following is taken from Masayuki Takayama’s serial column that closes yesterday’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
This essay, too, proves that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
I have repeatedly stated that it is no exaggeration to say that the world is ignorant.
All those with reasonable intelligence in the Western countries named in this essay will feel doubly ashamed.
One reason concerns the reality of their rule over the countries they conquered and their colonialism.
The other concerns their ignorance of the fact that Japan’s rule of Taiwan and its annexation of the Korean Peninsula were precisely the opposite of their own.
It concerns how, at least until 2010, when “The Turntable of Civilization” appeared, they continued to stigmatize and attack Japan, echoing anti-Japanese propaganda claiming that Japan had practiced the same colonial rule as they had.
Taiwan and Hong Kong
Poland, where Marie Curie spent her childhood, was under Russian rule.
Those under domination have no need for knowledge.
The university was closed, and her father, who was a professor, lost his job.
With her love of learning, she moved to Paris, met Pierre Curie, and won the Nobel Prize twice.
Her second prize was awarded for the discovery of new elements.
She named one of them polonium after her homeland.
Less than thirty years later, her homeland was occupied by Hitler.
German rule was so harsh that Russian rule seemed preferable, and education stopped at elementary school.
There was nothing beyond that.
Intellectuals, such as professors and doctors, were not deprived of their jobs but of their lives.
The only education permitted in elementary schools was learning to count to 500 and write one’s own name [Himmler].
People were placed under Gestapo surveillance, and the Gestapo killed citizens at will.
Hitler regarded the Slavic Poles in the same way as the peoples of Asian colonies.
Incidentally, after taking possession of Burma, Britain first executed intellectuals and influential figures, then confiscated paper.
Because with paper, education was possible.
French Indochina also restricted education, and there was only one lycée [high school].
Instead, numerous tax collection offices were established, and money was made by taxing salt, alcohol, and tobacco.
The Sûreté, similar to the Gestapo, was established to monitor the Vietnamese.
Leaving one’s village without permission was forbidden.
It was the same as being under martial law.
Nevertheless, when anti-French demonstrations occurred, the government of French Indochina opened fire with machine guns without hesitation.
If people died, even a funeral tax could be collected.
It was in such an era that Japan lost the war.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, abandoned by the United States and pursued by the Chinese Communist Party, fled to Taiwan.
The first thing Chiang Kai-shek did there was the same as what Western countries had done in their colonies.
He taxed salt, alcohol, and tobacco.
Chiang Kai-shek carried out the same systematic killing of intellectuals that Hitler had carried out in Poland.
The so-called February 28 Incident began when Chiang Kai-shek’s police confiscated tobacco from an elderly woman selling cigarettes.
They, too, were Chinese.
Like the present Beijing government, they exploited people through threats and violence, engaged in corruption, and committed rape.
When citizens condemned their tyranny, Chiang Kai-shek used it as a pretext to carry out the repression and execution of intellectuals throughout the country.
The Chinese police did this in the Chinese manner.
They pierced both palms or the calves of those they captured and threaded wire through them.
They marched large numbers of people, strung together like beads on a rosary, to the wharf at Keelung and pushed them into the sea.
Most drowned.
The number of victims is said to have been approximately 30,000, but the modern historian Kō Bun’yū states, “If the purges of local influential figures are included, the number reaches 100,000.”
Chiang Kai-shek also closed Taipei University and prohibited higher education.
He increased the number of police officers, which had been 12,000 throughout the island under Japanese rule, to 80,000 and imposed martial law to monitor citizens’ activities.
Chiang Kai-shek called Taiwan the Republic of China, but what he practiced there was a Hitler-like occupation or colonial rule.
Chiang Kai-shek’s young aides were predominantly people who had studied in the United States.
The treatment of Taiwan was probably modeled on the colonial Philippines, where the United States ruled through fear.
Martial law lasted forty years, from the February 28 Incident to the era of his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.
Although that rule inspires disgust, Sankei Shimbun president Nobutaka Shikanai repeatedly visited Taiwan under martial law and, after venerating Chiang Kai-shek, published “The Secret Chronicle of Chiang Kai-shek.”
The book is written as though the Nanjing Massacre actually occurred.
He probably valued Chiang Kai-shek as an anti-communist leader, but how did Taiwanese people suffering under martial law after the massacre receive such praise from the representative of a Japanese newspaper?
The Atlantic Charter clearly states that “the people have the right to choose their form of government.”
Such fine words had long since abandoned Taiwan and Poland.
And now the same groans can be heard from Hong Kong.
Sankei expelled Shikanai.
The reality of Hong Kong today is vividly portrayed in its pages, but not in those of Asahi Shimbun.
Does Shikanai’s ghost haunt Asahi as well?