2024/03/07

But the argument is sound.
Japan should at least say, “Shame on you.”
The following is an excerpt from the second half of Masayuki Takayama’s column in today’s issue of Shūkan Shinchō.
This article, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
It is an essential read not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Trump is right.
In the last war, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) forcibly dragged Japan into the conflict.
That would give the United States a pretext to enter the war openly, help Britain and France, and defeat Germany.
It was the same strategy as in World War I.
Now, what was to be done with Japan, which had served as the pretext for entering the war?
FDR said, “Three months will be more than enough.”
To that end, he asked Churchill to dispatch the battleship Prince of Wales, which arrived in Singapore on December 2, just before the outbreak of war.
At the same time, a unit equipped with 108 M3 tanks was sent from the U.S. mainland to serve under MacArthur in the Philippines.
Among those tank soldiers was Lester Tenney, a professor at Arizona State University who later lied about having been forced to march on Bataan and tortured.
On the first day of the war, he witnessed the destruction of 130 American bombers at Clark Field, where he was stationed.
Under FDR’s plan, 150,000 American and Filipino troops would crush the landing Japanese forces, the Prince of Wales would sink every Japanese vessel heading for Malaya, and the B-17 “Flying Fortresses” would bomb and devastate strategic areas of the Japanese home islands, forcing Japan to surrender.
He calculated that it would take “three months” to reach that point.
But the reality was different.
The U.S. Pacific Fleet suffered a heavy blow at Pearl Harbor, the Prince of Wales sank two days later, and the American and Filipino forces were defeated in just two days and fled to Bataan.
FDR’s miscalculation lay in MacArthur’s incompetence and his underestimation of the Japanese military.
The Japanese were thought barely capable of flying aircraft and too afraid of ghosts to enter the forests.
Yet the Japanese military possessed the highest-performing Zero fighter and easily shot down B-17s that even German fighters had been unable to bring down.
They did not fear Malaya’s dense jungles either, advancing through them at 20 kilometers a day and ultimately capturing Singapore.
Even after the three months FDR had spoken of, the Japanese army’s momentum did not weaken; it drove the whites out of Asian colonies such as the Dutch East Indies and British Burma and instilled a spirit of independence in their peoples.
After the war, the people of the Dutch East Indies, who until then had been more docile than cats, fought the returning Dutch bravely for four years and won their independence.
When Burma also gained independence from Britain, it abandoned English, left-hand traffic, and tea, and began teaching Japanese at its university of foreign languages instead.
After losing the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands was left with window prostitution as its only source of income.
The Netherlands rapidly declined.
De Gaulle declared, “French Indochina is indispensable to restoring France’s glory,” and embarked on its reconquest.
But the Vietnamese resisted, won the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, and drove out the French.
De Gaulle was furious.
Was it not because FDR had angered Japan that we had lost our colonies?
Britain and the Netherlands nodded in agreement.
To make amends, the United States launched the Marshall Plan, committing $10 billion to reconstruction.
It was named after George Marshall, who had promoted the failed war against Japan.
The European countries also established a mutual aid organization so that those that had become impoverished could help one another.
That is today’s European Union.
FDR was soft on the Soviet Union and handed over all of Eastern Europe.
As a result, the communist bloc advanced to the West’s doorstep.
Impoverished Europe could not afford to increase its military spending.
Here again, the United States established NATO to clean up after FDR and continued to fund Europe’s defense.
Even so, discontent continued to smolder among the European nations, which could not forget their former prosperity.
Jean-Pierre Lehmann gave voice to their feelings.
“We were taken prisoner and worked hard by the Yellows, and we lost our colonies.
The United States at least vented its resentment by dropping the atomic bombs, but we have not retaliated against Japan in any way.”
The Japanese do not know how deeply they are resented.
They could not understand why the French female prime minister angrily declared that she would “trample the yellow ants (the Japanese),” or why the Dutch queen demanded compensation every time she visited Japan.
To those useless European countries still clinging to the United States, Trump said:
“Pay for NATO yourselves. Even if you are attacked, we will not help you.”
But the argument is sound.
Japan should at least say, “Shame on you.”