2024/04/29

The following book by Yoshio Kisa, journalist and former Berlin correspondent for the Yomiuri Shimbun, The True Face of Germany’s Turn Against Japan, is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Japanese readers should go to their nearest bookstore and purchase a copy immediately.
I will do everything I can to bring it to the attention of readers worldwide.
It is no exaggeration to call this one of the most important books of the twenty-first century.
This substantial book, filled with facts that Japanese readers and people elsewhere will encounter for the first time, costs only 990 yen.
A friend of mine, an exceptionally avid reader, says, “Nothing offers better value than a book,” and that is absolutely true.
It is no exaggeration to say that Japan is now the only place producing truthful essays that the world should read every day.
It is divine providence that the turntable of civilization is turning in Japan.
I have discussed the reasons for this several times.
For the first time in human history, Japan created a society without class divisions, religion, or ideology.
Such a country could not have existed anywhere else.
Before Japan, the turntable of civilization was turning in the United States.
That was because the United States was the champion of freedom and democracy.
Japan and the United States must lead the world in parallel for another 170 years.
GHQ left Japan with a profoundly damaging legacy.
When I still subscribed to the Japanese edition of Newsweek, it published the results of an opinion poll on German attitudes toward Japan and the Japanese.
Reading it left me astonished and appalled.
The results indicated that approximately half the German population held anti-Japanese views.
I have written several times about my anger at that finding and my contempt for Germans.
This book reveals, in full, just how contemptible those Germans who harbor anti-Japanese views are.
It was only natural that a people so contemptible should have produced and supported Nazism.
They place all responsibility on Hitler alone, act as though it has nothing to do with them, and, astonishingly, condemn Japan in the manner of the Asahi Shimbun.
Perhaps the approximately half of Germans said to hold anti-Japanese views remain essentially Nazis even today.
That is why they align themselves with Chinese and South Korean anti-Japanese propaganda.
Since Syngman Rhee’s administration immediately after the war, South Korea has continued to practice Nazism under the name of anti-Japanese education.
In China, Jiang Zemin began practicing Nazism under the name of anti-Japanese education to divert public attention from the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and it has continued to this day.
This explains why approximately half the German people align themselves with the anti-Japanese propaganda of China and South Korea, whose essential character consists of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
Read this substantial book, and everything becomes clear.
It should be an eye-opening experience not only for Japanese readers but for people throughout the world.
Almost every Japanese reader will be stunned to discover that Germans could be such contemptible people.
The Japanese media, which have failed entirely to convey this reality about Germans, are not even worthy of being called journalists.
Worse still, they, together with the academics and so-called cultural figures who have followed their lead, have continued to utter the most absurd nonsense imaginable, such as “Learn from Germany.”
They are the greatest fools in human history.
This book also confirms, one hundred percent, the correctness of the intuition that led me to denounce those who kept telling us to “Learn from Germany.”
pp. 19–47
Chapter One: Germany’s Shamelessness in Condemning Japan
Anti-Japanese activities by activists of Korean descent are becoming increasingly intense in various countries.
In particular, the comfort women campaigns conducted by anti-Japanese organizations have spread to Germany, where comfort women statues and similar installations have appeared one after another.
There is no doubt that the comfort women issue is the greatest factor damaging Japan’s image in the international community.
In Germany, some people exploit this situation, and stereotypical contrasts between Germany and Japan are being reproduced on an ever larger scale.
With Support from a Former Left-Wing Chancellor, a Comfort Women Statue Appears on Public Land in Berlin
On September 28, 2020, an unveiling ceremony was held in Berlin’s Mitte district, which includes the Brandenburg Gate, for a “Statue of Peace” said to symbolize the comfort women.
Two comfort women statues had previously been erected on private land in Germany, but this was the first to be installed in the capital and, moreover, in a public space.
It stood beside a residential street on public land administered by Berlin, in a location readily visible to local residents.
Approximately one hundred local politicians and residents attended the unveiling.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, it was a work by the creators of the comfort women statue exhibited in “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’,” the exhibition temporarily suspended during the Aichi Triennale 2019 in Aichi Prefecture the previous year.
The Korea Verband, a Berlin-based anti-Japanese organization of Korean descent, spearheaded the installation, while the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, formerly the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, supported its production.
An official in Berlin’s Mitte district said that permission had been granted to install the statue as an artwork for a limited period of one year, adding, “We hope its message opposing sexual violence against women will reach as widely as possible.”
However, the following inscription appeared on the statue in German:
“During the Second World War, the Japanese military forcibly took women throughout the Asia-Pacific region into sexual slavery.”
Comfort women did exist during the war, but they were neither held in slavery nor forcibly taken away.
Thorough investigations by both the Japanese and American governments substantiate this.
Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi held a video conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and requested cooperation in securing the statue’s removal.
He reportedly explained that the Japanese and South Korean governments had reached the 2015 Japan–South Korea agreement on the comfort women issue.
The agreement provides as follows:
・The South Korean government will not support the installation of statues overseas.
・The expression “sex slaves” will not be used.
・The South Korean side will seek to persuade domestic support groups and work toward resolving the issue of the girl statue in front of the Japanese Embassy in South Korea.
In response to the Japanese government’s position, South Korean internet users voiced numerous criticisms, including, “This is the difference between Germany, a country advanced in its understanding of history, and Japan, a backward country.”
Here, too, we see the stereotypical contrast between Germany and Japan.
In Berlin, there is an organization of unclear identity called “AG Trostfrauen”—AG being described here as a joint-stock company and Trostfrauen meaning “comfort women.”
According to its website, the organization is conducting a comfort women campaign in Germany, with activists participating from “Germany, Japan, Korea, Congo, the Philippines, and other countries.”
It is noteworthy that Japan is listed second, after Germany and ahead of South Korea.
“Anti-Japanese Japanese” are playing a central role.
Activists from these countries appear to have coordinated their efforts to secure the statue’s installation.
On November 5, the Mitte district assembly adopted a resolution allowing the “Statue of Peace” to remain for one year.
Then, on December 1, it passed a motion calling for the statue’s “permanent installation” by an overwhelming majority.
The resolution included the vague statement that “the girl statue contributes to discussion of sexual violence against women during armed conflict.”
Of the thirty-seven assembly members present, twenty-eight voted in favor and nine against.
The Social Democratic Party, the Greens, the Left Party, and others supported it, while the Christian Democratic Union, led by Chancellor Merkel, and others opposed it.
What deserves attention in this controversy is the reaction within Germany.
Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democratic Party and his Korean wife jointly sent a letter to the district mayor asking him to reverse the removal decision.
According to reports, the couple stated, “Germany is respected throughout the world for having come to terms with its Nazi past.”
“German authorities must not participate in concealing Japanese war crimes.”
Professor Steffi Richter of the Institute of Japanese Studies at Leipzig University made the following comments to the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh.
The newspaper described her as “a German scholar of Japan well versed in Japanese new-right revisionism, including the controversy over Japanese history textbooks.”
“I was shocked by the response of the German Federal Foreign Office and the responsible officials in Berlin to pressure from the Japanese government.”
“Since the mid-1990s, several right-wing organizations denying war crimes committed by the Japanese military have emerged in Japan, operating primarily in politics and diplomacy.”
“Attempts since 2011 to remove comfort women statues from various locations around the world, as well as the recent pressure directed at the girl statue in Berlin, are connected with this reactionary network.”
Ilse Lenz, a former sociology professor at Ruhr University Bochum, reportedly told the same newspaper:
“What matters is not a confrontation between Korea and Japan.”
“Many Japanese have also sought to uphold justice in opposition to wartime sexual violence.”
“We must distinguish between the present Japanese government, which suppresses debate about wartime sexual crimes, and Japanese people who do not support war and sexual violence.”
(Published on October 12.)
The problem lies in the reference here to “Japanese who sought to uphold justice,” but I will discuss that later.
German scholars of Japan are generally said to hold views of postwar Japan much like Professor Richter’s.
This stands in stark contrast to the unusually high praise that Japanese scholars of Germany give to Germany’s postwar efforts.
See Chapter Two, “The Absurd Claims of Anti-Japanese Japanese Poisoned by the Tokyo Trial View of History.”
To be continued.