This chapter from Masayuki Takayama’s 2020 book dissects how Germany and parts of Europe shifted moral and financial burdens onto Japan while downplaying their own roles in aggression and the Holocaust. It recounts Italy and the Netherlands’ complicity, Germany’s long-standing resentment of “competent Japanese,” and the use of Chiang Kai-shek and John Rabe’s fabricated Nanjing massacre narrative to damage Japan. The author contrasts postwar German rhetoric that blames “the Nazis” with Angela Merkel’s unusual awareness of Germany’s true position, and shows how Asahi Shimbun’s Watanabe Masataka and Democratic Party leader Katsuya Okada tried—and failed—to weaponize Merkel for anti-Japanese, anti-Abe politics. The chapter closes by linking Aeon’s misleading labeling of Chinese food products to a broader culture of dishonesty among Japan’s political and media elites.

Merkel Was, Rare for a German, Someone Who Knew Shame

October 24, 2021.

The following is from the latest book published on December 31, 2020, by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is essential reading not only for all Japanese citizens but for people around the world.

In particular, it is required reading for those who make their living at the Asahi Shimbun, a contemptible newspaper unlike any in the advanced nations, which not only takes pleasure in denigrating its own country before the world, but will commit any fabrication to do so, and for those who subscribe to it.
Above all, the so-called scholars who have long said, “We must learn from Germany.”
Those who make their living at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which has used the Asahi’s anti-Japanese reports to continue writing anti-Japanese articles of its own.
Those who subscribe to such newspapers and make their living at television stations that, every year at the end of the year, as a fixed annual event, broadcast the Nanjing massacre tale fabricated by John Rabe.
And, as a result, roughly half of the German people, who are said to harbor anti-Japanese ideas.
Those who call themselves scholars, such as Alexis Dudden in the United States, a proxy for South Korea, must also read it.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the finest book in the world.

pp. 18–29

Merkel Was, Rare for a German, Someone Who Knew Shame

Germans said to the Japanese, “Next time, let’s do it without the Eye-ties.”
In other words, “The last time we failed because we let those fools in; if it were just us, men of real ability who respect one another, we would succeed.”
But this is not true at all.

It is true that Italians can be hopeless.
We might excuse their collapsing midway through the war, but after the war they had the gall to act as though they had always been on the side of the Allies and demanded war reparations from Japan.
When asked why they were so unscrupulous, the Italians said, “Because we contributed to bringing down fascism.”
If so, how much in reparations did they demand from Germany, the main culprit?
The answer is, “We took nothing.”

Germany committed, in President Weizsäcker’s words, “a crime without precedent in history—the attempt to exterminate the Jewish race entirely,” in addition to its wars of aggression.
In fact, Italy also aided that crime and killed eight thousand Jews.
The film by Roberto Benigni, which takes Trotsky’s words “Life is beautiful” as its title, depicts this.

The Netherlands is the same.
They were accomplices in the extermination of Anne and one hundred thousand others.
So at a time when Jews and the Holocaust are loudly discussed, it is hard for them to demand reparations from Germany while isolating only its wars of aggression.
And so they came to squeeze Japan instead.
Italy was as ugly as the Netherlands.

Even so, it was still far better than Germany.
Germany has long hated “competent Japanese” for the same reason it hates “competent non-white Jews.”
It had been a constant source of irritation to the Germans that Japan took Tsingtao, which they had carefully cultivated, in the First World War.

So, how should they beat Japan?
The idea came from the United States, which used as a model its own strategy of wiping out the Indians.
The Wampanoag tribe, which had given turkeys to the Puritans, was attacked with the stronger Pequot tribe; when the Pequots won, the Mohicans were armed with better weapons and made to destroy them.
By the same method, America decided to support Chiang Kai-shek, strengthen the Chinese, and set them against Japan.

Germany thus sent Hans von Seeckt to China, gave the Chinese army military training and the latest weapons, and had them attack the Japanese concession in Shanghai.
This was the Second Shanghai Incident.
The Japanese were surprised to see Chinese troops wearing Nazi helmets, but because the men inside them were still Chinese, they were able to beat them despite being outnumbered ten to one.

When Chiang’s army was routed, John Rabe of the German company Siemens appeared and spun lies, claiming, “The Japanese army committed a great massacre in Nanjing.”
Even as Germany did such mischief, it approached Japan saying it should sign the Anti-Comintern Pact in order to pin the Soviet Union down in the Far East.
Japan, however, concluded the Japan–Soviet Neutrality Pact and avoided being drawn in by Germany.
You could say that was Japan’s revenge for Shanghai and Nanjing.

Hitler was furious.
In Mein Kampf he disparaged the Japanese as “imitators of culture,” and when the British stronghold of Singapore fell, he let slip his true feelings in Goebbels’s diary: “I would like to send twenty German divisions to drive out those yellow fellows.”

I have never heard that postwar Germans have reformed this Hitlerian racial consciousness.
Even for the extermination of the Jews, carried out by the whole nation, there are many who shamelessly excuse themselves, saying it was “something the Nazis did.”
Brandt apologized at the Warsaw Ghetto, but like Weizsäcker, he was apologizing for “the persecution of Jews by the Nazis” and claiming that “the German people were also victims of the Nazis,” and he made neither apology nor reparations for the invasion of Poland.

It was from such a Germany that Merkel came.
Present-day Germany resembles the era of Seeckt, when the country was assisting China.
Merkel came saying, “But please do not misunderstand us.”
She was, rare for a German, someone who knew shame.
She knew that Germany was not in a position to lecture Japan loftily about the last war.

However, the Japanese who had lain in wait for her—above all Watanabe Masataka of the Asahi Shimbun—were crafty.
He welcomed Merkel enthusiastically, had her give a speech, and in return tried to make her nod along with Asahi’s masochistic view of history.
He essentially said, “Abe refuses to acknowledge your Mr. Rabe’s Nanjing massacre or the two hundred thousand comfort women. Please scold this bad Abe for us.”

Merkel answered that Germany’s present situation is thanks to “the generosity of our neighbor France.”
By that she meant that it is abnormal for China, which took the white side and betrayed Japan, to now falsify history and slander Japan.
Watanabe’s base scheme backfired.

The same is true of Katsuya Okada of the Democratic Party.
In a forty-minute meeting, he spent thirty minutes on historical issues in an attempt to have Merkel criticize Japan.
After the meeting, he proudly told the press, “Chancellor Merkel said Japan must properly resolve the comfort-women issue.”
In response to that reporting, Merkel said, “I did not say that.”

Having foreigners criticize Japan and then using it for domestic political struggle—this kind of tattletale reporting is not limited to the Asahi; the Democratic Party does it as well.

Incidentally, Okada’s family business, Aeon, has been selling dangerous food products made in China under labels reading “Producer: Aeon,” in a way that makes them appear domestically produced.
It is frightening how neither he nor his relatives feel any resistance to such lies.