This introduction to Masayuki Takayama’s 2022 book Newspapers Arrogantly Lie opens with a GHQ-banned Pearl Harbor commentary and uses it to expose how postwar Japan unlearned its own sense of justice and became afraid to criticize foreign powers.
Through a fierce exchange with the Dutch ambassador over colonial history and war-crimes trials, and a reassessment of Satō Eisaku’s “three non-nuclear principles” and Nobel Peace Prize, Takayama shows how the United States, Europe, China, and South Korea have worked—often in concert—to sever the Japanese people from their past and weaken their national identity.
Contrasting real “power” in totalitarian regimes like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Putin’s Russia with the easily toppled authority of Japanese prime ministers, he argues that journalists who merely chase gaffes or parrot Western liberal narratives are not watchdogs but collaborators.
Drawing on decades of battlefield reporting and encounters with global leaders, Takayama defends curiosity-driven, fact-based journalism that challenges imposed “Tokyo Trial” history and calls on today’s reporters to rediscover that curiosity as the only force capable of saving Japan.

Below is taken from the prologue “Introduction” of Masayuki Takayama’s book Newspapers Arrogantly Lie, published on December 15, 2022.
This essay as well proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people all over the world.

Introduction
In the commentary to Blake Clark’s book Pearl Harbor—translated by Navy Captain Hirose Hikota and later consigned to the flames by GHQ—there is a passage that reads as follows.
“Has Japan ever once in the past insulted the United States?
Has Japan ever, even to the extent of the dirt under a fingernail, threatened the very existence of America?
And yet they gratuitously despise Japan, put it under pressure, and make the existence of the Empire precarious both economically and militarily…” (from government answers in the joint budget committee of the House of Peers and the House of Representatives).
These were the words of a government official voicing his indignation at the American line of attack which, after having thrust the Hull Note at Japan as an ultimatum, went on to denounce Japan relentlessly for having carried out a “cowardly sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor.
This sensibility of “not criticizing other countries” and “not showing contempt toward them” has in fact not really changed even today.
On top of that, there is a sense in which defeated Japan, after the war, became oddly overawed by foreign countries and went so far as to abandon, proactively, even the act of making judgments about right and wrong.

Even toward North Korea, which masqueraded as Japanese in order to carry out terrorist acts around the world and, as part of those operations, abducted Japanese citizens, the Asahi Shimbun, for example, continued to use to the fullest the honorific name “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called them a “rogue state,” the Asahi would not even report it.
The Asahi likes to belittle Japan.
“Japan is a defeated country, an Asian small nation without an army, and no matter what it says, it is nothing more than the gnashing of a minnow’s teeth.”
Thinking, “Is that really all there is to it?” I once wrote about a country I do not particularly like, the Netherlands, in a newspaper column.

The Dutch are nasty.
At Schiphol Airport, they would often charge Japanese travelers excessive import duties on the Nikon cameras or Pioneer products they were carrying, with lines like, “You intend to sell these on the black market, don’t you?”
It was open harassment.
So in that column I began with the story of a troupe of itinerant performers that toured Europe and America in the late Edo period.

During their American tour they were invited to the White House, shook hands with the President, and that night “went out to buy women.”
I introduced them as unaffected, big-hearted Japanese.
The troupe then went on to tour Britain and France, playing to packed houses, and when the performance was over, they “again went out to buy women.”
But once they entered the Netherlands, the atmosphere changed.

As they walked through town, citizens would pick fights with them.
It did not happen just once or twice.
At last it escalated into a commotion in which “we drew our short swords and fought without restraint,” leaving no time at all to go to purchase women in the red-light district.
The director’s diary concludes with the line, “The people and the country of Holland are both bad.”

After quoting this, I took up a then-current piece of news: in connection with the visit of the Heisei Emperor to Europe, the Netherlands was reopening investigations into alleged Japanese war crimes committed in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).
In the last war it was the Netherlands that declared war on Japan.
In response, after Japan captured Malaya, an 800-man battalion of the Imperial Japanese Army attacked the Bandoeng fortress, where 80,000 British and Dutch troops were stationed, and the latter surrendered without a fight, hoisted the white flag, and went on to enjoy “a life in the POW camps with three meals and a nap until the end of the war” (Rudy Kousbroek, The Loss of Western Colonial Empires and Japan).

Yet after the war they turned 226 Japanese soldiers into B- and C-class war criminals and executed them.
When Dutch Army Colonel H. prosecuted Navy Colonel Horiuchi Toyoaki—who had led a naval paratroop unit in a drop on Celebes—and sentenced him to death, Horiuchi’s defense attorney asked what his crime was that merited the death penalty, and the colonel replied, “Because he is Japanese.”
The bitterness at having lost their colonies because of Japan and having been reduced to poverty as a nation ran deep.
When the Shōwa Emperor passed away, the Netherlands was the only royal house in the world that refused to attend his funeral, and this renewed “investigation” was merely the groundwork for a third round of reparations claims.
I ended the column by writing, “The people and the country of Holland are as bad today as they were in the Edo period.”

Then the Dutch ambassador to Japan came directly to the managing editor to lodge a protest.
Because he was the plenipotentiary ambassador, this took the form of an official protest representing the Dutch state.
However, unlike the Asahi Shimbun, I had written nothing but facts.
No, he said, the article is offensive and must be rewritten.
I could smell, too, that racial consciousness of “a yellow country must not criticize a white nation.”

Should they not rather consider that it is the Dutch government’s attempt to interfere with and correct an article in a Japanese newspaper that infringes on freedom of the press?
Angered, I criticized that arrogance in print.
This apparently made them even more upset, and the staff of the leading daily NRC Handelsblad, of the weekly Elsevier, and of some television station came all the way out here to interview me.

At the time, as a smoking editorial writer, I had been kicked out of the newsroom and was writing my copy in a storage room in front of the elevator hall.
It was in that storage room that the cameras rolled and the microphones were shoved in my face.
There I took the opportunity to talk at length about the brutality of Western colonial rule in Asia and to recount, just as Arnold Toynbee wrote, the process by which “Japan created the opportunity and momentum for the independence of the Asian nations.”

I also reminded them that the Netherlands had cooperated with the Nazis and, as a co-perpetrator of the Holocaust, had sent Anne Frank to a concentration camp.
In response, a mountain of letters protesting “Takayama” poured into NRC Handelsblad, and they devoted a full page to a special feature rebutting me.
Most of them repeated arguments along the lines that the Japanese army had committed brutal acts of aggression across Asia, starting with Nanjing, and that the Dutch, for their part, had enlightened the Indonesians and made their country better.

The column in question was one of the pieces in my “Iken Jizai” series, which ran on the front page of the Saturday evening edition of the Sankei Shimbun.
As the above story shows, it turned out that, contrary to the Asahi’s assumptions, countries around the world are in fact carefully checking every nook and cranny of all Japanese newspapers.
In other words, they are nervously watching to see whether Japan has recovered its senses.

As long as every paper keeps bad-mouthing the Liberal Democratic Party administration just like the Asahi does and obsesses over anti-nuclear power and the Moritomo and Kake scandals, they can relax and say, “They are still fools.”
It was precisely at such a moment that my column appeared.
A perspective that openly scoffs at the history they imposed on us—the Tokyo Trial view that white people are righteous and the Japanese alone are evil—was something they absolutely could not tolerate.

The Dutch plenipotentiary ambassador immediately sprang into action, and the media over there made a huge fuss as well, trying to stamp out this heretical point of view.
The result was the opposite of what they intended, but what is more telling is that all the other newspapers in Japan carefully ignored this incident, while a Fuji Television correspondent in Europe went so far as to send a “warning” to our paper saying, “The Sankei Shimbun has written an outrageous article; you must address this at once,” which was laughable.
At the same time, I felt a twinge of sadness that a correspondent with such a shallow understanding existed.

Let me give one more example.
On the eve of the reversion of Okinawa, Prime Minister Satō Eisaku articulated what is called the “three non-nuclear principles,” under which, after reversion, Japan would not allow the U.S. military to bring nuclear weapons into Okinawa.
In the background was the failure of American administration in Okinawa, which had aimed to make it “like Hawaii” (in the words of High Commissioner Galloway) but had run aground due to opposition from the people of Okinawa.
So President Nixon decided to return administrative rights to Japan, keeping only those bases he deemed necessary and foisting the prefecture’s population back onto Japan.

Satō found himself confronted with a once-in-human-history opportunity to regain territory seized in war without having to fight.
Yet there were foolish opposition parties and the Asahi Shimbun that failed to grasp this.
Faced with the gravity of the situation, he proclaimed, as a political expedient, that Japan would “not possess, not manufacture, and not permit the introduction of” nuclear weapons.

The United States did not miss this.
What Americans fear most is those two nuclear bombs dropped in violation of international law.
They believed that Japan possessed the right to two nuclear reprisals against the United States and that Japan would certainly exercise that right.
For that reason they imposed a strange constitution on Japan and have been on their guard against Japanese nuclear armament ever since.

Kent Gilbert argues that Japan should possess a powerful military against China, yet he also says, “Japan must absolutely never possess nuclear weapons.”
That is the true voice of Americans.
Just then, the Japanese prime minister announced the three non-nuclear principles.
“Well said,” they thought.
The United States immediately ordered the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award Satō Eisaku the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that Japan had now declared its own nuclear renunciation.

Most people saw through this shallow American trick.
Satō himself said, “We can abandon the non-nuclear policy whenever we want.”
Later the Nobel Committee even made the news by admitting that “awarding the prize to Satō was a huge mistake.”
Yet now along comes Prime Minister Kishida Fumio saying that “the three non-nuclear principles are the national policy of Japan.”
He ought to go bang his head against a block of tofu and think it over again.

What do these two episodes tell us?
Japan suddenly appeared on the international scene in the late nineteenth century.
For example, it quickly identified the pest bacterium that was the cause of the Black Death, which had terrified the world for five centuries since the fourteenth century, and thereby relieved the world of that dread.

The Japanese also taught the world about the existence of vitamins and liberated people from beriberi and scurvy, which had been fatal diseases.
They also clarified the existence of adrenaline and even developed the vaccine therapies we have today.
Japan then won the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, and in doing so fundamentally transformed the form of naval warfare that had persisted since ancient Greece.

Japan also criticized the shameful colonial imperialism that enslaved entire nations and championed racial equality.
In the twentieth century, white societies united to crush Japan, but it was only long afterward that the world finally came to understand the words of the Japanese, colonies became independent, and a racially equal world was achieved.

The United States has used every crafty device it can think of since the war to seal away such terrifying power.
To put it simply, it cut the Japanese people off from their own past and erased their sense of national identity.
China and South Korea happily lent a hand to America, repeating slanders and calumnies, while the Netherlands kept watch from a distance.

That is the situation in which Japan now finds itself.
I believe that it is the job of newspaper reporters to explain to the public that this is the environment we live in.
There are those who say, “No, our job is to monitor those in power.”
And so they chase after cabinet ministers’ gaffes and verbal slips.
I think that is a bit off the mark.

Japanese prime ministers are not exactly “those in power.”
In fact, newspapers have toppled one administration after another based solely on fabricated suspicions.
Real “power” is embodied in totalitarian states, or in “Big Brother” from George Orwell’s 1984.
Mao Zedong or Stalin will also serve as examples.

When Mao paid a courtesy call on Stalin, the latter had him confined, and Mao was terrified that he would be killed.
These two men could not abide opposition or criticism of their policies.
Anyone who dared to be so impertinent was immediately eliminated.
Peng Dehuai, who remonstrated with Mao over the “Great Leap Forward,” which did nothing but torment the people, was tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution.

Foreign correspondents operated under the same conditions.
Stalin recognized only Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who wrote nothing but propaganda pieces praising him.
Mao likewise expelled all Japanese reporters except for Asahi Shimbun’s Akioka Ieshige, whom he left in place.
Putin today is no different.

The Russian people have no glorious past to be proud of.
There was one brief period when, under the illusion that “communism is rosy,” they led the Eastern bloc as its leader.
He doubly mistook that as evidence of Russia’s strength.
Being short in stature like Stalin and wearing elevator shoes out of a complex, he would brook no defiance.

Alexander Litvinenko, who exposed Putin’s false-flag terror attacks, died after two weeks of agony when polonium was slipped into his drink.
That same year, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who criticized his politics of fear, was shot to death in her Moscow apartment building.
Saitō Tsutomu, an editorial advisor to the Sankei Shimbun who criticized Putin’s reign of terror, was given an indefinite entry ban by the Russian government amid the uproar over the invasion of Ukraine.

At that time, many journalists from the free world, notably the United States and Britain, were also expelled or barred entry, and as far as Japan was concerned, a total of sixty-three people—including, besides Saitō, the international political scientist Hakamada Shigeki—were placed under indefinite entry bans.
Yet not a single reporter from the Asahi Shimbun or the Mainichi Shimbun was subjected to any such measure.
The reporters from these outlets do nothing but ingratiate themselves with those in power—like the Asahi’s Akioka Ieshige—and never write anything the authorities dislike.

And yet Asahi’s former editor-in-chief Funabashi Yōichi pompously declares that “newspaper reporters must monitor those who hold power and fight them to the bitter end.”
So what are they actually doing now?
For example, taking advantage of the fact that a former prime minister who was felled by an assassin’s bullet can no longer defend himself, they engage in base speculation, slandering him as being “deeply entwined with the Unification Church.”
They are nothing more than scoundrels masquerading as reporters.

My column “Henken Jizai,” serialized in Shūkan Shinchō, reached its thousandth installment this autumn.
I take a little pride in the fact that it has never once missed an issue and that I have somehow managed to keep the freshness of my topics from going stale, but one of the things I have learned through writing it is what role newspaper reporters ought to play.

Being a reporter was a joy.
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II has passed away, but when she visited Japan I had the privilege of covering her from close up.
I also had opportunities to interview the new King Charles on the West Coast of the United States.
I dined several times with Peter Drucker, and Vietnam’s hero, General Vo Nguyen Giap, even taught me how to eat papaya.
I went to battlefields—a place where not even the Self-Defense Forces have practical experience—six times in all, before and after the war, and exposed myself to shot and shell.
My motive in all of this was simple curiosity.
Thanks to that, I came to see quite a few things that are usually invisible.

The reason I have been able to keep this column going is that curiosity provided me with a wealth of material I could pick up.
I think that current reporters have far more important things to do than catching politicians out on technicalities or doing loose translations of the Washington Post.
I cannot shake the feeling that this very curiosity is what will save today’s Japan.

If this book—written for twenty years on the strength of nothing but that curiosity—can serve as a reference for what to be curious about and how, I will be happy.
November 2022
Masayuki Takayama