Takayama dissects San Francisco’s long anti-Japanese legacy—from the Chronicle’s racist campaign to modern comfort-women propaganda—and explains why Osaka was justified in ending its sister-city ties.
At the same time, he exposes the Asahi Shimbun’s hypocrisy: the very paper that invented the “sex-slave” narrative now scolds Osaka while forgetting its own tearful promise to issue global corrections.
A powerful indictment of historical amnesia and media duplicity.

“Have they forgotten how they cried, ‘We will issue corrections in English to the countries we misled, so please forgive us,’ begging for mercy at that time?”

November 19, 2018

The weekly column by Masayuki Takayama— the one and only journalist in the postwar world— published in Shukan Shincho this week bears the title “A Hundred Years Too Early.”

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A Hundred Years Too Early

There was no profound meaning when Osaka City became a sister city with San Francisco (SF) sixty years ago.
Since Osaka was Japan’s second largest city, it made sense to choose the second largest cities of other countries, preferably also port cities.
Thus, Osaka established sister city ties with Saint Petersburg in Russia, Shanghai in China, and Melbourne in Australia.
Applying the same standard to the United States, Boston would come to mind, and New Orleans would also be suitable.
On the West Coast, Los Angeles was an option.
There, Terminal Island once existed as the point of arrival for many Japanese immigrants.
It is often compared to Ellis Island, the window of immigration on the East Coast.
Yet, Osaka selected San Francisco above all these.

In light of history, it seems a tremendous mistake.

In the early 20th century, during the Russo–Japanese War, the local paper San Francisco Chronicle launched a ferocious anti-Japanese campaign.
They claimed Japanese immigrants sent all their money back home and contributed nothing locally; that they chose spouses from photographs, and that their marriages lacked love.
The ultimate slander was: “Brown steals white brain.”

At that time, Jokichi Takamine had successfully extracted and crystallized adrenaline from the adrenal gland.
It was a world-class achievement, but the American John Abel declared, “Takamine stole my research,” and arbitrarily renamed it “epinephrine.”
Although Abel’s lie was later exposed, the American medical establishment still uses “epinephrine” as the official name.
This kind of atmosphere was exactly what the Chronicle was fanning.

When Japan won the Russo–Japanese War, contempt for the Japanese escalated into grotesque hatred, which took shape after the SF earthquake soon afterward.
Japanese people sympathized with the city’s devastation and donated 500,000 yen—more than the total contributions from all other nations combined.
The city’s response was to expel Japanese children from public schools.

The United States had earlier enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act to rid itself of coolies.
But by this time, the Chinese seemed more endearing, and the Japanese—deemed dangerous—were vilified and even target of arson attacks.
Hollywood, which had long used the sinister and cruel “Fu Manchu” as the symbol of the Chinese, now set the villain exclusively as Japanese, replacing the image of the Chinese with the beloved detective “Charlie Chan.”
San Francisco’s notorious Chinatown, once despised, now received warm protection and flourished.

The Chinese were grateful to Japan.
According to Keiko Kawazoe, in recent years Chinatown has been controlled by Florence Fang (Fang Libangqin), who aligned herself with U.S. interests and transformed the area into a hub of anti-Japanese agitation.
Like in Beijing, she opened an Anti-Japanese War Memorial Hall, and last year she erected atop a building a comfort-women statue “for the hundreds of thousands of women who were enslaved by the Japanese military, forced to serve twenty men a day, and finally killed.”
The Chinese mayor immediately elevated the statue to city-park status.

If those numbers were true, every Japanese soldier would have abandoned the war to spend all day with women.
The absurdity was so extreme that Osaka City severed its sister-city relationship with San Francisco.
Naturally.

Then Asahi Shimbun published an editorial admonishing Osaka, urging it to “return to the origin and reconsider.”
It argued that the root cause of the discord was Toru Hashimoto’s remark that “prostitutes were necessary at the front,” which supposedly offended SF residents.
It criticized Hashimoto as careless.

The editorial was likely written by the editorial-chief Kiyoki Nemoto.
Has this man forgotten that his newspaper fabricated the story that “ordinary prostitutes” were “sex slaves”?
The lie was exposed, and Kimura Tadakazu lost his position.
Has he forgotten how he cried, “We will issue corrections in English to the countries we misled, so please forgive us,” begging for mercy at that time?
What is unforgivable is that they manipulated the corrections so they could not be searched from outside.

If he wants to discuss wartime prostitutes, Nemoto should first go in person and apologize: “We lied.”
Which side needs to “return to the origin”?
Asking Osaka City for advice is a hundred years too early.