This article examines how Asahi Shimbun’s insistence on portraying Japanese as perpetual villains leads to historical contradictions. By ignoring the reality of mixed-race communities in the Dutch East Indies, the paper undermines its own narrative.

2017-05-06
The Japanese must be villains.
This is the editorial doctrine of the Asahi Shimbun, yet adherence to it inevitably causes contradictions.
What follows is a continuation of the previous section.
The other day, the Asahi Shimbun wrote that anti-Japanese sentiment among the Dutch originated from “abuse by the Japanese military” at that time, but Gausbrook analyzes that “half of what was perceived as abuse lay in the white racial consciousness of being ordered about by yellow, bow-legged monkeys.”
There was also another category of “whites” who were not placed in internment camps at that time, a fact that both Gausbrook and the Asahi Shimbun deliberately avoid mentioning.
“They were mixed-race children born to Dutch men and local women, called half-castes, and the women were more beautiful than Dutch women,” Noboru Yamaguchi, a former ANA executive who had served with the Southern Area Army, told me long ago.
The mixed-race men, as seen in the case of Xanana Gusmão of East Timor, became soldiers who protected their white fathers while persecuting the local people on their mothers’ side.
The women also lived within white society, but with the outbreak of war everything collapsed.
Their biological fathers, constrained by family considerations, did not take them to internment facilities.
The local population hated them, and as in East Timor, they were at risk of being killed.
They therefore sought protection from Japanese soldiers, civilian military employees, and trading company staff who advanced into the area.
“There were many cases of marriage or cohabitation with them,” he said.
The Hakuba Society organized by Soichi Oya was also aimed at these Javanese half-castes.
Leaving Oya aside, all of the civilian employees who lived locally were serious and sincere individuals.
After the war, many of the roughly two thousand soldiers and civilian employees who joined and perished in Indonesia’s war of independence had such personal ties.
To cover up the lies of Seiji Yoshida, the Asahi Shimbun has long sensationalized stories about the grotesque “sexuality of Japanese on the battlefield.”
One example is the series claiming that “the Japanese military raped not only Koreans but also Dutch women in the Dutch East Indies.”
This time, reporter Maki Okubo recounts a story about a “daughter of a Dutch woman and a Japanese civilian employee” who came to Japan to meet her paternal relatives.
Within the article, it is quietly revealed that these women were not Dutch but abandoned half-castes.
The Japanese must be villains.
That is the editorial doctrine of the Asahi Shimbun, yet it inevitably fails to make sense.
This article itself serves as proof of that failure.
They cannot write about good Japanese people.
It is a truly tragic newspaper.