In the Ōe trial concerning Okinawa’s “mass suicides,” the core issue is whether the Japanese military ordered civilians to kill themselves.
The belief that capture meant inevitable rape and slaughter—and therefore suicide—was instilled not by the military, but by the Asahi Shimbun before the war, an undeniable historical fact.

2016-04-03
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The issue that should be judged in the Ōe trial.
Having gained confidence from this, the “islanders” sought to exploit the matter more politically and extract even more money, portraying two unit commanders as heinous criminals.
Why should it require courage to question this?
From here, he shifts to a general argument, claiming that “the Japanese military routinely told civilians to commit suicide,” and therefore that his own assertion is not mistaken.
Yet the lawsuit questions the truth of whether “two demon-like commanders issued suicide orders.”
Why evade such a simple point?
Why did the Asahi Shimbun publish such a clumsy excuse?
This newspaper has developed its claim that “the Japanese military were demons” based on his falsehoods.
Therefore, if Kenzaburō Ōe falls, the Asahi Shimbun falls with him.
While having him write this column, the Asahi itself began preparing its escape.
A May 14 Kerama report bore the headline, “Die Honorably, the Soldiers Said.”
It appears intended to suggest that the military forced suicides, yet the content contradicts the headline, describing instead how soldiers urged civilians to surrender to U.S. forces to avoid being caught in the fighting.
This is what is called “sheep’s head, dog’s meat.”
The Asahi attempted to recover from this misstep in its June 23 editorial marking the fall of Okinawa, writing that “it has been regarded as an unquestionable fact that mass suicides were forced by the Japanese military.”
Only the Asahi and Kenzaburō Ōe have claimed this to be an unquestionable fact.
Is it not precisely this claim that the Ōe trial set out to question?
The editorial further asserts that “the Japanese military taught that if captured, women would be violated and men brutally killed.”
Therefore, they were told to commit suicide.
It was the prewar Asahi Shimbun that instilled this belief, and that is an undeniable fact.
Yamagata Aritomo’s field service code conveys that the cruelty of the Chinese was far from ordinary.
Russian soldiers readily resorted to rape, and even in the anti-Japanese writer Sata Nobuhiro’s recommended book Mizuko no Fu, it is written that Koreans brutally killed Japanese men and violated women, in numbers said to exceed those of the Russian army.
The brutality of U.S. forces was reported by Lindbergh and continued even after the war.
More than 2,500 Japanese were killed by U.S. soldiers, and the number of women violated is suggested by Procurement Agency documents to be in the tens of thousands.
To be continued.