2021/3/28
The following is from a feature article in today's WiLL, a monthly magazine titled "The Comfort Women Issue: Germany's ulterior motive in beating Japan." The article features a conversation between journalist Yoshio Kisa and information strategy analyst Tetsuhide Yamaoka.
As I mention every month, the monthly magazines WiLL, Hanada, and Sound Argument are full of genuine articles that are must-reads for the Japanese people and people worldwide.
This article proves that point beautifully.
When I was still a subscriber to the Japanese edition of Newsweek, I read an unbelievable article about a German poll showing that about half of Germans have an anti-Japanese ideology.
Since then, I have had the utmost contempt for the so-called cultural figures who have been saying things like "learn from Germany," among whom I have seen Takeshi Umehara and Masakazu Yamazaki firsthand in the pages of a newspaper.
Yoshio Kisa and Tetsuhide Yamaoka, also national treasures as defined by Saicho, have proven perfectly that my criticism of Germany was 100% correct.
The Japanese people had to head to the nearest bookstore to subscribe.
I will let the rest of the world know as best I can.
No Historical View of the Nuremberg Trials
Yamaoka
I had the opportunity to ask a foreign ministry official directly what the Japanese foreign ministry's response was to the recent installation of the comfort women statue in Berlin.
The answer was, "We have said everything that needs to be said.
I then asked him, "Did you also insist that they were not in a position to criticize Japan for the severe and brutal forced prostitution that took place in Germany during the war? The Foreign Ministry responded, "Yes, we said that, and they knew it."
I found out that at the level of the head of the German ward council they are aware of such historical facts.
Kisa
But our Foreign Ministry's argument is still weak.
Concerning Professor Ramseyer's earlier article, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should take a firm stance and present its view based on solid evidence.
The Japanese government's research could be more convincing when it comes to evidence.
In the U.S., the Clinton and Bush administrations spent eight years and over 3 billion yen to conduct a thorough re-investigation of Germany and Japan's war crimes.
The investigation results were compiled in April 2007 as the "Final Report to the U.S. Congress of the Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Nazi War Crimes and the Records of the Japanese Imperial Government.
However, the World Federation for the Protection of the Historical Facts of the Anti-Japanese War, an anti-Japanese Chinese organization in the U.S., demanded that comfort women be included in the report; it would indeed reveal facts inconvenient to Japan.
So, the U.S. embarked on a re-investigation and found not a single U.S. government or military document that supported the claims of war crimes and "systematic enslavement of women" related to Japan's comfort women.
It is the reason why the preface of the investigation report says, "We have disappointed you" and "We regret that we have reached these results."
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should use the results of this kind of third-party verification.
Yamaoka
After the war, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was, in some respects, used as a translation agency by GHQ.
In other words, it was an organization that promoted the postwar regime.
Asahi and NHK are similar organizations.
When you talk to the foreign affairs bureaucrats individually, they show willingness. However, the ministry seems pulled by the organizational climate and responds to diplomacy from a masochistic view of history.
Kisa
In that sense, people like Mabuchi Mutsuo, the former ambassador to Ukraine, are rarer.
Yamaoka
To change the Ministry of Foreign Affairs culture, we need politicians' leadership, but unfortunately, it is also hard to find such politicians.
Kisa
As soon as possible, Japan must get rid of the Tokyo Trials' historical view, which judges Japan unilaterally from the standpoint of the victorious nation despite being Japanese.
There is no such thing as the history of the Nuremberg Trials in Germany.
When I interviewed German historians, they said the Nuremberg Trials have become taboo and forgotten.
They established their constitution (fundamental law) and took responsibility for their children's education.
Hitler himself came from rural Austria to become the head of Germany.
Moreover, due to family registration, Hitler's surname does not exist anywhere else in Germany.
From the German point of view, he was a perfect scapegoat.
Yamaoka
In the case of Japan, the emperor could not be tried as a war criminal.
Therefore, GHQ planned to use Hideki Tojo and others as scapegoats, but it was too much to compare them with Hitler.
In the end, it ended half-heartedly.
Kisa
In short, the emperor was taken hostage by GHQ.
To somehow maintain the national identity (the imperial system), the government leaders of the time had no choice but to accept the GHQ Constitution in tears.
It was unprecedented for a constitution to be enacted by an occupying power.
Yamaoka
It was a complete violation of international law.
Kisa
In this complicated situation after the war, people were educated unilaterally that Japan was evil, claimed that the emperor, the ringleader of the war, was a war criminal, and extreme people who were ashamed of being Japanese came to appear as "anti-Japanese.
But think about it.
Many of them grew up in Japan, protected by the capitalist system, and now earn high salaries as journalists and lawyers.
Shouldn't that deceitfulness be denounced?
Yamaoka
Mr. Kisa's new book will be an opportunity to learn about this.
2024/4/1 in Kyoto
