The following is from Mr. Sekihei's serial column on the front page of Hanada, a monthly magazine released on January 26.
It is a must-read for the Japanese people and people around the world.
The emphasis in the text is mine, except for the headline.
Don't deal with China and South Korea's "historical awareness"
In my last article, I discussed the Korean Peninsula, and from this time on, I will be cooking up a series of three articles on China and South Korea under the theme of "historical awareness.
The reason for this is that China and the Korean peninsula, which have long been known as "big and small China," have several bad habits in common in their "perception of history.
First of all, one of their bad habits is to falsify historical facts for their own convenience arbitrarily or to create historical "facts" out of thin air, instead of taking history as a fact and respecting it as such.
China is probably the world's greatest master at falsifying and concealing historical facts.
As a laughable example, let me introduce the famous "falsification of the founding ceremony oil painting three times" in the history of the Communist regime.
On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China at Tiananmen Square.
Later, the Communist regime ordered a famous domestic painter to paint the scene of this event in a famous oil painting called "The Opening of the Nation Ceremony.
In addition to Chairman Mao Zedong, senior Communist Party officials such as Liu Shaoqi and Gao Gang, who became Vice Chairman, are depicted in a row.
However, five years later, in 1954, Gao Gang, the vice president, was purged after losing a power struggle within the party.
So, the "Great Book of the Opening of the Country" was repainted, and Gao Gang was erased entirely as if he had never existed in the first place.
Then, during the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, Liu Shaoqi, a vice president at the time of the country's founding and later became president, was purged by Mao Zedong.
Naturally, the oil painting had to be repainted.
At that time, the painter of the painting, a great artist, had already been imprisoned by the Red Guards, but the picture would not work unless he were the painter himself.
So he had to be taken out of jail and repainted the picture he had painted 17 years earlier for the second time.
In this way, the existence of Liu Shaoqi and Gao Gang and the fact that they stood at Tiananmen Square were utterly erased and covered up.
For example, in November 2021, under the Xi Jinping administration, a "History Resolution" summarizing the 100-year history of the Chinese Communist Party was adopted and announced.
However, although the names and achievements of General Secretary Xi Jinping's predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, are listed, the names of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, the party general secretaries before that, are not mentioned at all.
These two men, who were purged from the party, have been erased from existence, and the fact that they served as general secretaries of the Communist Party is completely hidden from history.
China also fabricates "historical facts" that do not exist, depending on the circumstances of each case.
One typical example is the overt historical fabrication of the "300,000 people theory of the Nanjing Massacre.
I was educated in China from elementary school to university. During my time there, the "Nanjing Massacre" was never mentioned in any textbooks or educational settings, nor did the Chinese Communist government ever mention the so-called "Nanjing Incident.
Since it never existed in the first place, it is natural that there is no mention of it.
However, in the 1980s, the same Communist government suddenly started talking about the "Nanjing Massacre.
The historical background is as follows.
In the 1980s, China began to ask for economic and technical assistance from Japan to rebuild its economy.
However, the communist regime was not happy to sit on Japan's shoulders, so to speak, in the position of asking for aid.
Therefore, they wanted to play some cards to win over Japan to gain a diplomatic advantage.
At that time, a sneaky anti-Japanese reporter went to China and burned China by saying, "Nanking Massacre."
That was indeed a blessing in disguise for the CCP regime.
Since then, China brought up the fabricated history of the "Nanjing Massacre" and used it as a card in its diplomacy with Japan.
Furthermore, in the 1990s, the then Jiang Zemin administration launched a nationwide "anti-Japanese education" program to restore the Communist Party's centripetal force after the Tiananmen Square incident.
In doing so, the Nanjing Massacre was used as the perfect material.
The Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall was designated as a "patriotic education base," Visitors were required to visit it, while "Nanking" was included in elementary school textbooks throughout China.
As a result, the "Nanjing Massacre" fiction is now firmly established as an "undeniable fact" in China.
In this way, for China, history is something that can be arbitrarily erased or fabricated according to the circumstances of each occasion, and they have no intention whatsoever of exploring and respecting the facts of history.
It is clear that there is no point in talking about "history" with such a country. Still, this kind of distorted sense of history is unique to China and Korea on the Korean Peninsula, which has the same cultural tradition.
I will leave this to the following article.
