The following is from an article by Mr. Ara Kenichi, an exertion that rebukes society, which appears in the current issue of the monthly magazine WiLL.
As mentioned in this column, I am very proud that Mr. Ara is a senior at my alma mater.
It is a must-read not only for Japanese citizens but also for people worldwide.
Emphasis in the text other than the headline is mine.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should erase the "Nanking Incident" from its homepage!
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which continues to tell lies without evidence, is fooling the people of Japan.
Strange Answer by Yoshimasa Hayashi
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs website describes the Nanking Incident.
"It is undeniable that there were killings and looting of non-combatants after entering Nanking."
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been describing the incident since 2005, but there are no documents on which to base this description, according to the Ministry.
At an April 3 meeting of the House of Councilors' Accounts Committee, Councilor Masamune Wada again asked the question, to which Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi responded.
How about Wada's question?
"Are there any documents within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that serve as the basis for this statement?"
Hayashi answered.
"We have not confirmed that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs prepared this document."
Foreign Minister Hayashi admitted that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had described the statement as undeniable without any basis.
That is not all.
At this point, a further problem was exposed.
In his answer, Foreign Minister Hayashi cited two documents.
The first was the "Government's Answer decided on April 24, 2007," and the second was the "Military History Series, Army Operations during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1),
The former is described on the website, and the latter has the corresponding description on the website.
However, the former was a government response two years after the description on the homepage, so there is no way it could have been included.
The latter is nowhere to be found.
Not only does the Ministry of Foreign Affairs state this on its website without any evidence, but it also responded similarly to the Japan-China Joint History Study and the UNESCO Memory of the World Heritage registration and is still lying at this juncture.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should immediately correct its homepage to show how much danger this attitude is putting Japan in.
Foreign Minister's Answer that Mocks the People
The former of the two documents is a response to a written question by Shingo Nishimura, a member of the House of Representatives, who asked what the government thought of the Nanking Incident, stating that "it is undeniable that there was killing or looting of non-combatants.
Needless to say, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website cannot be used as a basis for a question-and-answer session two years later. Still, if one looks at the 2007 government response, the government's answer traces the description on the website, and Foreign Minister Hayashi states the exact opposite.
Furthermore, Foreign Minister Hayashi explains that the 2007 government's answer "was based on a comprehensive judgment based on the testimonies of related parties and various materials related to the case," but since he merely traced the website, can it be said that he made a comprehensive judgment?
He also says it was based on various materials, but this story lacks substance.
In response to the government's 2007 response, I asked it on December 1, 2016, to disclose the documents it based its decision on.
On January 31, 2017, I received a notice stating, "We have searched in the files where the subject documents may be stored but have not found any documents. We will continue our search."
Nine months later, on October 31, I received the final notice.
"We have searched within the relevant files but have not been able to confirm the existence of the relevant documents."
In other words, there were no documents.
Foreign Minister Hayashi explained that there were various documents but no documents as of 2017.
The fact that there were no documents from 10 years ago suggests that there were never any in the first place.
That is not the only reason why there were no documents.
The statements of Mr. Hiroshi Hashimoto, Director General of the Information and Culture Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on November 30, 1982, and of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa on November 26, 1991, regarding the Nanking Incident, also responded to my request for disclosure by saying that they had no materials on which to base their claims.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has absolutely no documents related to the Nanking Incident.
The committee meeting was broadcast live on TV for the public to watch, and yet these answers were given with impunity.
The Nanking Incident with no documentation.
Let us look at the latter.
The Military History Series, compiled by the Military History Office of the National Institute for Defense Studies, Defense Agency, and published since 1966, is Japan's official military history in 102 volumes.
It is a full-scale work unlike any other in the world.
It was initiated by former military officers who wanted to preserve the history of the Greater East Asia War correctly and conducted research and surveys.
The "Military History Series: Army Operations during the Shina Incident (1)," given by Foreign Minister Hayashi, is one of the volumes and describes the first six months of the Shina Incident, including the Roudou Bridge Incident, the Battle of Beiji, the Second Shanghai Incident, the Battle of Nanking, and Japan's policy in January 1938.
It is a military history published in 1975 during the so-called Nanjing Incident.
The author of "Military History Series: Shina Incident Army Operations (1)" is Toshio Morimatsu.
Toshio Morimatsu was a military officer who graduated from a military academy and ended the war as a major.
After the war, he joined the Self-Defense Forces. He began his career in military history research, writing this book while working as an army history editor at the National Institute for Defense Studies.
The Nanjing Incident is described in "Note: The Nanjing Incident" after the Battle of Nanjing, which runs for over two pages.
It explains that Harold J. Timperley (journalist) and Edgar Snow (U.S. journalist) described the Nanking Incident during the war and that it was taken up at the Tokyo Trials after the war ended.
"When you consider the evidence in detail, these numbers are completely unbelievable," he wrote of the ruling.
It also explains that "the reason this was taken up as an incident was that there were some facts, which were misunderstood, perverted, and even exaggeratedly propagandized."
The "some facts" refer to looting and other crimes, and "the military punished them severely in light of the law," the report states.
It does not mention the killing of non-combatants, which is the focus of the Foreign Ministry's website.
Furthermore, the primary historical document discussed here is the "Business Diary and Confidential Operation Diary," which also states that the shaking up (uplift) of military discipline and public morals was discussed in Tokyo and did not directly refer to Nanjing.
In other words, the relevant description mentioned by Foreign Minister Hayashi cannot be found.
The other "military history book" mentioned by Foreign Minister Hayashi is also like this.
After leaving the Self-Defense Forces as an assistant general, Toshio Morimatsu joined Kaikosha, a group of army officers, and continued his research while serving as the library director.
Within Kaikosha, he was regarded as a leading expert on military history research.
He was different than the type to speak clearly, but he always answers politely if you ask him a question.
When I called him at home to ask him a question a long time later, he told me he was in the hospital.
His family told me that although he was frail, he only slept in bed, so I went to see him and talked with him in the hospital room where several people were.
Since I had such a relationship with Morimatsu, I asked him about the Nanking Incident about ten years after he wrote "Military History Series: Army Operations during the Shina Incident (1)".
The story that I heard from him several times went something like this.
When Morimatsu became a military history editor, the Nanking Incident was not on his mind, and no one around him was researching the Nanking Incident.
The Military History Office was not progressing in organizing historical documents related to the Nanking Incident.
While he was writing "Army Operations in the Second Sino-Japanese Incident (1)," Akira Suzuki's book, "Illusion of the Nanjing Massacre" became a bestseller, and the Nanking Incident became well known at the Defense Agency, so he could not avoid mentioning the Nanking Incident.
It led to research, and Morimatsu became the most knowledgeable about the Nanking Incident.
In other words, by the time "Army Operations during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1)" was written, the Nanking Incident had not yet been considered as military history.
The Panay and Lady Bird incidents, which occurred along with the Battle of Nanking, are discussed in the main text, and "Note: Regarding the Nanking Incident" was written to deny the Nanking Incident, which had begun to be known as the Nanking Incident.
Councilor Masamune Wada stated, "I have read the entire document, and there is no clear statement that the Japanese military intentionally killed those who were killed," which is true.
Foreign Minister Hayashi replied that there was a relevant statement, so again, on April 24, Councilor Wada asked which statement it was.
The Foreign Minister connected "regrettable incidents such as looting, assault on women, and arson were frequently committed during the offensive" at the beginning of "Note: Regarding the Nanjing Incident" with the last sentence, "It is regrettable that even a small number of innocent people were killed or injured and that the treatment of prisoners of war was not appropriate.
There is no killing of non-combatants in the previous statement.
The first and second statements are in different contexts.
The latter statement is a supplemental explanation to "The majority of the bodies in the vicinity of Nanking were the result of combat action," The killing and wounding of innocent residents refers to collateral damage, which is common in combat.
There is no description of the killing of non-combatants, which is the crucial point.
The Abomination of a Defeated Nation
When the compilation of the Military History Series began, the Defense Agency's internal bureaus were cursing the Military History Office of the National Institute for Defense Studies and Training (NIDS), saying that it was a waste of taxpayer money to study a battle that had already been lost and was now of no use.
The Military History Office chief and the Army Group head were at the heart of the Japanese military.
They were excellent men who had served as secretaries to the prime minister and military attachés.
If there had not been the defeat in the war, the internal bureau of the Defense Agency would not have been able to speak to each other, but now, they bring up the defeat in the war and abuse each other.
The director general of the Defense Agency at that time was in contact with the Self-Defense. The fact that THE INTERNAL BUREAU made such a statement means that the government regarded the military history series as such.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs authoritatively states that it was "prepared by a government agency" and that it is also described in it.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, is not responding to a request for disclosure from the public but rather to a question from a Diet committee, and the Ministry likely thought it could not be justified in saying that the documents were not available, so it brought out a misguided statement on the authority of the government.
When a country loses a war, the history of the defeated country is twisted.
The Nanking Incident at the Tokyo Trials is a case in point, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to this by twisting it from within Japan.
It is a crime of a magnitude not seen in any other country.
The Foreign Minister's answer was made by a young man in the China and Mongolia Division 1 of the Asia and Pacific Affairs Bureau, who does not know about the Nanking Incident or when the website began to address it.
Successive governments have repeatedly stated it, so we have no choice but to give what is not the basis for the data.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs also reads out his answer, which is full of mistakes, and when questioned again by Councilor Wada, he repeats it and again shows his shame.
When the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put this information on its website, it could not have anticipated that the minister and his staff would be exposed to such an abomination in the future.
How much danger does this attitude of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put Japan in today?
The propaganda war began with World War I. Great Britain won the propaganda war in World War I; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took the lead in conducting propaganda and eventually made these organizations independent as the Ministry of Propaganda.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, an American missionary, Minor Seal Bates, started the Nanking Incident with his false propaganda that the streets of Nanking were littered with dead civilians.
The Republic of China, led by the Kuomintang (KMT), widely propagated this false propaganda.
The KMT forces were the ones who fought against the Japanese in Nanjing.
In response to the Chinese and American propaganda, the Japanese Embassy in the U.S. went to American newspapers. It held lectures in various locations to appeal to American citizens about the Japanese viewpoint.
Furthermore, the Japanese Embassy in the U.S. set up a budget and newly created diplomats specializing in publicity and dispatched them to the U.S. and the U.K.
The Japanese Embassy even proposed the acquisition of a significant American movie company due to their efforts.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also played a central role in publicity in Japan.
In 1979, the People's Republic of China began to use the Nanking Incident.
For 30 years, the Chinese Communist Army had ignored the Nanking Incident because they had not fought the Japanese in Nanking, and it had been a successful propaganda campaign by Chiang Kai-shek.
Then, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs flattered to China and started saying that there was the Nanking Incident.
2005, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs even put it on its website.
Furthermore, under the Neighboring Countries Clause initiated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Nanking Incident can now be written about as much as one wants, and the educational scene is often reported.
Let us take the example of a junior high school.
In 2001, Oita Prefecture taught a Chinese textbook that said 300,000 people were massacred.
In 2005, in Tokyo, the question was asked, "Who and how many people did the Japanese massacre in Nanking?" The answer was, "At least 150,000 to 200,000 people, including women, children, and prisoners of war.
In 2012, Nagasaki Prefecture taught the Hundred man killing contest as a fact.
In 2014, in Miyagi Prefecture, they taught that 1,000 women were raped in Nanking and that Japanese soldiers determined whether a body was dead or pretending to be dead by kicking the side of the body and kicking the classroom trash can.
Elementary school students are similarly affected. In 1997, a sixth-grade girl taught a Hundred man killing contest said, "It's a little too much, and Japan, too! Human scum! Shame on Japan! You're a little crazy," she wrote of her impressions.
High school students take school trips to the Nanking Massacre Memorial Museum.
What will happen if they receive this kind of education?
According to the "World Values Survey," a 2021 survey of attitudes in various countries and regions with the cooperation of sociologists from nearly 100 countries, Japan had the lowest percentage of "yes" answers to the question, "If war breaks out, would you fight willingly for your country?" at 13.2%.
Next was Lithuania with 32.8%, a significantly lower percentage than Japan.
One of the main reasons for such a low response rate may be that people are taught that Japanese soldiers committed the Nanjing Incident and that they are terrible people.
It is happening in China because education about the Nanjing Incident has also started in China.
A Chinese who came to Japan and was caught for committing a crime said that it was natural because the Japanese killed the citizens of Nanking.
It is "anti-Japanese innocence."
Two Chinese carried a sign that said "Nanking Massacre" and set fire to the Yasukuni Shrine.
China is not the only foreign problem.
Azuma Shiro's testimony was used as a teaching tool for high school students in the United States.
Azuma is a former soldier who testified that his squad leader killed civilians in Nanking and that he raped 100% of the girls he found hiding.
When the American students were shown the video of these testimonies, they criticized Japan, and the Japanese-American students there were shocked.
The Japanese court rejected Azuma Shiro's testimony. Still, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the verdict had nothing to do with the Nanking Incident, so they could not fault American education.
The Propaganda War Continues
In the Republic of China, in 2015, President Ma Ying-jeou invited the parents of Iris Chang (deceased), who wrote The Rape of Nanking, to the Presidential Office and awarded Iris Chang a medal of honor.
Ma Ying-jeou is a figure in the vein of the Kuomintang, the party that widely publicized the Nanjing Incident.
On March 29 of this year, Ma traveled to China to visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and criticize Japan for "a beastly act rarely seen in the history of humankind.
He also said that "all Chinese people should learn from this incident."
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not commented on former President Ma's remarks.
The Foreign Ministry has nothing to say because it recognizes the Nanjing Incident.
Propaganda warfare is also being waged in the war in Ukraine.
Russia calls Ukraine neo-Nazi, while Ukraine says that Russia is repeating Nazi-like atrocities.
It is hard to know which side is telling the truth.
The propaganda is a conspiracy.
It is convoluted.
What we do know is that propaganda is becoming more and more active and vital.
When the Second Sino-Japanese War began, propaganda was studied in Japan.
It was said that the propaganda war started before the battle and continued even after it ended.
The Foreign Ministry's acceptance of the Nanking Incident means it is losing the propaganda war.
Around Japan, a plot is being hatched to demoralize Japan and create public opinion for the unification of Taiwan.
If the KMT comes to power again in Taiwan, and if they, along with the Chinese, bring up the Nanking Incident, will the Japanese people be able to fight alongside Taiwan in the event of an emergency in Taiwan?
The government plans to establish a "Strategic Communications Office" in April 2024.
It may be like the prewar Cabinet Intelligence Department.
The Cabinet Intelligence Office was a Japanese propaganda agency created in 1937 by the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of War, the Ministry of the Navy, and the Ministry of Communications.
It was expected to be upgraded to the Ministry of Propaganda.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also involved in the Office of Strategic Communications.
Is it safe?
What the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should do now is to change its view of the Nanking Incident.
What it should do immediately is to change its website.
Mr. Wada concluded his April 3 question: "I believe that it should change to one that is more in line with the facts."
He is right.
