The following is from the afterword to the excellent book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Masahiro Miyazaki, one of the world's leading China experts.
It is a book that the Japanese people need to go to their nearest bookstore and get a copy of it.
I'll do my best to tell the world about it.
Japan's Shock to the White World
At a meeting in his hometown of Fukuoka, Taro Aso said, "No other country but Japan has kept the same people, the same language, and the same dynasty for 2,000 years.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
It's a matter of course.
In his book, Henry Stokes, a former correspondent of The Times, wrote that it was a miracle of the world.
It's a fantastic thing, but Japanese people don't think about it too much and are not moved by it.
We can understand it by looking at the 2,000 years of other countries.
Take Russia, for example.
One day in the 13th century, Mongol horsemen appeared on the horizon, Ryazan and Moscow were attacked, men were killed, women were raped, and Russians became Asian "Lenin faces" (Professor Hiroshi Furuta of Tsukuba University).
The Mongols destroyed Ukraine in the west, dropped Poland, and went as far as the outskirts of Vienna.
However, there was a deep marshy area in the northern part of Ukraine, and the country beyond that was spared from being overrun.
So the people named their country Belarus, meaning "pure white Russians" who were not raped.
The Mongols also raped Iran.
I sometimes see Asian faces on the street.
So when they hear that a baby has been born next door, the first thing they ask is, "What color is it?
They congratulate you only when they hear that you have Persian skin color and then ask if it is a boy or a girl.
There is no such disaster in the history books or folklore in Japan.
Several times, different races came to Japan, but they were all defeated.
Protected on all sides by the fortress of the sea, Japan has been calm for at least 2,000 years, despite the many natural disasters such as earthquakes, eruptions, and tsunamis.
Whenever there was a disaster, people helped each other and lived in a caring manner.
The language is so smooth that sometimes subjects and verbs are omitted.
As the linguists say, this is a sign of having lived with the same people for a long time, and we can covey the meaning without saying much.
It is why Japanese people do not speak as loudly as Chinese or Americans.
However, if you ask them to speak Japanese, their tone of voice and facial expressions become calm, as if they are different people.
Chinese people's tongues tangle when they try to say, "I beg you.
Americans would also pull a face and say "please," but they can say "please" calmly in Japanese without hesitation.
The Japanese language has such a mysterious power, but let's leave that aside.
As soon as Taro Aso said such an obvious thing, he was accused of saying things like, "What kind of a single ethnic group is the Ainu," "It is common knowledge that the aliens brought their culture to Japan," and "The hubris of thinking that they are a special ethnic group caused the last war."
But it is academically precise that the Ainu people came from the north during the Kamakura period.
They are only the predecessors of Koreans living in Japan.
In addition, the excavation of many Jomon cultural sites, starting with the Sannai-Maruyama ruins, has revealed the existence of a unique culture that is older than any other human civilization.
Furthermore, the Y-chromosome analysis of all ethnic groups has proven that the Japanese people are a single ethnic group that has existed unmistakably from the Jomon period to the present day. Even more excitingly, our genetic sequence has proven that we have nothing in common with the Chinese and Koreans.
In such an age, why is it that as soon as we hear the words "one race," we are accused like a knee-jerk reaction?
If you look into the arguments of such people, you will probably find a political stench.
At the end of the Meiji era, there was talk around the University of Tokyo's anthropology department that Japan was an immigrant nation like the United States.
After the war, it came back to life and bloomed like ragweed.
Namio Egami talked about the theory of the arrival of horse riders, Ryotaro Shiba said that Japan's homeland was Korea, and Eiji Oguma declared that it was a myth that Japan was a single race.
The word "myth" means nothing more than a baseless lie.
They claim that South Seas and continental peoples came to Japan in great numbers, raped the Jomon like the Mongols did in Russia, brought new cultures such as rice cultivation, and continued to bring in people and relics from the Korean Peninsula.
Today's school textbooks ignore the Y-chromosome and say that the Yayoi culture began with aliens after the Jomon.
If you look for why this happened, you will find the GHQ.
GHQ fiddled a lot with Japanese history education.
GHQ burned many books.
Among them is Atsuo Mishima's "A Study of the 6,000-Year History of the Descendant Race.
In his book, Atsuo Mishima argues that Japanese civilization came from the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia.
The Japanese people have a history and lineage of several thousand years.
The GHQ didn't like it, so they burned the book and ordered the schools to pronounce "Sumer" because "Sumeru" means
"Sumeramikoto(Emperor)."
They also made the Japanese teach that the Yayoi culture of the immigrants replaced the inferior Jomon culture.
In short, GHQ made sure that the Japanese people were not a unique, single race.
This process is still going on today.
Oguma, who described a single race as a myth, received many awards, such as the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award, but John Dower's "Hugging Defeat" was praised in the United States to match it.
In the United States, John Dower's "Embracing Defeat" was highly praised. It received the Pulitzer Prize and the School Book Award, but the content was terrible.
Dower repeatedly disparages the Showa Emperor as an "ordinary human being who shirked his responsibilities" and says that the Japanese are a boring people, no better than the Chinese.
Why does he want to go to such lengths to make Japan a sub-par country?
It is the main focus of my interview with Masahiro Miyazaki.
Japan made its debut in the international community in the latter half of the 19th century, and in the half-century that followed, it shocked the white world that had come to dominate the world.
Hokusai's paintings surprised them, and so did Shibasaburo Kitasato, who solved the mystery of the Black Death, which they had feared for 500 years, in a week. Still, the biggest shock of all was that the Japanese were "more potent and yet more compassionate than Jesus.
To them, the yellow Japanese were unknown to all intents and purposes.
They could not predict the behavior of the Japanese.
That is why they were afraid and plotted to eliminate the Japanese.
That was the last war.
But it did not end there.
Once a country is destroyed, it cannot be reborn.
That is the common wisdom of the world, but Japan has revived and continues to teach the world many things.
That is why they are afraid of Japan.
It is why they keep using John Dower and China and Korea to undermine Japan.
The Japanese have their own sensibility, and we are more hardworking, diligent, and research-oriented than any other people. Still, we are humble, good-natured, and think an opponent is a good person.
They have been carefully planning to exploit this and prevent the Japanese from realizing it.
When the Japanese realize this and stop caring about the noise from the obscene world around them, Japan can rise again.
Japan can cut off relations with our vulgar neighbors.
There is no need to flatter the West.
Japan has the underlying strength to do so, and its predecessors have done so.
I would be happy if this dialogue helped the Japanese to understand it.
April 2029 Masayuki Takayama
＊It is no exaggeration to say that the current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, together with his pro-China cabinet members, has yet to announce a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics.
Mr. Kishida, if you think you are not a fool, you need to reflect hard.
It would help if you immediately studied hard about China and the Chinese people.＊
