2020-06-22
There are many passages in this month's Sound Argument, the monthly magazine, that I have yet to read.
This morning, when I was reading the serial (long) article by Dr. Sukehiro Hirakawa, Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, there was a part that made me think that this is today's China itself.
In the last part of his notes, which he summarized and published, there was a part that proved that I had hit the bull's eye.
Mr. Hirakawa's article is a must-read not only for the people of Japan but also for people worldwide.
Composition of democracy vs. fascism
After our defeat in the war, we Japanese were made to judge the past actions right and wrong from the standpoint of the victorious United States and other allied nations.
Post-war Japanese have been educated along these lines for the most part.
Many post-war-born Japanese were raised from childhood to believe that Japan was an evil country that waged a war of aggression.
Some of them feel a sense of justice in exposing that evil.
The U.S., Britain, Russia, and other Allied nations propagated World War II as a war between democracy and fascism.
It was a way of forcibly uniting two inherently incompatible democracies, the democracy of the liberal countries of the U.S., Britain, and France, and the people's democracy of the Soviet Union and other communist countries, into one.
But even so, it would not have been possible to draw a rival scheme of a war between the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, a coalition of democratic good against the totalitarian alliance of evil, the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
It said that good democracy triumphed over evil fascism in World War II, and after the war, many people in Japan accepted this kind of historical view.
Shigeto Tsuru emphasized Iwanami Shinsho and other publications because he agreed with the American left's views.
The decisive reason for the widespread acceptance of this view of good and evil in the external world is that it recognized the Jews' destruction in Nazi Germany as an unprecedented atrocity.
As long as it justified the Allies in their victory over such an evil incarnation of Hitler Germany, Germany's Axis ally, Japan was also unjustified.
Many Americans and the British treated both Germany and Japan equally as evil enemies.
The difference between Nazi Germany and Japan is not well understood.
It is where the idea that Emperor Showa is the Hitler of Japan comes in.
Or they think that the Japanese Empire must have had a master plan to conquer Greater East Asia.
The Americans and the British also classified the Soviet Union and China as allies of the righteous democracy, following the logic that the enemy's enemy was an ally.
This is the view that Jiang Zemin expressed at Pearl Harbor and that Xi Jinping sought to proclaim as soon as he became president of the People's Republic of China, traveling around the world.
This paper continues.
2024/7/8 in Akashi
