In December of last year I visited Myanmar, Brazil, and Argentina. As is my annual tradition, I also went to a New Year’s party at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Up until now I have been to 81 countries and have engaged in sincere discussions with important persons such as kings and former presidents. The people in all nations – both in the past and present – all evaluated Japan highly.

There are only three anti-Japanese nations across the world. The first is China. President Xi Jinping spreads the fiction that 300,000 people were massacred in Nanking during World War II, and continually insists that the Senkaku Islands are Chinese territory, for which there is absolutely no historical basis. Yet the Communist Party government was born because the Japanese Army fought with the National Revolutionary Army. It fully knew that the Nanking Massacre was one facet of the information strategy warfare by Chiang Kai-shek of the Kuomintang. These claims are to ensure that Japan will not be revived as a strong country and because China needs to strengthen its own political foundation. The aim behind China’s insistence on its possession of the Senkaku Islands was because undersea resources had been discovered there. It wanted to usurp these resources, gain an entryway to the Pacific Ocean, and divide it up to rule with the United States.

Just like China, South Korea is also an anti-Japanese country. Past South Korean presidents have been criticized and arrested for corruption after their resignation, and have even committed suicide. Former President Lee Myung-bak’s older brother was arrested for accepting bribes. Lee Myung-bak realized that if he stepped down he would certainly be arrested too, so he landed on Takeshima, which is Japanese territory – the first such lawless occupation by a president – right before resigning, and made a statement that showed contempt for the Emperor of Japan. (He said, “If the emperor is going to say incomprehensible things such as mentioning his ‘deep regret,’ there is no need for him to come here. If he wants to visit South Korea, he should kneel to apologize to the members of the independence movement.”) In this way, he pretended to be a patriot and evaded arrest. Based on this lesson, President Park Geun-hye continually insists that 200,000 Korean women were forcibly transported and made to serve as sex slaves by the Japanese army – an absurd claim she does not believe herself. Park Geun-hye’s father is former President Park Chung-hee, who studied abroad at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. He was a soldier in the Manchukuo Imperial Army and a pro-Japanese man who fought for Japan against the Soviet Union. Accordingly, Park Geun-hye purposefully pretends to be an anti-Japanese patriot so she is not seen as an extreme friend of Japan.

The third anti-Japanese country is, unfortunately, Japan. In fact, it has the strongest anti-Japanese sentiments of these three countries. The reason there are so many anti-Japanese powers in Japan is the Press Code imposed on the Japanese media during the American occupation. The media continues abiding by it in the form of voluntary restraints even today. In addition, the people who benefited from Japan’s defeat in World War II formed a “stealth complex” – an elite network of graduates from the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Law – and inherited the role of vanguard for the U.S.’s indirect rule. If media outlets printed the truth, everyone would become conservative. However, the media is bound by the Press Code and so one cannot say that people understand the true circumstances. Moreover, historical studies in Japan are also quite bizarre. New truths are being discovered one after another, such as the Verona Files that deciphered the codes of Comintern agents (spies) in the U.S. Despite this, no one attempts to change the established theories.

Just like Xi Jinping, Park Geun-hye, and others, world leaders tell lies, kill people, and even commit massacres for the sake of ideologies, their country, and national interests, separate from the truth or their own beliefs. This is the common understanding of the international society.

One example is the atomic bombs. The U.S. was afraid that Germany was developing atomic bombs, so it used secret Congressional funding and German scientists who had fled from their country to start developing its own atomic bombs. Believing that the enemy of an enemy is a friend, the U.S. gave the Soviet Union massive military assistance in order to beat Germany, fulfilling requests from the American defense industry and other parties. In this way it created a monster – a major military power. From the time when it seemed possible that the Soviet Union would beat Germany, conflict deepened with the Soviet Union about who would rule Europe during the postwar era. The U.S. thought that a victorious Soviet Union would start World War III in order to communize the world, and feared that more than 10 million war causalities would occur. It made the continuation of the Japanese Emperor System ambiguous and continually disregarded all maneuvers to end the war until it could use the atomic bombs. It then dropped two types on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: uranium and plutonium. By actually using these bombs, the U.S. displayed its immense destructive power and turned World War III into the Cold War.

It is wrong to think that one will be rewarded for making true assertions; the world is fundamentally corrupt. Japanese people are too naïve and need to gain a self-awareness that opposes this.
 

In the Japanese media, television and radio stations are affiliated with major newspaper companies. They only spread information that has been approved and passed through the filters of the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish news agencies, which control the worldwide media. The Press Code binds the newspaper companies, so information is regulated on the whole. For that reason the reporting is biased towards the West, and there are almost no cases in which the views of parties such as the Islamic countries are printed.

However, the spread of IT technologies is breaking down this traditional polarization of information. People who use the Internet are able to gather information from across the world that is not biased according to the Anglo-Saxons and Jewish people, such as the assertions of the Muslim world. It is important for individuals to use their own minds to understand various information, such as that from the mass media and biased textbooks. As a result, the foundation of democracy is for people who have the same views to gather together and create political parties. Afterwards, political parties that have a majority in the parliament will acquire political power. However, today we have a warped democracy in which the mass media guides the public opinion. To evade the mental occupation of the U.S. and become a true democracy, today individual citizens must utilize IT to seek out the truth.

In the first “True Interpretations of Modern History” essay contest, the winner of the Grand Prize was Toshio Tamogami. He concluded his essay as follows:

Tamogami is exactly right.
 

I was asked to write an article for the March issue of Yasukuni, the newsletter published by Yasukuni Shrine. I wrote the following essay. This is the pre-publication version and it may be changed slightly in the actual newsletter, but I am sharing it here first.
 

Learning about true modern history to regain pride in our fatherland

I visit Yasukuni Shrine each year on the anniversary of the end of World War II. Last year on that day there were more visitors than I have ever seen before, of which young people and women were particularly conspicuous. Naoki Hyakuta’s The Eternal Zero has become a huge hit and was even made into a movie. In this way, people who were ignorant of or uninterested in the war and kamikaze pilots have learned about the significance of World War II, and also that the members of the kamikaze units had strong feelings regarding their fatherland and families. It is thought that this is why they have started visiting Yasukuni Shrine to pay their respects to the spirits of the war dead. I am extremely happy that more young people have become disillusioned with the masochistic historical viewpoint of the postwar period, and have come to focus their attention on historical truths.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. During the postwar period, historical truths have been consistently warped by the skillful occupation policies of the U.S. and the anti-Japanese Japanese people who inherited these policies and have benefitted from Japan’s defeat in the war. Education and anti-Japanese news reporting – based on a masochistic view of history – have given the postwar Japanese people a self-torturing historical viewpoint.

I began the “True Interpretations of Modern History” essay contest in 2008 to break the curse of this masochistic view of history and to revive Japan as a country that is worthy of pride. The Grand Prize winner of the first contest was Toshio Tamogami, who was the chief of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force at that time. He became a hot topic of conversation and his essay – which claimed that Japan was a good country – was bashed by the media as being in opposition to the government’s views. Tamogami was dismissed and then automatically made to resign by the Taro Aso administration, which was in a terminal condition.

Compared to that time, I feel like over the past six years a major change has occurred in the public opinion in terms of historical awareness and pride in our fatherland. Many citizens are angered by the Takeshima and Senkaku Islands issues. Shinzo Abe became prime minister for a second time, The Eternal Zero is enjoying huge popularity, and it seems like Japan is becoming progressively more conservative thanks to Tamogami.

Reflecting on Japan’s history since Commodore Matthew Perry came to Japan in June 1853, at that time many regions of the world had already been colonized by the powers of Western Europe. These waves were moving from Europe to the Far East, the most distant location. Japan, feeling a sense of impending crisis, fought a series of battles to ensure its continued existence as an independent nation. At that time, the Japanese intelligentsia had learned from the Dutch at Dejima in Nagasaki about the colonization of colored nations in Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and other regions, as well as the tragic results of the Opium War in China. They felt a sense of danger that said if Japan – the last independent colored nation – were colonized, colonial rule in the colored world could last for hundreds of years.

After the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War regarding the Korean Peninsula, Japan joined the major powers of the world. Its defeat of Russia, a white nation, inspired great hope in the colored countries that had been subjected to colonial rule. Moreover, in 1919 Japan proposed adding the abolition of racial discrimination to the Covenant of the League of Nations. A vote took place on April 11 of the same year and the proposal was approved by the majority, but American President Woodrow Wilson (the chairman) insisted that it must be a unanimous vote, and the proposal was not adopted. In this way, Japan asserted racial equality to the world at an early stage even amidst white rule. Yet this history, which is something we can be proud of, is rarely taught in postwar education.

Furthermore, during World War II Japan did not want to fight and made continued efforts until the last moment to negotiate with the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for a third term because of his public promise to not be involved in the war. In order to enter the European front from the back door, he had Japan’s naval and diplomatic codes deciphered and knew all of Japan’s plans. He plotted to allow Japan to make the first attack. As Osami Nagano (chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff) stated at the Imperial Conference, “If we do not fight, the country will be ruined. If we do fight, we may be unable to avoid the country becoming ruined. Yet if we do not fight and the country is ruined, our ethnic group will be ruined body and soul. If we fight to protect the nation – even if we are not victorious – the spirit of protecting our fatherland will remain, and our descendants will certainly recover.” As this indicates, Japan fought in order to maintain pride in its fatherland and to liberate the Asian countries that were under colonial rule. Japan lost the war, but one can say it fulfilled its objectives because – by fighting against the white suzerain states – colonial rule by the white people was brought to its demise, and many independent colored nations were created.

On the other hand, in the last stage of the war the threat that the Soviet Union would communize the world was growing. The U.S. used secret Congressional funding to quietly develop the atomic bombs and use them on Japan, by which it wanted to gain hegemony in the postwar world. Japan used various channels to convey its desire to end the war, including the Soviet Union, Chiang Kai-shek of the Kuomintang government, and the Vatican. Its only condition was the continuance of the Emperor System. The U.S. bought time by giving a vague response to this condition, and once the atomic bombs were successfully tested it sent the Potsdam Declaration. It had used no bombs for air strikes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where it dropped two different types of atomic bombs (uranium and plutonium) to confirm their effects. In order to show that these atomic bombs were not the only inhumane weapons, it massacred 100,000 civilians in one night during the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945.

Because the U.S. had slaughtered nonresistant civilians, it had to show itself as a just country by portraying Japan as a bad one. To that end, the U.S. brought up the fabrication that 300,000 people had been killed in Nanking (as insisted by the Chinese army) at the Tokyo Trials. It also executed General Iwane Matsui as a Class B war criminal, and supports South Korea, which makes claims including that the Japanese Army forcibly transported 200,000 Korean women and subjected them to sexual slavery.

Moreover, the U.S. brainwashed Japanese people via censorship. On September 18, 1945 – one month after the end of the war – The Asahi Shimbun newspaper printed a statement by Ichiro Hatoyama, who said the usage of the atomic bombs was a violation of international law. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ) punished The Asahi Shimbun by imposing a two-day publishing ban, and it released the 30-item Press Code on the following day. It employed 4,000 Japanese censors at high wages, who fully regulated ideologies by checking newspapers, radios, printed materials, and 200 million personal letters according to the Press Code. Unlike the censorship that took place in Japan during the war, merely blacking out censored passages was not allowed, and reprinting cost money. This enhanced the trend of voluntary restraints at publishing companies and newspapers. This regulation of freedom and speech was kept secret. The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War, causing confidential information to flow out. The U.S. has also released information. In these ways, the truth is gradually becoming clear. Despite this, the Japanese media has yet to print the register of censor names and continues abiding by the Press Code via its voluntary restraints; it only reports in a way that is in line with the Tokyo Trials viewpoint.

In December I visited São Paulo, Brazil to give a speech at the invitation of Keizo Tokuriki, chairman of the Brazil Japan Conference. As I spoke with the Brazilian people of Japanese descent, I strongly felt that they still possess the old-fashioned spirit of Japan. In Brazil there is no anti-Japanese education or news reporting like in Japan, so they have not lost their Japanese spirit even 70 years after the war.

Japan used to be an extended-family nation led by the Emperor of Japan. Before World War II Japan had an inheritance system in which the oldest son, in exchange for inheriting everything, was expected to care for his parents and family members. Today it has become an issue that elderly people are dying alone due to the creation of nuclear families and population aging; in contemporary society, I feel that nothing is more sorrowful than dying alone. Families have been divided by the postwar equal inheritance system and individualistic education. Children tend to abandon their personal duties and leave the care of their parents up to the social security system. It is not right to leave these personal duties up to the public sector, and the social security system has grown massive and financial problems are occurring. Japan’s wonderful culture was lost after World War II because the U.S. was terrified of the Japanese spirit it saw during the war. During the occupation, it destroyed this spirit so that Japan could never rise again.

Since the second Abe administration was inaugurated in December 2012, it has shown a certain amount of consideration for our neighboring countries while making dignified assertions regarding Japan’s position to the international community. The government has made major progress by coming to refute fabricated history such as the so-called Nanking Massacre and comfort women issue. The Abe LDP administration won a great victory after dissolving the House of Representatives in November, by which Abe has solidified his internal party foundation and made preparations to be a long-term government. At his press conference at the beginning of the year held on January 5, Abe referred to making a statement to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. The U.S. immediately told him to carry on the Murayama Statement. Abe should advocate for the truth – without being bound by the Murayama and Kono Statements – to create a foothold for freeing Japan of the postwar regime while Barack Obama (who became a lame duck when the Republican Party gained a majority in both houses) is president. He should make proper assertions while the weak Obama is in office, and connect these to negotiations with the next president. It is thought that the next president will be a strong one from the Republican Party, so the president will likely understand that Japan must maintain a balance of power with military force for peace and prosperity in East Asia, where the expanding China is located.

Japan’s economic prosperity in the postwar era was thanks to the sacrifices of many heroes who gave their lives for their fatherland. Showing contempt for Japan’s history based on a self-tormenting historical view is the same as showing contempt for our ancestors. On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, people should feel reverence for the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine, once again turn their focus to historical truths, and have pride in their fatherland. To that end I plan to devote efforts to expressing my views, even more so than business.

January 19, 2015 (Monday) 11:00 p.m.