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The Revisionist Fallacy in The
Japanese Media
Case Studies of Denial of Nazi Gas Chambers
and NHK's Report on Japanese & Jews Relations
by Takesato Watanabe
Professor of Journalism Department, Doshisha
University,
Kyoto 602-8580, Japan
For its February 1995 issue, Marco Polo,
a monthly published by Bungei Shunju Press Co., featured the article, gThe
Post-War World's Greatest Taboo: The Nazi Gas Chambers Never Existed,"
written by Masanori Nishioka, an internist2). It did not show any
clear evidence to deny an academically proved and universally accepted
fact, and it easily turned out to be a propaganda piece, but the author's
crass challenge to the accepted facts of history promptly provoked criticism
from all circles of society not only in Japan but also of the world.
The publisher initially fought back
by having the then-editor in chif, Kazuyoshi Hanada, argue that Marco Polo
was exercising its right to freedom of speech. Mr. Hanada-who would
go on to assume the editorship of UNO!, a women's magazine published by
The Asahi Shimbun group-added that opposing views would be allotted equal
space in the monthly, though he did not specify when.
Yet Bungei Shunju was quick to backpedal from its position when human rights groups of worldwide renown such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center joined the chorus of censure. It called a press conference and apologised and then Marco Polo was subsequently discontinued without settling the questions posed by its own publisher, whose answers serve as a crucial premise in any rational understanding of the modern world. These are:
One, the validity of assertions denying that the Nazi gas chambers ever existed; and two, the applicability as well as significance of freedom of speech in interpreting history. This raised the question about whether or not the opinion which is not based on the correct information or fully proven and well accepted facts is permitted in the name of gfreedom of speech" for the mass media.
Throughout its existence, Bungei Shunju has felt the need to publish anything as long as it either boosts circulation or helps to manipulate public opinion favorable to the political and economic authorities and powers by belittling common citizens3). In the Marco Polo debacle, the publisher outwardly claimed to be the victim, blaming the monthly's demise on the pressure exerted by advertisers that were controlled by Jewish capital.
As a pretext, it sounds fairly legitimate, and disapproval by advertising sponsors was no doubt a factor. Yet, analysis of Bungei Shunju periodicals underscores a point we should always bear in mind: The publisher-as with Shinchosha, another publishing company in Japan-has maintained strong ties to the state security apparatus, and those two media firms have often engaged in the dissemination of government-inspired disinformation to their readership (Yoshihara, 1977, Saito, 1982 & Kamei, 1983).
Indeed, Bungei Shunju was crafty enough to offer another explanation for closing down Marco Polo to satisfy those with revisionist or conspiracy history preferences, knowing that they would not be convinced with the financial justification alone. In a speech given at a media conference held on June 10, 1996, for example, Bungei Shunju senior managing editor Mitsuyoshi Okazaki insisted that the Marco Polo article was factual, and described Jewish organizations of all kinds as gterrorist groups."
Mr. Okazaki further observed: gMarco Polo
was not discontinued because the feature it carried was untrue or due to
the subsequent loss in advertising revenue. The decision was a result
of information obtained from a certain source that Japanese business expatriates
may be targeted for terrorist attacks outside Japan." (I-Media, Vol. 152)
One can only wonder who this gcertain
source" was. What his statements do reveal, however, is the unequivocal
fact that Bungei Shunju as a company is capable of duplicitous behavior
and constant self-justification.
This paper will examine the emergent trends of historical revisionism-also known as ghistorical liberalism" in Japan-found in Germany as well as among certain elements in my country, Japan that advocate a sweeping denial of the Holocaust and genocidal gassing. It will also review the fraudulent nature of and disturbing historical backdrop to such theories in the context of improving both the media's mission to have a social function and the media literacy of the general public.
Freedom of Speech in the Media and Socially Accepted Facts
The First Amendment, enacted in 1791, of the American Constitution was the first written document describing the concept of freedom of speech4). One of its drafters, Thomas Jefferson, noted, gGiven the choice between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I would choose the latter without hesitation." He was convinced that the press should be unhindered in its criticism of the government, the supreme seat of power in society, in order to protect the foundations of democracy.
A vast number of news gathering organizations in Japan today are acting to the contrary, and are quite willing to exploit the principle as a means to deflect any criticism directed at them. At the same time, freedom of speech in the truest sense represents the doctrinary and ethical mandate to prevent both violations of human rights and the dissemination of inaccurate information.
It was an act of frenzied commercialism, not freedom of speech, when the press, acting only on leaks provided by law enforcement officials, wrongly accused Yoshiyuki Kono of perpetrating the sarin nerve gas attack which took place in Matsumoto City, Nagano, Japan in June 1994. An abundance of similar instances can be found in articles published in periodicals like Shinchosha weeklies Shukan Shincho and Focus that have exposed Mr. Kono's family lineage as the source of gthe crime", the private life of a murdered woman worker of a public utility, and photographs of a juvenile then suspected of the homicide of another minor. By feeding the base curiosities of their audience, the Japanese media unquestionably aids and abets the state in its intrinsic proclivity toward obscurantism.
Press criticism of those in power, given the media's fundamental function to provide the basic tools to assist the public in making sound judgements as members of society, must be composed of impeccable truths and facts. It is vital that the media-generated information encourage people to participate in building a better society. These are the conditions for what should constitute media accountability as it serves the public's right to know.
The Holocaust, including the massacre of non-Aryans
other than Jews, from political dissenters and the mentally ill to homosexuals,
Jehovah's witnesses and others,is a proven enough historical event.
And because how we look at such events critically influences our understanding
of human history, the deliberate distortion and falsification of facts
which pertain to these events cannot be tolerated.
Facts can generally be classified under
the following categories:
First, facts of indisputable nature,
the acceptance of which is fundamental in forming rational perspectives
on science and society. These include mathematical principles like
one and one makes two, and information such as Tokyo being Japan's current
capital, or that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The second category of facts are those
open to a variety of interpretation and argument, among them being the
relationship between Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution and the Self-Defense
Forces, or the efficacy of single-seat constituencies in a democracy, for
example.
The Nazi massacre of Jews through gassing is an unequivocal fact proven by reliable documentation, testimonials and a vast volume of detailed academic research such as The Annihilation of European Jews, by Raul Hilberg (original, 1961 and Japanese edition, 1998). Therefore one comes to the conclusion that any attempt to distort or deny the fact has nothing to do with the exercise of the freedom of speech.
The first edition of Hilberg's book was published in 1961. The Japanese translation is the latest, specially-revised edition for it. In their commentary, the translators write: gThis work is widely recognized as one of the foremost studies on the Holocaust. It has not, however, merited much political plaudit in Israel as it touches upon the loss of moral behavior on the part of the Jewish Council leadership-namely, the `cooperation' certain Jews extended to the Nazis out of want to survive. Readers will find in this book a determined will to reveal historical truths." In particular, Chapter Nine gExtermination Camps" and Appendix B gJewish Death Statistics" serve as incontrovertible evidence that the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust actually occurred.
Why then could the refutation of such historical truths possibly emerge so frequently and rampantly? Let us first analysis the structure of the Holocaust and then review the background and mechanism of these revisionistic trends in the following paragraphs.
Motives for the Jewish Massacre
Two causes were instrumental in the attempt
at genocide: One was Hitler's perverse preoccupation with the idea of Aryan
supremacy and institution of policies legalizing discrimination against
Jews. The second was triggered by the growing Nazi fear of Jewish
reprisals as the fortunes of war began to shift toward the Allies.
In Mein Kampf (Volume 1, 1925), Hitler,
in comparing Jews to Aryans, dehumanized the former by noting that they
gare nothing more than parasites that invariably leech off another race.
. . They were sometimes expelled by the races they abused. Yet their
proliferation is a phenomenon typically found in all parasites. They
are constantly seeking a new body to leech off for the sake of the survival
of their own race." (Japan's Kadokawa Bunko edition, Vol. 1, p.434)
The systematic slaughter of Jewish population in Europe is a historical reality that took place between 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Weimar Republic, and his suicide in 1945. It was this fact that led German President Weizsacker, in his 1985 address to parliament commemorating the 40th anniversary of Germany's defeat, to reflect upon the horrific errors of the past committed by his country. After expressing profound contrition for the gsix million Jews who perished in concentration camps" and gcountless" of other minorities and dissenters who were killed by the Nazis, the president went on to urge the establishment of lasting global peace.
Moreover, it is precisely because the Holocaust
had begun to occur that Chiune Sugihara, at the time deputy consul of the
Japanese consulate in Lithuania, had issued visas to some 6,000 Jews in
August and September 1940(Hilberg, 1961).
Those who applied feared for their lives following
the Nazi invasion of Poland, which Germany and the Soviet Union had secretly
agreed to partition. Soviet authorities demanded Sugihara leave Lithuania,
annexed earlier by the Soviet Union, while Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke
Matsuoka repeatedly refused to respond to Sugihara's correspondence (as
documented by the telegraphs he received from the Ministry on August 14
and 16 in 19405)).
In spite of this most trying of circumstances, Sugihara felt compelled to act against the Foreign Ministry's wishes and continued to approve transit visas to Jews out of humanitarian reasons. Had those Jews not been truly alarmed, they most certainly would not have fled the advancing Nazis halfway around the world, from Europe on through Siberia and the Pacific. Indeed, many of those who were unable to obtain visas were subsequently murdered-further proof that the Holocaust's net of butchery was cast far and wide.
@@@@Japan concluded the anti-communism
agreement with Nazi Germany in 1936 and that was one of the causes for
the Japanese government not to officially permit Sugihara's repeated requests.
@
@@@In spite of these facts many articles
and reports which are not based upon academically approved documents and
logic often appear in the Japanese media, and whenever the media are criticized
on these cases they say that they have the right to gfreedom of speech
and expression."6j
Historical Revisionism of NHK TV Education's gViews and Opinions"
For its gViews and Opinions" (Shiten-Rontenw_E__x) program of April 29, 1998, NHK Educational Channel 3 (Japanese Public Television, Educational) featured a commentary by Professor Shoichi Watanabe of Sophia University. Entitled gA New Perspective on the Relationship Between the Japanese and Jews,"7) the broadcast, as the following summary of its contents makes clear, paints a highly revisionist assessment of historical truth. It should also be pointed out that NHK's timing was equally suspect: The show was aired on the day Emperor Showa whose image is often seen in books, articles, TV programs, etc. was born. I will refer to this matter later.
Among the more erroneous propositions cited by the commentator were:
One. Japan was never party to practices of racial discrimination since World War I.
Two. In contrast to the governments of Britain and the United States in World War II, Japan did not adopt discriminatory measures toward the Jewish people.
Three. The issuing of transit visas for
several thousands of Jewish refugees issued by Chiune Sugihara8), then
Deputy Consul of the Japanese Consulate in Lithuania, was done under the
instructions of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
Four. Prominent Jewish businesses-owners
and their group (zaibatsu), and Jewish academicians have yet to emigrate
to Japan because of its heavy tax burden, so revisions to the Japanese
tax system should therefore be made to encourage such emigration.
Japan's wartime government was manifestedly unsympathetic to the plight of non-Japanese. But in this commentary broadcast by NHK, Professor Shoichi Watanabe made a number of statements to the contrary. These assertions are clearly erroneous and among the most blatant was: Mr. Sugihara issued transit visas to numerous Jews at the direction of the Foreign Ministry.
As for the first premise, one need only to review the treatment of the local populace in the colonized Korean peninsula and China by the Japanese Imperial Army to reject it.
The second one is false because Jewish people from around the world settled in the U. S. in great numbers, while Japan merely issued transit visas. In reality, the Japanese government, under pressure from Nazi Germany as well as its own military, had come to view the Jews as a diplomatic nuisance.
The third assertion is also groundless: Mr.
Sugihara issued the visas in Lithuania out of personal conviction and a
sense of responsibility, in spite of Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka's
repeated rejections by telegraph. Ample documentation from that period
has survived to prove the government's unwillingness to issue visas to
Jewish refugees who fled from Poland. And also there is another fact
to prove this, that the then Prime Minister of Japan Kiichi Miyazawa officially
apologized in the Japanese Diet in 1992, for railroading Mr. Sugihara into
resigning after the war because he disobeyed ministerial instruction not
to issue the visa at Lithuania. And in addition Parliamentary Vice
Foreign Minister Muneo Suzki, after Miyazawa's speech, went to see Mrs.
Sugihara and apologized for the misdeed of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
The fourth premise is simply ludicrous.
Professor Shoichi Watanabe not only characterizes successful Jews in a
stereotypical fashion so that their main concern is money and the notion
that things should be changed merely for appearances' sake is inimical
to the interests of both Jews and Japanese. Such a way of thinking
also makes mockery of now universally accepted principles such as genuine
global harmony, peace and human equality.
As the transcript reveals (see Note: 7), Professor Shoichi Watanabe's point of view is nothing less than an attempt to rewrite history. So I have urged NHK, which is ultimately accountable for the contents aired on its broadcast, to provide a viable counterpoint at the very least (May 16, 1998). Yet they seek to shirk the issue entirely by responding that gNHK cannot be responsible for the televised comments because it was not involved its research nor production." (June 5, 1998)
Such facts reveal that this historical revisionism by NHK (Japanese governmental TV) is closely related to other types of historical revisionism like the denial of Nazi Gas Chambers, the Nankin Massacre by the Japanese military, appraisal of Hideki Tojo as a humanist and as a hero who protected Japanese emperor system etc., often appearing in the Japanese mass media, behind which I find some joint movements to manipulate Japanese public opinion.
When I took issue with Professor Watanabe's statements by requesting NHK to air a rebuttal, Satoshi Horiguchi of the network's Commentary Committee replied in writing after consulting with his superior, who consulted with NHK President Katsuji Ebisawa himself. He essentially rejected my request, noting that NHK could neither refute a commentator's viewpoint nor be held responsible for the contents of the program it broadcasts. This response is the one which almost all academics of media and communication studies surely find difficult to comprehend9). This answer is completely wrong especially in the understanding and daily practices of geditorial right".
I say so because the Japanese Broadcast Law defines the responsibilities of broadcasters for the programs they air (Article 1, Purposes) and in addition Article 4.2, revised in 1997, holds a network responsible for broadcasts that violate the human rights of individuals or airs fraudulent information: gWhen a broadcaster finds untruthful items in its broadcasts, it shall air a correction or retraction within two days of their discovery with the facilities equivalent to the one used in the original broadcast in an appropriate manner."
Nevertheless, a recent Japanese film, gPride-The Fateful Moment," (produced Toei Movie Co. in 1998) thoroughly denied the fact that the Rape of Nanking took place. Revisionist theories like those embraced by Professor Watanabe were woven into the script, primarily because the film's production committee chairman, Hideaki Kase, has long asserted, as has the Sophia professor, that the war in the Pacific had contributed to the emancipation of Asian countries from the yoke of western imperialism such as that of the UK and France. Subscribers to such views contemptuously denigrate pacifist theories anchored to the facts of history as a form of ghistorical masochism."
Therefore particular concern should be paid to the extensive network and deeply-rooted motives that drive historical revisionists (historical liberalists) and their supporters in Japan. These people are powerful enough not only to produce a full-length feature film, but exploit a public television broadcast, to further their ends, which is proved by the analysis of this NHK's case.
To return to the Holocaust, then: Hitler's program of mass murder was one of the most destructive and insensate acts in human history. The systematic killing through gassing was the culmination of policies implemented by the Third Reich that began with the enactment of the anti-semitic Nuremberg Law in 1935. Gas chambers were built not only in Nazi-occupied territory, but in Germany as well: Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, Ravensbruck, Stutthof and Mauthausen are all infamous as killing fields on German soil (Hilberg, Special Edition for Japan, 1998).
A veritable library of documentation have been amassed which conclusively proves that the gas chambers at such concentration camps as Auschwitz-Birkenau were designed, constructed and utilized for the sole purpose of perpetrating genocide(Bastian, 1994). Testimonies of those who collaborated in the gassing of prisoners are available in an abundance of published literature, including Shoah. Other documents from gas chamber blueprints and their construction budgets to construction journals kept by contractors, have also been discovered by Holocaust scholars such as Till Bastian. Needless to say, Raul Hilberg, Till Bastian and other researchers have thoroughly rebutted the specious arguments of historical revisionists.
The Nazi Gassing Massacre
The Nazis employed two methods of gassing. One was to load Jews on to a truck with a hermetically-sealed cargo compartment and asphyxiate them with exhaust fumes. It was originally used in German-occupied territories of the former Soviet Union. The other method involves the cyanide gas, Zyklon-B, and the gas chamber (Hilberg, 1961 & Ruby, 1995).
In the initial phases of the Holocaust, Jews were primarily shot to death. But Nazi officers found it inefficient; in fact, the volume of shed blood drove some executioners neurotic and so the use of exhaust fumes followed. The latter avoided bleeding and the need for bullets. It allowed a greater number of people to be killed, and the corpses could be conveniently trucked away for disposal immediately following execution. It was the method of choice at Auschwitz until September 3, 1941, when Zyklon-B, developed by a typhus & pest-control company, was first used in Block No. 11 (Bogusz, 1962).
The systematic mass murder by gassing and the disposal of corpses through cremation were carried out in the following manner:
gVast numbers of innocent people were packed so tightly that they were falling atop one another. . . Ten minutes after the doors had been shut, the temperature inside rose to an appropriate level for cyanide gas to vaporize. . . Zyklon-B, or cyanide gas soaked in diatomite at a 20 percent concentrate, was used for this act of German barbarism." (Ruby, 1995)
The writings left by Rudolf Hoss, who directed the killings at Auschwitz, provide detailed figures of the deaths by Zyklon-B (Hoss, 1963). For an idea of the quantity of nerve gas produced, the Polish Medical Association reported that 19,000 kilograms of Zyklon-B was supplied to Auschwitz, according to the records of the manufacturer, the Tesch and Stubenow Company of Dessau. Jozef Bogusz writes that, gnon-Aryans were exterminated as vermin."
The use and distribution of Zyklon-B was supervised
in this way:
gSS doctors. . . observed the gassing through
a peephole in the chamber door, one which the gas could not leak through.
The door was opened only after the doctors signaled that all the victims
were dead. Every SS doctor attached to the concentration camps took
part in this operation. SS doctors delivered Zyklon-B on ambulances
painted with red crosses with the help of medical orderlies of the SDG
(the Nazi intelligence agency). . . SS commander Dr. Ernst Robert van Kravitz
supervised the allocation of the gas to each concentration camp." (Bogusz,
1962)
The Fallacy of Historical Revisionists
The position of historical revisionists especially concerning the Holocaust may be summarized as:
One, there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz;
Two, the Holocaust never occurred; and
Three, the argument that six million Jews were killed is a product of a superbly crafted and orchestrated disinformation campaign by Israel and its Zionism.
These three points have been fully refuted. I believe the first and second are blatant contradictions to established fact. My position on the third is this: While the Holocaust and attempted genocide of the Jews by Hitler regime definitely took place, and although the ultimate toll of victims may well have reached six million, it could be argued that it may be a little smaller than that and that not all deaths were attributable to gassing.
My view is predicated on a number of reasons:
First, the Third Reich paid fastidious attention
to conference minutes and terminology so as to leave no direct documentation
of the Holocaust.
Second, not much physical substantiation remained
because the Nazis burned what documents existed that linked them to their
crimes, and destroyed the gas chambers as well as incinerators, just as
the Imperial Headquarters of Japan and Unit 731, which conducted chemical
and bacteriological experiments on Allied prisoners of war in China, did
immediately prior to Japan's defeat.
Third, since other countries do not maintain as meticulous registration records of the population as Japan, it is all the more so for foreigners in a foreign country, as many Jews found themselves to be at the time when they were unable to give precise figures of the Jewish populace who were murdered by the Nazis. A similar instance can be found in the massacre of several thousand Korean residents in Japan by the local population after the 1923 earthquake in the Tokyo area.
Fourth, the number of deaths at Auschwitz was
placed at 1.5 million people in 1994, a reduction reflecting a natural
tendency of victims to overstate their predicament, something which might
occur for other camps in the future.
Fifth, the victimized party invariably seeks
to extract the maximum political advantage from their grievance.
The existence of Jewish collaborators as revealed by Hilberg was intentionally
suppressed, thereby helping to undermine the Jewish cause in the eyes of
suspicious revisionists.
Lastly, when the Soviet Union recaptured German-occupied territory, it confiscated numerous documents related to the Holocaust. When Poland became a Soviet satellite, Soviet propagandists took great liberty with the severity of Nazi atrocities committed in that country to further their own political designs.
According to a 1995 study by Luby, based on documents returned to Poland and Germany after the Soviet Union's collapse, 5.46 million people were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, and a total of 4.34 million perished in them, a mortality rate of 79.45 percent. It stands that the number of those who were gassed to death in the camps would be less than these figures, and a fairly large part of the deaths was caused by the diseases from terrible living conditions in the camps. A more convincing estimate may be to put the death toll by gassing at more than one million, though there is obviously no moral difference between one million and four million in that they both constitute genocide. Moreover, a lower figure would in no way inhibit the veracity and tragedy of the Holocaust.
I argue about the number of gassing deaths because the Israeli government along with the United Kingdom and United States, who have supported the young nation on the issue of Palestine, has obviously exaggerated Nazi atrocities as a political tool to gain international recognition for the state of Israel. The former Soviet Union also benefited in that its struggle against fascism helped it to secure a leadership role in the postwar socialist bloc. That the Kremlin did so by making wildly exaggerated claims about Nazi barbarism still serves as cause for criticism from historical revisionists and ghate-criminals".10)
Not that propaganda activities and orchestration
of historical facts are rare. They have been employed in issues as
diverse and divisive as Palestine and Cambodia in the past as well as present.
I once estimated the number of Cambodians willfully killed by the Khmer
Rouge regime to be several hundred thousand, excluding those who died of
starvation and illness11). Yet newspaper correspondents like Kazuhisa
Ikawa (then a member of the Asahi Shimbun editorial board), who sided with
Socialist Vietnam in the clash between the nations, filed sensationalistic
dispatches of Khmer Rouge atrocities. One of his reports tells that
the gplains of Cambodia are filled with the remains of massacre victims",
in spite of the fact that even an amount of corpses equal to the entire
population of the world could not fill it.
Propaganda, obviously, is not a tool
wielded just by Israel and its supporters, but any one with power tries
to do it so as to gain more support from others and to keep its power in
any form. And of course there are several more reasons that such a historical
revisionism repeatedly appears in the mass media.
In present day Japan the term gsocial information" is gaining circulation in the revisionist lexicon. It purportedly defines a set of informational values which stand apart from the empirical facts as established by natural science, and interpreted to transcend ideology in the post-modern sense. It also lends theoretical credence to the revisionist argument that denies the Nazi gas chambers, the Rape of Nanking and the fallacy that there were no mistakes in the policies during the period of Showa Emperor Hirohito.
The problem is that many of those who adhere to the tenets of social information are eventually co-opted by the holders of political and economic power. Their interpretation of the concept helps rationalize their flawed justifications, and ultimately prods them to seek the revision of history. Such belief, however, has already been confuted. I thus define social information as public information required to build a society founded on civil sovereignty.
Everyone who denies the existence of Nazi gassing seems to rely upon the Roichter Report, no matter how solidly substantiated the counter-argument may be. Their denial may be theoretically possible because a portion of a chamber wall did not contain traces of Zyklon-B after being tested 44 years later. But it is extremely illogical. If that kind of logic is permitted, one may as well insist that witnesses were hallucinating or that existing documents were thoroughly misinterpreted.
It would be like telling those who experienced the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they could not have seen what actually happened because they had to have shut their eyes at the critical instant. The moment of detonation is not the issue. The United States did develop a nuclear weapon and loaded it on a B-29 dubbed the gEnola Gay"; it then took off from Tenyan Base, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki three days later and more than 200,000 people were killed as a consequence. One does not require witnesses at the very moment of detonation to affirm that American atomic bombs were used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japanese gHistorical Liberalism" and Its Supporting Network
Now in Japan the gSociety for Historical Liberalism" (Jiyushugi-shikan Kenkyu Kai) led by Tokyo University Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka, and the gSociety to Make New History Textbooks" (Atarasii Rekishi Kyokasho wo Tsukuru Kai) led by Tokyo Denki Tsushin University Professor Kanji Nishio, are two major organs of historical liberalism and one of the leading figures of the latter, a comics' writer who is influential among the young, named Yoshinori Kobayashi admits here the existence of the Holocaust by the Nazi but he tries to justify the last war of aggression at any cost:
gNazi-Germany waged war against European
countries and in addition it was carrying out the Holocaust against Jews.
The genocide should be criticized as a crime against humanity...
Japan was involved in the war just as the USA, the UK, France, the Soviet
Union and Holland were, but our war was to liberate Asian countries from
yokes of those white peoples. And Japan committed war crimes as those
countries did, concluded peace and paid reparations as a country.
Japan's compensation for it is already over but still there are some insane
Japanese who repeatedly refer to the cruel deeds of the past committed
by the Japanese military..." (Kobayashi gA," 1998, p.126).
Kobayashi even tells a lie, which is
clear from the chapter we have seen from the analysis of the NHK program
gViews and Opinions":
gAnti-Japan mass media deny the Sankei Shimbun Report (March 30, 1998) and spread conventional propaganda that Chiune Sugihara issued visas by his own will, but actually there was official document named gCountermeasures against Jews" stating that Japan would not segregate Jews, and there were not any telegrams against the Sugihara's deed..." (Kobayashi gA", 1998, p.38).
We can easily understand these people's way of misinforming the readers -and how illogical they are- when Kobayashi even says the following:
gThe Jewish scientists from Germany who sought asylum in the United States thought that the US should develop the atomic bomb earlier than the Nazis, but they have never referred to Germany as the target of the bomb. . . The target of it was Japan from the beginning. . . Those scientists and the US government had to use the bomb on the Japanese who were just like yellow monkeys for them...and the US used tactics intentionally blurring the treatment of the imperial system so as to earn time to use the A-bomb over Japan... Japan saved twenty thousand Jews but they helped the US make atomic bombs and massacred so many Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . and so it is completely unreasonable for the US, which massacred Japanese as an experiment, and the US and China having such terrible weapons, criticize Japanese war responsibility" (Kobayashi gA" 1998, pp. 337-338).
Kobayashi also praises the will and deeds of Japanese soldiers who died believing in gHakkoichiu" (hF) where sokoku (cEhome-country), kyodo (yEhome-land), kazoku (Efamily), and Tenno (VcEEmperor) are respected. It is OK to respect ghome-country, home-land and family" but he should know that all of these three actually became victims of the last key word gemperor." With such erroneous logic and understanding of history Kobayashi and others gathered under the flag of historical liberalism criticize the contents of current school history textbooks and are very eager to change them.
Japanese school textbooks from elementary school to senior high school are institutionally checked by the Ministry of Education and as a result of this, although it may seems for us that the descriptions of the wrong doings of past Japanese militarism are not adequate, the group of Fujioka, Nishio and Kobayashi etc. with the help of the Japanese conservative power elite, have put pressure on the Education Ministry even to delete some expression on things such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese invasion of China and other Asian countries or the massacre of thousands of Koreans in the chaos of the Kanto Earthquake around the Tokyo Area in 1923. Moreover they refer to the last incident saying that in the midst of the massacre a Japanese police station chief named Tsunekichi Ohkawa saved three hundred Koreans kept in the station from the people wanting to kill them (Fujioka, 1996, pp.126-128), and try to emphasize the good nature of Japanese character.
Now we have fully understood that Japanese historical revisionists assert only one side of the historical incident and disregard or sometimes even neglect the main facts of the case so as to rationalize anything in the past from a point of view that does not damage the good reputation of the Showa Emperor Hirohito.
According the to Simon Wiesenthal Center, the
various components of the ideology of Holocaust denial include: German
nationalism, neo-Nazism, anti-communism, anti-Zionism and anti-semitism.
Deniers subscribe to an ideological framework, which contains at least
three components:
1. racial determinism (i.e., biological
race determines culture, intellectual capacity and moral worth);
2. the doctrine of White superiority;
3. the rehabilitation of Nazism
and its leaders.
iA Simon Wiesenthal Center Report, 1994,
p.7j
Any modern country has some social element of ultra-nationalism or right-wing extremists and the above mentioned analysis might be applied to Japanese historical liberalism and revisionism but we should also take notice that the characteristic of the Japanese case is that the central core of society itself, economic and political, is involved, or, dare I say that they are leading the movement from behind, because they want to escape public criticism on their war responsibility, which might be proved through the analysis of the prospectus and the list of supporters of their organization and their movements.
A group of people who are gathered together under the flag of gHistorical Liberalism" (Jiyushugi-shikan) held a press conference on December 2nd, 1996 and made an appeal for the necessity of to improve school textbooks about Japanese history and started their activities by organizing the gSociety To Make A New Textbook of Japanese History" on January 30th, 1997. The purpose of the society is that ghistory school textbooks at present are based on the view of class struggles and they see history only from the view point of people who have resisted rulers and, especially in recent times, they tell about the so-called sex-slaves of wars and Nanjing Massacre as if they were facts... The textbooks we make intend to give a self-portrait of Japan and the Japanese in the global view with decency and balance. . . and to make children to have confidence and responsibility, and contribute to world peace and prosperity." And it also states that gIf the present history education in Japan continues, our children and grandchildren might lose their homeland and suffer hard experiences of a people without a country."
Officials of the Society To Make A New Textbook of Japanese History as of November 1998 are: Kanji Nishio (President, Professor of Tokyo Denki University), Nobukatsu Fujioka (Vice President, Professor of Tokyo University), Ita Namikawa (Vice President, Commentator of Nippon Broadcasting Co.), Susumu Nishibe (Trustee, Former Professor of Tokyo University and Chief Editor of Hatsugensha monthly at present), Tadashi Koga (Supervisory Auditor, President of Toho Rayon Co.).
The list of members, which numbers 6,964 as of October 1998, of the Society includes: Takeshi Inagaki (Former Editorial Staff of Asahi Shimbun), Rokuro Ishikawa (Honorary President of Kajima Construction Co.), Hisahiko Okazaki (Former Japanese Ambassador to Thailand and Former Bureau Chief of Information and Research of the Japanese Foreign Ministry), Daizo Kusayanagi (Commentator), Kentaro Hayashi (Former President of Tokyo University), Keitaro Hasegawa (Commentator), Hirotatsu Fujiwara (Former Professor of Meiji University) etc.
Any campaign taking place in the society beyond the size of face-to-face communication needs the mass media without exception and here too The Sankei Shimbun Newspaper Company supports this movement and has decided even to publish their textbooks through their affiliated publishing company Fusosha Press. According to Yoshinori Kobayashi, already more than 200,000 people reserved the textbooks. It is important here to keep in mind that this Sankei Shimbun always appear as the supporter of the right-wing extremists from the media side: to give one example, its morning edition of March 30th 1998, reported that gChiue Sugihara issued visas to the Polish Jews in Lithuania by the directive of Japanese Foreign Ministry, which clearly shows the fact that The Sankei, the Japanese historical liberalists including Sophia University professor Shoichi Watanabe, the producer of gPride" Hideaki Kase, and Yoshinori Kobayashi etc. are closely connected in their undemocratic beliefs.
Democracy in the framework of our modern age is denied in this movement: Kanji Nishio, President, told in his speech of the symposium with Nobukatsu Fujioka, Yoshinori Kobayashi and others held in Tokyo on June 30th 1997 that his group also considers the drawbacks of democracy, questions it in the belief that democracy is not always the best political system and says so in their new textbooks (Kobayashi gB," 1998, p.39). This way of understanding of democracy is so dangerous, though I myself admit present democracy is not perfect. As any person is fundamentally equal, on which idea democracy is based, and he or she can speak with the same human rights, which brought about the parliamentary system when the size of the society became bigger than that possible by direct human-talks. One of the characteristics of this group's idea is to deny the validity of direct democracy even when it's about settling the problems of community environment, which means that they do not believe in the wisdom and power of the people.
Another characteristic of their movement, as we have seen, is re-evaluation of the imperial system and the the emperor. As many researches and surveys done in Japan show, the Japanese power structure acquires its legitimacy through the imperial system, which is always depicted in the media as favorably as possible so as to gain the support of the people. Such a media technique, always revealing its pro-imperium, extreme right-wing notions of historical revisionism, can be examined in a concrete case through the life of Ryuzo Sejima, perhaps one of Japan's more powerful postwar figures, whose influence predates the war:
Sejima, born in Toyama prefecture in 1911, was a graduate of the Imperial Army's military academy and distinguished himself as a staff officer in the Japanese expeditionary forces occupying China. With Japan's capitulation in 1945, he was interned as a prisoner of war in Mongolia and Siberia for 11 years in total. After his repatriation to Japan, Sejima was employed by the trading conglomerate C. Itoh Corporation, and quickly rose through its ranks, ultimately serving as its chairman. Corporate success also spelled growing political clout: he served on a number of high-profile state commissions, including those seeking to reform the Japanese educational, administrative and fiscal systems, and gained considerable prominence for his de facto leadership of them. His wartime connections with fellow officers are believed to have played a major, albeit covert, role in the successful conclusion of Japan's war reparation negotiations with South Korea and Indonesia (Kyodo News Agency, 1996). At present, he acts as a special advisor to C. Itoh and chairs the Inamori Foundation (founded by Kazuo Inamori, chief executive of Kyocera Corporation). Sejima also serves as the chief lay representative of Nishi-Hongan-ji Temple, one of Japan's oldest Buddhist sects, which also shows the strong relations between Japanese mainstream religion and the imperial system.
Interviewed by a newspaper, Sejima noted the
following on religion and patriotism:
gThere isn't any contradiction in my
religious beliefs and my duty as a citizen to execute war. The teachings
of Shinran, known as the founder of Jodo Shinshu School of Buddhism, have
become part of my body and soul, just as eating three meals a day is part
of life. Likewise, I see no discrepancy between my faith and my postwar
duties in the service of my trading company and government." (The Kyoto
Shimbun, July 21, 1998, evening edition)
The ties that link Japan's established religious sects to the power structure are as abstruse yet meaningful as they are historical. Higashi-Hongan-ji, for instance, also subscribes to Jodo Shinshu, and therefore is closely affiliated in religious doctrine with Nishi-Hongan-ji, whose parish Sejima represents. The wife of Higashi-Hongan-ji's chief priest is the younger sister of the deceased emperor. Another example is the Tendai sect, perhaps the earliest Buddhist school of thought to be imported to Japan. Because its priests were dispatched under imperial patronage to China to study Buddhism more than ten centuries ago, the sect has traditionally been among the staunchest supporters of the Imperial Family. To this day, the sect reports to the Imperial Household Agency whenever its disciples successfully undergo its most rigorous esoteric practice Sennichi-Kaiho, and the agency in turn issues certificates recognizing their success.
The Tendai and the Hongan-ji sects, the latter ironically founded as an instrument of social reform by Shinran for the sake of the masses, asserting that neither good nor evil acts should deny individuals the right to enter paradise, are but two illustrations of religion's intimacy with the imperial system. Even those who once opposed the power structure are eventually co-opted. The idealistic young disciples of Sen-no-Rikyu, who founded the tea ceremony cult to which they belonged, literally staked their lives resisting Toyotomi Hideyoshi, whose Shogunate unified Japan and later led its first invasion of the Korean Peninsula at the end of the 15th century. Yet the descendants of their cult are now part of the privileged elite, having married into the imperial family.
There remains in Japan today an age-old social dynamic: association with the imperial system consolidates one's standing in society. As do countless of other Japanese institutions in want of recognition, the Inamori Foundation, which ranks among the largest of its kind, funded by JY20 billion (some $160 million) from Kazuo Inamori's private coffers, invites a member of the Imperial Family for its annual endowment ceremony. The ritual is virtually repeated at every major public event worthy of note. The dynamic is equally conspicuous and influential through the alumni of Gakushuin University, the prestigious teaching grounds of the Imperial Family, and its affiliated schools.
This framework was kept intact even after the Japanese defeat in World War II, when the Allied Occupation under instruction of the U.S. government adopted a policy absolving Emperor Hirohito of his complicity in the war so as to facilitate its control over the country. The decision prefaced the preservation of the imperial system in postwar Japan, and with it the system's deeply rooted influence over Japanese social life including religion. That the two remain viable and inter-linked can be seen in the 1997 Ministry of Education directive mandating the singing of the national anthem, with its lyrics of adulation for the emperor, in all elementary and middle schools. And in here the linkage between Sejima's group and historical liberalists who assert that the imperial system and democracy coexist is completed. Needless to say, all of these make so big a difference in creating barriers of understanding between Japanese and those of other Asian countries which were invaded by Japan during the last war (Konaka, 1997).
Conclusion
What is of critical importance here is for the Japanese to discern that those in power are quietly weaving a fabric of disinformation as evidenced by the revisionist attempts as mentioned earlier to thwart citizens from exercising their right to govern and therefore enable the powerful to maintain their hold on power. These revisionists are gGoyo-bunkajin" or gGoyo-gakusha" who sell themselves to gain benefits from power and we must constantly remind ourselves to improve our media literacy, the ability to critically analyze information generated by the media conglomerates and use the media as the tool for the benefit of the people, so that we can participate in the policymaking process in this Age of Information by strengthening the lateral links of communication between concerned citizens.
Notes:
Pj This article was originally prepared for a monthly gThe Daisan-Bunmei", September 1998 Issue and was later revised for the speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center at Los Angeles on October 27, 1998.
Qj Nishioka, Masanori revised his article and published a book entitled gTruth of Gas Chambers of Auschwitz", Nisshinhodo, 1997DIwAEVECbcuKXv^xVC1997NDAfter the Marco Polo issue, Aiji Kimura published a book entitled gPoints To Be Discussed About Auschwitz", Liberuta Press, 1995 which also denies the Nazi Gas Chambers together with the Holocaust and even GenocideDwAEVBbc_xx^oC1995NDAnd both Nishioka and Kimura are cooperating to denounce the facts of Auschwitz. And recently this Aiji Kimura translated Roger Garaudy's gLes Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne" into Japanese asWFEKfBCwUCXG_bxCǁ[VC1998, which denies not only the existence of Nazi-Gas Chamber but also other activities of The Third Reich, and for whose publication the author was prosecuted and found guilty in France.
Rj One of the typical examples of this is the negative campaign by The Shukan Bunshun(Weekly Bunshun) November 19th 1998 issue, which is criticizing Naoto Kan, the political opposition party leader for his scandal with his girl friend. The Bunshun spent five months to write the scandal, which should have been treated as a private matter between the two of them or discussed among the three including his wife. The Shukan Shincho (Shinchosha's weekly) has the same nature and it once reported about the victims of The Minamata disease as the pseudo patients seeking for only compensation money through the battle in the court. It also wrote an extensive article, in July 1994, on Mr. Yoshiyuki Kouno's family background titled, gThe Bizarre Family Tree where the Poisonous Gas incident had its origin." And Mr. Kouno and his family's privacy were thus violated, and the public was led to believe that he was an indiscriminate murderer until the March 1995 Tokyo subway gas attack made clear that he was, in fact, an innocent victim.
Sj Amendment One of the Constitution of the
United States of America
Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress
of grievances.
Tj The telegraph to Chiune Sugihara from
Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka dated August 14th, 1940 tells:
@@@@@@Re: Transit Visa For Sixteen Jews
Who Emigrate to Latin America:
@
Concerning the matter of the stay of the above
mentioned Jewish group in Japan I will discuss after they arrive in Japan.
And I will request you to note that only those who can get such visas should
be limited to those who have visas to the destination. The Japanese
Immigration Office will not permit even the landing of them on Japan to
those who do not possess such visas through due process.
@
The telegraph to Chiune Sugihara from Japanese
Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka dated August 16th, 1940 tells:
Re: How To Treat Refugees
@
There are some who do not have enough money
or who do not have entry visas for the USA or Canada as the destination,
among the Lithuanians to whom you issued transit visas for Japan, and the
Japanese Immigration Office will not give them permit to enter Japan.
So I request you not to issue entry visa to seemingly refugees unless they
finished due process of entry to the destination and at the same time,
unless they have enough money for the travel and the stay in our country.
@Most of the Jews from Poland could not get their money returned from banks where they had made deposits, because banks controlled by Nazi Germany did not permit it, which means that most of them were not better than grefugees" when they came to Lithuania. And so if Chiune Sugihara had not issued the visas against the directives of the Minister, almost all the Jews who came to the Japanese Consulate in the summer of 1940 would have been the victims of Nazis.
Uj In Japan there is no specified law on the freedom of speech, which defines more than the very abstract clause of Article Twenty One of the Constitution of Japan, which borrows the clause from the U. S. Constitution, Amendment One. So the Japanese mass media, especailly tabloid papers and weekly magazines have violated privacy saying that they have right to gfreedom of speech".
Vj April 29, 1998 NHK TV Education's Program
gViews and Opinions" (21:50-22:00): A Verbatim Transcript of Sophia University
Professor Shoichi Watanabe's gA New Perspective on the Relationship Between
the Japanese and Jews"
Transcript Begins:
@
gThe Jews and the Japanese" was the magnus
opus of the late Shichihei Yamamoto; it was a comparative thesis of the
two peoples. I would like to speak on the relationship of the two here
today.
@While Jews and Japanese have rarely
interacted with one another, I believe it is true that their relationship
has been quite cordial.
@
Let me cite one instance: the foreign currency
necessary for Japan to prepare for the Russo-Japanese War, in other words,
the sum it had to borrow from abroad to facilitate its war effort was some
10 million pounds Sterling. And the only country which Japan could acquire
such funds at the time was England. The vice chairman of the Bank of Japan,
Korekiyo Takahashi, traveled to London to raise the money, but he was only
able to acquire half the amount needed. At a banquet one evening, however,
Mr. Takahashi related his woes to a man who happened to be seated next
to him. The next day, that same man came to visit the vice chairman with
the news that he was willing to loan the remaining ?5 million.
@This man's name was Schiff, and he happened to manage Kuhnlieb, a Jewish-owned bank based in America. It is said that Mr. Schiff informed Korekiyo Takahashi that he was genuinely concerned about the plight of the Jews in Europe, that he was worried about their fate, and that Russia was the most anti-Semitic of all European countries.
@Their encounter just happened to coincide with a pogrom in Odessa, which resulted in the murder of a number of Jews. Mr. Schiff explained that, since Japan was at war with Russia, he would like to do his part to help the Japanese and so he promptly offered the ?5 million. The loan enabled Japan to financially strengthen its preparations for the ensuing conflict. That a nameless Jewish banker provided such sum to the vice chairman of the Bank of Japan was, in my view, extremely significant.
@In World War II, moreover, Jews were being relentlessly persecuted by the Nazis. The Third Reich sought Japan's cooperation in shutting out the Jews, but it refused. Japan replied that as a country advocating that racial discrimination be discontinued since the peace treaty ending World War I, it would uphold its policy and not discriminate against the Jewish people.
@I thank the Sankei Shimbun Newspaper for its recent coverage of this. The Japanese government provided asylum to approximately 20,000 Jews who fled the Holocaust through the Siberian Railway. Nazi Germany had repeatedly requested that the exodus be halted, but Japan went on with it, accepted the Jews and helped save their lives. These refugees arrived in Tsuruga, Japan from Vladivostok, moved to Kobe and then to Shanghai. In this way, the lives of thousands of Jews were rescued. All told, the number of Jews extricated by the Japanese government amounts to the tens of thousands.
@On the other hand, although there may have been many people in England and America who sympathized with the plight of the Jewish people, there were cases in which these two countries refused to come forward and help Jews; they just stood by and watched them be murdered.
@For instance, at the height of the Nazi persecution, some 1,000 Jews sought to escape to safety from Hamburg on the St. Louis. However, neither England nor the U. S. allowed the ship to enter port: After two months of sailing to and fro under the watchful eye of the Coast Guard, the St. Louis was forced to return to Germany. The German Jews on the ship were sent to concentration camps and ultimately to Auschwitz.
@So the only sovereign nation which clearly did not persecute the Jews, perhaps the only country to provide preferential treatment to these people then was Japan. Yet Japan has been subject to the worst abuse in the postwar period, largely because there has been a misconception that, as a signatory of the Tripartite Pact, our country was somehow involved in the same persecution of Jews as the Nazis. Yet the opposite is true: Japan was the only country, in spite of protests from its allies, to truly extend humanitarian aid to the Jews. This actually happened.
@Incidentally, when I took my family to England, I was able to meet my landlord. He was an old Jewish man who fought as a soldier in World War II. After we signed the rental agreement, we shared a cup of tea and he said, gI understand that the Japanese never touched the assets of Jews during the war." He seemed quite impressed by this.
@Of course, the Japanese didn't know the difference between a person of Jewish descent and any other foreigner, and due to the Japanese government's standing policy against racial discrimination, we never confiscated Jewish-owned assets. This fact should have provided postwar Japan with enormous diplomatic advantage. The only thing is, after its defeat in World War II, Japan never recognized its wartime treatment of Jews could be exploited to achieve its foreign policy objectives.
@One Japanese in Lithuania issued several thousand visas to Jewish refugees. But this man did not do so on his own; the visas were issued in accordance with standing policy of the Japanese government at the time. This man, a Mr. Sugihara, is widely respected by the Jewish people and there is even a street named after him in Israel. That in itself is fine and he is really famous among Jews. In fact, among the numerous Jewish refugees who could escape by Sugihara's help was a man who would later became the Israeli foreign minister.
@Why didn't Japan actively seek to use such Japanese in its postwar diplomatic efforts? The manner in which Japan interfaced with the Jewish people after the following and the way it did not fully utilize the diplomatic resources that it had well; I see them as being fairly inefficient. Moreover, in 1940, when Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, Kuhnlieb, the bank which lent money to Korekiyo Takahashi for the Russo-Japanese War, sent two envoys who were rabbis to Japan. Yet they were given the cold shoulder by the Japanese, and they left without having discussed anything of importance. If Korekiyo Takahashi had not been assassinated in the February 26 Incident, and if Japan had been able to come to terms with Kuhnlieb, then the country may have been able to find a way out of the oil embargo [without resorting to hostilities, triggering the Pacific War].
@That is why there are no points of contention between Japan and Jewish people: indeed, relations between the two are very good. In the future, I believe it would be in Japan's best interests if we could build a society in which even one of the immensely wealthy Jewish families would want to emigrate to our country, so that we may be able to raise the quality of life in Japan. I say this because, while Jews know that they will never be persecuted in Japan, not one prominent Jewish family has come to settle here. This is because our tax system places a heavier burden on citizens than in other countries. And we know of no Jewish Nobel laureates who wish to naturalize. For Japan to become truly happy and prosperous, we must remake our country so that wealthy Jews and academically distinguished Jews would like to live in Japan. (end)
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ARTICLES BY WATANABE
@@The original Japanese full text follows:
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@I raised several questions about the speech above. The following is my first letter to NHK's President Kastuji Ebisawa and the answer to it in the original text.i{j
NHKCVVl@erw_E__xSl
1998N516
nB
520-0016@sb2-22-3
dbF077-529-2614 Fax:077-529-2440
e-mail:twatanab@mail.doshisha.ac.jp
@ǢǬDžǑǵǢǮdǕǾJDŽljǾǥǢDžB950ǩ10ǐǢǧZǢgljDžǁDŽǼǟǢLJǴwǑǼǟǢLJǢǟǢDžB
@ǐDZljǬ^ǁǮǕǵǃDžB
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@ǵǩǵǪǐǻDžB
@C\AǩǴvǐ{OǩǐǢǧNJǩǩǽC1940N7ǩ1JNJLJǡǟC\sNu|[hvC|[hNJNǵLJhCcR\sNJNJDŽDŽLJv6000l_lNJulIflj{rUǕoǵvCOjNJ]ǻǩǡLJǐǢǧǪsLJNJ{OǩǕǟǢDžBDZDZǐvlCKqwZlrUxi\m}C1990NjǕǏǐDžEǻǫljǩljDžB
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1. NHKnǕǢǐFǩB
2DǵǢǻCNHKNpCǐǟǢLJKvǁoǟǂǁǪǕǫǧDŽǩB
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@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Answer from Satoshi Horiguchi in charge
of the program, representing NHKi{ǩj
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@1998.6.5ij
@nB@l
@O
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@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@_E__S
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@xm@
Wj For detailed reference of Chiune Sugihara's
trials and triumph in Lithuania, see gRokusen Nin No Inochi No Visa" (Visas
for Life) by Yukiko Sugihara, the late Deputy Consul's wife, published
by Asahi Sonorama, Tokyo 1990, and gIn Search of Sugihara" by Hillel Levin,
published by The Free Press New York, 1996 (Japanese Edition translated
by Kiyoshi Suwa & Teruhisa Shino, published by Shimizu Shoin, Tokyo,
1998 as g".
Xj This was written in the answer dated
June 5, 1998 as the response to my inquiry dated May 16, 1998.
POj It is legally punishable to criticize
someone on the grounds of his or her race, religion, sex, belief etc. and
to speak openly or to publish such materials containing what is called
ghate-speech" and those who commit such a crime are called ghate-criminals".
Such hate-crime is not punished in Japan unlike in Germany, France, Austria
or USA.
PPj The article I contributed to The Asahi
Shimbun Newspaper, March 22nd 1980, was later compiled into the anthology
of Cambodian Massacre and News Reports" as{wsEǐxiDžǽDŽXC1980N@Katsuichi
Honda ed.: Gyakusatsu-to-Hodo, Suzusawa Press, Tokyo, 1980, pp.101-105)
References
Bastian, Till, 1994: Auschwitz und die gAuschwitz-Luge",
C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung
iJapanese Edition with new contribution of
articles translated by Yuji Ishida, Haruhiko Hoshino & Yoshikazu Shibano,
published by Hakusuisha, Tokyo, 1995jeBEoXeBACcEETFERawAEVBbcǐAEVBbcRxC1995N
Bogusz, Jozef, 1962: Auschwitz, State Medical
Publishers, WarsawiJapanese Edition translated by Mitsuo Kaneda, published
by Japan Medical Journal, Tokyo 1982j[tE{OVCcYww]_EAEVrbcx{VC1982N
Buckley, Jr., William, 1992: In Search of
Anti-Semitism, Continuum New York
Buruma, Lan, 1994: Wages of Guilt, Memories
of War in Germany and Japan, Farraar, Strau and Goroux, New YorkiJapanese
editionCCAEu}CMwL\{lǐhCclxTBSu^jJC1994Nj
Fujioka, Nobukatsu & Society for Historical
Liberalism, ed., 1996: Japanse History Not Written In The School Texdbooks,
The Sankei Shimbun News ServiceiOriginal Japanese editionCMER`jwǁǶǻǢjxYoVj[XT[rXC1996Nj
Hilberg, Raul, 1961iSpecial Edition for Japan
1998j: The Destruction of the European Jews, Franklin WattsiJapanese
Edition translated by Yukio Mochida, Kazumi Harada & Shigeko Inoue,
published by Kashiwa Shobo Press, 1998jEEqo[OC]cKjEcEqw[bpE_lx[C1998N
Hitler, Adolf, 1925: Mein KampfiJapanese
Edition gWaga-Toso" translated by Ichiro Hirano & Shigeru Shojaku,
published by Kadokawa Press, Tokyo, 1973j
Kamei, Atsushi, 1983: Inside-Story of Weekly
Shincho, Daisanbunmei PressiOriginal Japanese editionCT~wTVxOC1983Nj
Kobayashi , YoshinoriCgAhC1998: On the
War, Special Declaration of Gohmanism, GentoshaiOriginal Japanese editionCǵwS[}jYESPECIALE_x~C1998Nj
Kobayashi , YoshinoriCgBhC1998: Campain
for Making New School Textbooks of History, Fusosha, TokyoiOriginal Japanese
editionCǵwVǵǢjǕuǬǂvǐǢǧ^ǁx}KC1998Nj
Konaka, Yotaro, ed., 1997: Japan in the School
Textbooks of Foreign Countries, Goma Shobo PressiOriginal Japanese editionCzYwONJ{ǫǧǩǟǢǩxǾ[C1997Nj
Kyodo News Agency, 1996: Chinmoku no File,
Kyodo News Agency, TokyoiOriginal Japanese editionCMwt@CxMC1996Nj
Hoss, Rudolf, 1963: Kommandant in Auschwitz,
Deutcher Taschenbuch VerlagiJapanese Edition translated by Keiji Kataoka,
published by The Simul Press, Tokyo, 1972jhtEwXC[wAEVBbcelǕǬLJEEEhtEwX^xTC}oC1972N
Lanzmann, Claude, 1985: ShoahiMovie, Japanese
Book Edition translated by Taketomo Takahashi published by Sakuhinsha,
Tokyo, 1995jN[hEY}CqwVA[xiC1995N
Levin, Hillel, 1996: In Search of Sugihara,
The Free Press New YorkiJapanese Edition translated by Kiyoshi Suwa &
Teruhisa Shino, published by Shimizu Shoin, Tokyo, 1998j
Lipstadt, Deborah, 1993: Denying the Holocaust?The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, The Free Press New York
Miyazawa Masanori, 1982: On the Japanese Articles
of Jews, 2nd Edition, Shinsensha, TokyoiOriginal Japanese Edition gYudayajin
Ronko" {Tw_l_l{NJǮ_cxCVC1982NB
Osawa, Takeo, 1995: Hitler & Jews, Kodansha
Press, TokyoiOriginal Japanese Edition gHitler-to-Yudayajin"jVjwqg[ǐ_lxukVC1995NB
Perl, William, 1989: The Holocaust Conspiracy:
an International Policy of Genocide, Shapolsky Publishers New York
Ruby, Marcel, 1995 : Le Livre Dela Deportation,
Editions Robert Laffonnt, S.A., ParisiJapanese Edition translated by Kenji
Sugano, published by Chikuma Press, 1998j}ZEr[CYwi`Ee{ǐx}[C1998N
Saito, Michikazu and others, 1982: Oh, Poor!
Bungei Shunju, Daisanbunmei PressiOriginal Japanese editionCEEcMvwǧǵIH|tHxOC1982Nj
Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1994: A Simon Wiesenthal
Report, Holocaust Denial: Bigotry in the Guise of Scholarship, Simon Wiesenthal
Center
Sugihara, Yukiko, 1990: Visas for Life, Asahi
Sonorama, TokyoiOriginal Japanese Edition gRokusennin-no-Inochi-no-Visa"@KqwZlrUx\m}C1990N
Yoshihara, Koichiro, ed., 1977: On The Relations
of Weekly Bunshun and Japanese Cabinet Information Agency, Banseisha PressiOriginal
Japanese editionCgYwTtǐtxC1977Nj
About the author:
Professor Takesato Watanabe got MA in Journalism
and Media Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan in 1969 and is currently
teaching Journalism and Mass Communication at Doshisha University. He is
also the organizer of Doshisha Society for Journalism and Media Studies.
For more information, write to him. His mailing address: Media and Journalism
Depertment, Doshisha University, Kyoto 602-8580, Japan
Phone: 81-29-2614 Fax: 81-775-29-2440
E-mail:twatanabmail.doshisha.ac.jp
{FDŽ
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