The following is from the final installment of Masayuki Takayama's regular column in the weekly magazine Shinchō, released today.
This article also proves that he is the one and only journalist in the post-war world.
Long ago, an elderly professor from the Royal Ballet School of Monaco, highly respected by prima ballerinas worldwide, came to Japan.
At that time, she said the following about the significance of artists
'Artists are essential because they can only shed light on hidden, concealed truths and express them.'
I don't think anyone would disagree with her words.
Masayuki Takayama is not the only journalist in the world after the war; it is not an exaggeration to say that he is also the only artist.
This thesis also beautifully proves the correctness of my statement that, in the current world, no one deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature more than Masayuki Takayama.
It is a must-read for not only the Japanese people but also people all over the world.
Written by a Chinese person
The French were envious of the British, who made money selling opium to China.
So, they started a war with China and took Vietnam.
The French thought that the Vietnamese, like the Chinese, were obsessed with opium, but they paid no attention to it.
Since that wouldn't be good for business, they first tied them down with various taxes.
They imposed a poll tax on everyone alive and a toll tax on anyone who left their village.
They imposed taxes even on marriages and the birth of children.
The people became furious.
When the residents rose in revolt, the French sent in planes and, without hesitation, rained down machine gun fire.
This was because if they killed them, they would get the funeral tax.
After locking the people up like this, they set up a branch of the Opium Monopoly Corporation in each village and sold opium to them.
The desperate Vietnamese smoked opium.
The French were delighted to make as much money as the British finally.
Incidentally, the Chinese were made to do the opium business and collect taxes, and they also grew fat.
After the Vietnam War ended, there was a massive exodus of boat people.
The pitiful end of the Chinese, who became pawns of the French and sucked the blood of the Vietnamese, is shown in this.
Now, the French's oppressive opium monopoly system was implemented in Taiwan, which had become a Japanese territory ten years later.
However, the purpose was completely different.
In addition to all kinds of diseases, Taiwan was infested with poisonous snakes such as the hundred-step snake.
If a hundred-step snake is bitten, it will die within a hundred steps.
In addition, there was the opium problem.
When Japan arrived here, there were 170,000 Chinese addicts.
China called the area "outside the borders of civilization" and "outside the borders of the world."
The Governor-General, Shimpei Goto, registered the people with an addiction as part of his opium countermeasures and sold opium only to them.
This way, he was able to suppress the number of new addicts, and the number of people with an addiction also began to dwindle.
Half a century later.
The 170,000 addicts had all but disappeared by the end of the war.
Thirty years after Goto Shinpei's experiment.
The Manchukuo state was established.
In fact, although there were no poisonous snakes here either, the place was full of Chinese people addicted to opium, as well as various other diseases, from syphilis to trachoma.
The Manchukuo state also adopted the Taiwanese method.
Patients were registered, and the Monopoly Corporation supplied them.
However, the West was cold towards Manchukuo itself.
Stimson, the US Secretary of State who hated Japan, issued a statement saying, "Manchukuo is part of Chiang Kai-shek's China" and "Japan invaded China."
Even when Japan said, "China has always been inside the Great Wall, and Manchukuo is the homeland of the Manchurians," they would not listen.
When Manchukuo was established, they accused it of being a "puppet regime of Japan," and they also spread malicious fake news about the opium monopoly, saying that "Japan invaded China and is making money by selling opium."
Chiang Kai-shek also joined in and criticized Japan, but he was a sworn brother of Du Yuesheng of the Green Gang, an opium trafficking organization.
"What face does he have to abuse Japan?" wrote American journalist F. Williams in his book 'Inside the Propaganda War in China.'
However, Japan 'is not good at propaganda, and instead of refuting it, they sulk and shut up' (ibid).
At a time like this, the newspapers should have refuted Stimson on behalf of the government, but they were saying stupid things like, "Newspapers are always anti-authority."
They needed to understand that national interests and criticism of the government are two different things.
In the end, Japan's arguments were ignored entirely, and it fell into the US's trap and was made into an "invading country that sells opium."
Seventy years have passed since then.
I thought that the Japanese people had learned a little.
Still, I saw that Shigetada Kishii, the chief editor of the Mainichi Shimbun, said on TV that "Japan made a lot of money selling opium in Manchuria."
He died without learning anything, but the other day, the Asahi Shimbun wrote the same lies as Kishii under the headline "Manchuria: An Ideal Land Built on Opium."
The article was written by Oka Fumina, a Chinese-born writer, and its arguments were the same as those of Chiang Kai-shek.
It accuses the Kwantung Army of taking control of the production and distribution of opium in the area around the city of Rehe, where opium was produced, and of joining forces with the Wang Ching-wei government to "impose a monopoly on the sale of opium to registered users only" in mainland China.
There are said to be 20 million opium addicts in mainland China.
This was a grand experiment in which Japan believed it could reduce that number to zero.
It's not a story that should be left to Chinese journalists who were brought up on anti-Japanese education.
This article also proves that he is the one and only journalist in the post-war world.
Long ago, an elderly professor from the Royal Ballet School of Monaco, highly respected by prima ballerinas worldwide, came to Japan.
At that time, she said the following about the significance of artists
'Artists are essential because they can only shed light on hidden, concealed truths and express them.'
I don't think anyone would disagree with her words.
Masayuki Takayama is not the only journalist in the world after the war; it is not an exaggeration to say that he is also the only artist.
This thesis also beautifully proves the correctness of my statement that, in the current world, no one deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature more than Masayuki Takayama.
It is a must-read for not only the Japanese people but also people all over the world.
Written by a Chinese person
The French were envious of the British, who made money selling opium to China.
So, they started a war with China and took Vietnam.
The French thought that the Vietnamese, like the Chinese, were obsessed with opium, but they paid no attention to it.
Since that wouldn't be good for business, they first tied them down with various taxes.
They imposed a poll tax on everyone alive and a toll tax on anyone who left their village.
They imposed taxes even on marriages and the birth of children.
The people became furious.
When the residents rose in revolt, the French sent in planes and, without hesitation, rained down machine gun fire.
This was because if they killed them, they would get the funeral tax.
After locking the people up like this, they set up a branch of the Opium Monopoly Corporation in each village and sold opium to them.
The desperate Vietnamese smoked opium.
The French were delighted to make as much money as the British finally.
Incidentally, the Chinese were made to do the opium business and collect taxes, and they also grew fat.
After the Vietnam War ended, there was a massive exodus of boat people.
The pitiful end of the Chinese, who became pawns of the French and sucked the blood of the Vietnamese, is shown in this.
Now, the French's oppressive opium monopoly system was implemented in Taiwan, which had become a Japanese territory ten years later.
However, the purpose was completely different.
In addition to all kinds of diseases, Taiwan was infested with poisonous snakes such as the hundred-step snake.
If a hundred-step snake is bitten, it will die within a hundred steps.
In addition, there was the opium problem.
When Japan arrived here, there were 170,000 Chinese addicts.
China called the area "outside the borders of civilization" and "outside the borders of the world."
The Governor-General, Shimpei Goto, registered the people with an addiction as part of his opium countermeasures and sold opium only to them.
This way, he was able to suppress the number of new addicts, and the number of people with an addiction also began to dwindle.
Half a century later.
The 170,000 addicts had all but disappeared by the end of the war.
Thirty years after Goto Shinpei's experiment.
The Manchukuo state was established.
In fact, although there were no poisonous snakes here either, the place was full of Chinese people addicted to opium, as well as various other diseases, from syphilis to trachoma.
The Manchukuo state also adopted the Taiwanese method.
Patients were registered, and the Monopoly Corporation supplied them.
However, the West was cold towards Manchukuo itself.
Stimson, the US Secretary of State who hated Japan, issued a statement saying, "Manchukuo is part of Chiang Kai-shek's China" and "Japan invaded China."
Even when Japan said, "China has always been inside the Great Wall, and Manchukuo is the homeland of the Manchurians," they would not listen.
When Manchukuo was established, they accused it of being a "puppet regime of Japan," and they also spread malicious fake news about the opium monopoly, saying that "Japan invaded China and is making money by selling opium."
Chiang Kai-shek also joined in and criticized Japan, but he was a sworn brother of Du Yuesheng of the Green Gang, an opium trafficking organization.
"What face does he have to abuse Japan?" wrote American journalist F. Williams in his book 'Inside the Propaganda War in China.'
However, Japan 'is not good at propaganda, and instead of refuting it, they sulk and shut up' (ibid).
At a time like this, the newspapers should have refuted Stimson on behalf of the government, but they were saying stupid things like, "Newspapers are always anti-authority."
They needed to understand that national interests and criticism of the government are two different things.
In the end, Japan's arguments were ignored entirely, and it fell into the US's trap and was made into an "invading country that sells opium."
Seventy years have passed since then.
I thought that the Japanese people had learned a little.
Still, I saw that Shigetada Kishii, the chief editor of the Mainichi Shimbun, said on TV that "Japan made a lot of money selling opium in Manchuria."
He died without learning anything, but the other day, the Asahi Shimbun wrote the same lies as Kishii under the headline "Manchuria: An Ideal Land Built on Opium."
The article was written by Oka Fumina, a Chinese-born writer, and its arguments were the same as those of Chiang Kai-shek.
It accuses the Kwantung Army of taking control of the production and distribution of opium in the area around the city of Rehe, where opium was produced, and of joining forces with the Wang Ching-wei government to "impose a monopoly on the sale of opium to registered users only" in mainland China.
There are said to be 20 million opium addicts in mainland China.
This was a grand experiment in which Japan believed it could reduce that number to zero.
It's not a story that should be left to Chinese journalists who were brought up on anti-Japanese education.
2024/10/1 in Umeda, Osaka
