Japan Institute for National Fundamentals

　　　　　　Chinese President Xi Jingping seems serious. After South Korean President Park Geun-hye initiated a South Korea-China joint history war against Japan by encouraging China to build a memorial in Harbin for Korean independence activist Ahn Jung-geun who assassinated Hirobumi Ito, the first prime minister of Japan in 1909, Xi turned the war into a China-led warfare by telling Park in The Hague on March 23 that a new memorial for resistance against Japan was about to be completed.
　　　　　　In a manner to lead anti-Japan salvo in Germany on March 28, Xi asserted that Japanese militarism victimized 35 million including more than 300,000 killed in the so-called Nanjing massacre. But his assertion against Japan is filled with lies and fakes as is always the case with information war. The public opinion warfare that China has provoked is definitely a war without using weapons. Japan must make all-out efforts to counter the Chinese offensive.

35 million victims represent a lie
　　　　　　Historical facts have a decisive power in such information war. The facts undoubtedly support Japan. This is because China has faked history, and Japan has never faked history. But Japan has so far failed to learn history and assert facts, losing history wars. Japan must learn history sufficiently to take advantage of facts.
　　　　　　First, Japan must know that the 35 million victims of the Japanese militarism represent a lie. Just after Japan's defeat in World War II, China's Kuomintang Nationalist Party claimed that the number of Chinese victims in the Japan-China war totaled 3.2 million. It then failed to specify any ground for the number. Later, the number was raised to 5.79 million. As the People's Republic of China was founded upon an end to the Chinese civil war, the Communist Party asserted the number as 21.68 million. In May 1995, or 50 years after the war, then Chinese President Jiang Zemin, known for thorough anti-Japan education, boosted the number further to 35 million.
　　　　　　When I and my colleague Tadae Takubo questioned Bu Ping, director of the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, about the number in Beijing in 2005, Bu said the number was directly linked to ethnic sentiment. He thus admitted that the number was a fake.

No Nanjing Massacre
　　　　　　Next, 300,000 victims in the “Nanjing Massacre” also represent a lie. China has claimed that Japanese forces entered Nanjing on December 13, 1937, and massacred 300,000 people by early February 1938. But 69 reports to the Japanese embassy from the International Committee for Nanjing Safety Zone for protection of civilians did not include the word of massacre or any description indicating such incident. Why? It’s because there was no massacre there.
　　　　　　A report by Guo Qi, a Kuomintang force officer, was submitted to the Nanjing Military Tribunal as a decisive evidence of the massacre. It said that there was no means to record random killings that took place at any place and any time and that gunshot sounds remained constant for three months.
　　　　　　Regarding his daily life in Nanjing then, the same person wrote that he took a lunch at the home of one of his colleagues at noon and got information on Japan or played Go there and that he lived an ordinary life anyway.
　　　　　　How could he live an ordinary life while hearing sounds of Japanese forces’ gunshots to kill Chinese people? The Nanjing Massacre represents an absolute lie. We should fully respond to China’s historical information warfare and take advantage of facts to counter Chinese propaganda. To this end, all Japanese should become well versed in history.
　
Yoshiko Sakurai is President, Japan Institute for National Fundamentals.