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The massacre records revealed after 100 years

Published: 25 Dec. 2023, 19:59

KIM HYUN-YE
The author is a Tokyo correspondent of the JoongAng Ilbo.

A record that has been sleeping for 100 years has been released to the world. This is a record no one has read before. It is a 102-page report written by the Japanese military and handed over to the U.S. military during World War II.

It was in April 1958 that the report, which had been gathering dust in an archive near Washington, D.C., returned to Japan. It has been lying in the Japanese defense ministry archive ever since, and 68-year-old writer and history journalist Nobuyuki Watanabe brought it to life.

“I didn’t want to study. I only read books. I found history books most interesting. Because I didn’t study and got only 5 points on math, I could not get into the University of Tokyo,” said the energetic voice over the phone.

The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake claimed the lives of over 100,000 people. 100 years ago in September, more than 6,000 Koreans living in Japan were massacred. The tragedy began with rumors that Koreans had poisoned wells. But the Japanese government denied the facts until recently, saying “there is no record.”

But on December 14, an article directly refuting Tokyo’s long-standing denial was published in the Mainichi Shimbun online. Watanabe discovered the records. The report was drafted by the military headquarters in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, which had been in charge of conscription and veterans affairs under the Army Ministry.

How did this document come to light? “I felt as if the records from 100 years ago were waiting to be read,” the journalist said.

Watanabe began covering the 90th anniversary of the Kanto earthquake as a reporter for the Asahi Shimbun in 2013. He began to question why Koreans had been massacred during the time. Watanabe began to collect related materials and read them at home every day. It was not easy to dig into old documents. It often took several days to understand one Chinese character. Then, this summer, he was asked to lecture for the 100th anniversary of the earthquake.

He reviewed his documents before the presentation and discovered a document that had been mentioned in “The Great Kanto Earthquake, the Truth behind the Denial of the Massacre,” published in Japan two years ago and translated into Korean this August.

Watanabe studied the report he hadn’t read as it was too difficult to understand, and in the end, he brought it to the world. He plans to publish a book on it.

Why is he willing to confront the historical records of Japan’s faults? He resolutely said, “If we don’t clarify why these things happened, the same things can happen again. What to be done now is to reinterpret these documents. It is my job to do my best.”