Henry S. Stokes at FCCJ
Hiroyuki Fujita at FCCJ
"Stokes, a longtime resident of Tokyo, did not know what was written in his own book." It says all. It shows the right wing attempts to vilipend the foreign media correspondents in their work on World War II issues was once more defeated. It was all of a trick that we discovered. It also says a lot on current administration whose nationalism sees to be a bit out of control to the point that the US administration of president Obama asked Japan to cool down: "U.S. President Barack Obama urged Japan on Friday to settle disputes over the issue of women, mostly Koreans, who were forced to provide sex to Imperial troops in Japan’s wartime military brothels, calling it a “terrible” human rights violation.” (JT April 25 2014)"Hiroyuki Fujita at FCCJ
Part I
It is maybe time now to review treaties of impunity and to finally agree to settle history cases in a spirit of fairness, equity and justice and to make of World War II abominations at last a case of Victim's Justice.
I and other journalists have exposed for years of work here and overseas the numerous attempts of the Japanese right wing conservatives and their clones to whitewash massacres, slaughters, looting and misery by Japan Imperial Army during China and Korea invasion and during the South Strike to Malaya and Singapore, Indochina and the Philippines. Time to clarify in textbooks the JIA responsibility massacres during WW2 and settle the Nanking slaughter with the aim to produce fine documented archives in universities and schools and request from Allied nations, China, Russia, Japan and all concerned administration to open their archives. 2015, 70 years after the end of hostilities, could be a year to start such history mission and show more concerns with the obligation of remembrance ( Aka "Le devoir de Mémoire" in French )
Recently a few statements by Japanese press attacked the Fccj on history issues accusing the foreign journalists to be Peking and Seoul spies! And they quoted manipulated documents to justify their claims. Today, back-pedalling, one writer who can't hold a pen but who published a book with the aid of a Japanese right winger who "used" him admits that he was cheated: "Stokes, a longtime resident of Tokyo, did not know what was written in his own book."
This attack by Fujita against foreign correspondents was published in the column for the Sankei Shimbun column of March 29, Takao Harakawa accused foreign correspondents based in Tokyo of harbouring “blind belief” in the anti-Japanese propaganda being generated by China and South Korea. He bases this on his observations from a recent press conference that in his view descended into a “blame-Japan” fest.
“Interpreter at the event was Hiroyuki Fujita, an international journalist and translator of Henry Scott-Stokes’ recent book (in Japanese) titled, “Falsehoods of the Allied Nations’ Victorious View of History, as Seen by a British Journalist.” “Foreigners, especially citizens of the Allied nations (during WW2), tend to view the historical truth in terms of judgments handed down by the Tokyo war crimes tribunal,” said Fujita. “According to that view, Japan must be the villain, and anyone who attempts to assert something at odds with that is stereotypically tarred as a revisionist who is attempting to gloss over history. One of the very few correspondents who’s an exception to this would be Mr Henry Scott-Stokes, who has really done his homework on the issues.”
For the anecdote, I can add that for months I often watched Fujita entertaining Stokes at lunched at the bar of Fccj where Fujita claims that he received all instruction and data from Stokes. But I never saw Stokes or Fujita writing documents or engaged into working sessions there. Fujita is the same right wing clique who claims that foreign journalists are Chinese and Korean spies...
Poppycock!
Part II
Now today's story in Japan Times: "Journalist backtracks on best-seller after Nanjing switcher"
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/05/08/national/history/journalist-backtracks-best-seller-revisionist-switcheroo/#.U2wRFV59v1o
Former Times bureau chief 'shocked' by revisionist conclusion of own book
By Ben Dooley and Kyodo news agency.
MAY 8, 2014
Former New York Times Tokyo bureau chief Henry S. Stokes should have reason to celebrate. His latest book “Eikokujin Kisha Ga Mita Rengokoku Sensho Shikan no Kyomou” (“Falsehoods of the Allied Nations’ Victorious View of History, as Seen by a British Journalist”) has moved 100,000 copies in the five months since its December release, according to its publisher Shodensha.
The mashup of journalistic anecdotes from the front lines of Japan’s modern history and hard-nosed arguments against its responsibility for World War II atrocities has made the 75-year-old Stokes a darling of the country’s resurgent right wing. With the slim volume popping up on best-seller lists across the nation, its author has found himself in the brightest spotlight of his career.
There is just one problem — until a recent interview with Kyodo News, Stokes, a longtime resident of Tokyo, did not know what was written in his own book.
Now, the former reporter, who reads and writes only a little Japanese, says he is “shocked and horrified” by the book’s conclusion that the Chinese government fabricated the Nanjing Massacre, describing the claim as “straightforward right-wing propaganda.”
The book’s translator, Hiroyuki Fujita, “smuggled” the rogue passages into the work, Stokes says, adding that the conclusion was “just spooned into the text.” Fujita admits that he added his own language to the book but argues that he closely based his additions on Stokes’ own views.
Stokes, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease and cannot easily type or use a pen or pencil, entrusted the book’s production to Fujita and Hideaki Kase, two men with close ties to the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, a nonprofit educational group that advocates “revisionist” positions on Japanese history.
At Kase’s urging, Stokes sat with Fujita for over 170 hours of interviews about his journalistic career and his self-described “right of center” political views. He says the men told him that they would translate the interviews into Japanese and then shape them into a book.
Stokes agreed to participate in the project, despite warnings from family and friends to be wary of the men, whom he describes as “personal, close friends.”
According to Stokes, Fujita had assured him that “90 to 95 percent” of the book was based on their interview sessions. While Fujita reiterated these claims, he would not comment on what other additions he had made to the text and declined multiple requests to share the recordings.
“As I’m being interviewed by these people, I would trust them to stick by the record,” Stokes said. “And if they haven’t done that, they have let me down and let themselves down.”
The “record” of Stokes’ comments on Nanjing is decidedly mixed. On one hand, the claims made in Stokes’ book appear, almost word for word, in an article attributed to him in the March 2014 issue of WiLL, a hard right-wing Japanese magazine, edited by Kazuyoshi Hanada. Similar comments appear under Stokes’ name in a series of interviews in Yukan Fuji, a popular evening tabloid.
But, in the March issue of Voice Magazine, another Japanese-language publication, Stokes expresses a very different opinion on both subjects. In a translated response to a question about Nanjing by reporter Taka Daimaru, Stokes says that he “can’t support” right-wing arguments that the massacre never happened, because they “aren’t realistic.” Similar comments appear in an interview with journalist David McNeil that ran in the April issue of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan’s magazine Number 1 Shimbun.
Despite the contradictions, Fujita, Daimaru and McNeill all say that they have faithfully reproduced their conversations with Stokes. Hanada was not available for comment.
“In the process of compiling the Japanese version of course I summarized or interpreted basically what he said,” Fujita said, adding that the quotation marks around the words Nanjing Massacre make it clear that he intended to convey Stokes’ position that the Chinese government has exaggerated the scale of the massacre, not that it is an outright lie.
Japanese readers, however, have interpreted the text differently. In a tweet sent two days before the interview, for example, one wrote that Stokes claims “there is not even one piece of evidence that the Nanjing Massacre occurred.”
That conclusion could not be further from the truth, Stokes says.
Over the course of multiple interviews with Kyodo News beginning on April 5, Stokes repeatedly expressed a view on Nanjing that directly contradicts the remarks attributed to him in both his own book and the articles in WiLL and Yukan Fuji.
“I don’t come within ten-thousand miles of this stuff as a position,” he said, dismissing the view that Nanjing is a fabrication as “ludicrous,” “fatuous” and “utterly, utterly asinine.”
“The stance I take is that ghastly events occurred in Nanjing,” Stokes said, adding that he does, however, disagree with Chinese assessments that 300,000 people died during the six days when the Imperial Japanese Army overran China’s then capital. He also objects to the use of the term massacre, preferring the more anodyne “Nanjing Incident.”
Stokes’ claims are supported by one of the project’s transcriptionists, who resigned for “ethical concerns” stemming from what she described as major differences between Fujita’s interviews with Stokes and the book’s contents. The text, she said, takes out of context or deliberately ignores several of Stokes’ statements, especially on the subject of Nanjing and the comfort women.
Stokes’ career as Tokyo bureau chief for the left of center New York Times, where he worked from 1978 to 1983, makes him the perfect vehicle for providing credibility to historical revisionists’ arguments against Japan’s responsibility for wartime atrocities, according to Takesato Watanabe, a professor of media ethics at Doshisha University in Kyoto.
Fujita admits this was a consideration in producing the book. “If I wrote this,” Fujita said, “people would say that I’m right-wing or a revisionist, and the things I say can’t be trusted, because I’m defending Japan.”
“If a foreign correspondent says it for me,” he added, “no matter what the content . . . people will say it’s interesting.”
Although Fujita played a major role in the book’s production, “without Kase-sensei (Mr. Kase), this publication was not possible,” he said, adding that he had consulted with Kase on the book’s topics and what questions to ask Stokes.
While admitting that he introduced Stokes to the book’s publisher, Kase denied that he had any direct role in writing it or that he knew about Fujita’s additions. Kase wrote the book’s afterword.
Stokes met Kase, who describes himself as a “diplomatic critic,” in the late 1960s. In the years following, Kase became an adviser to former Prime Ministers Takeo Fukuda and Yasuhiro Nakasone.
Kase, 77, has stayed active in conservative political circles in Japan. In addition to his position as the chairman of the revisionist group, he has been involved with several other right-wing organizations, most notably as a “representative” and “auditor” to the board of directors of the Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a hard-right political group with links to the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
In November 2012, Kase’s name appeared alongside Abe’s in a full-page newspaper advertisement in the New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger that described comfort women as high-paid prostitutes and made a number of additional claims that closely resemble those found in Stokes’ book. The ad instructs readers “eager to look further into the truth” to visit the website of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.
This is not the first time that Kase’s name has appeared in connection with a literary sleight of hand. In the 1990s, a Korean journalist accused the prolific author of ghostwriting “Minikkui Kankokujin” (“Ugly Koreans”), a Japanese best-seller that argues Japan’s occupation of Korea had been good for the country. The book’s original author later came forward and accused Kase of making substantial revisions to the text, which was published under a Korean pen name. Kase says he “corrected” the book, but denies writing it.
Stokes has requested that Fujita issue a correction to his book. Fujita says that he will correct the record in a forthcoming English edition, but there are currently no plans to amend the existing text.
Contacted by Kyodo News, the publisher said that he was “surprised” by the allegations and that if true a correction would be issued.
Despite his objections, Stokes refuses to assign blame for the book’s contents to the men he calls friends.
No matter how much he may disagree with the end result, “If I’ve been taken advantage of, it’s with my complicity,” Stokes said. “And, it’s my responsibility and my fault.”
[We felt as important to publish here the whole story of JT as document to future researchers]
Part III
The FCCJ magazine Number 1 Shimbun journalist comments about the right wing attacks (in the Sankei group for instance) against foreign media in current edition of the press club magazine. Editor is Gregory Starr.
Siegfried Knittel
Freelance journalist (Germany)
Martin Fackler
New York Times (USA)
Henry Scott Stokes
Yukan Fuji columnist
Joël Legendre-Koizumi
RTL France Broadcasting (France)
Justin McCurry
The Guardian (UK)
Fuyuko Nishisato
Producer, ZDF TV (Germany)
David McNeill
The Independent (UK)
En langue française:
"Au Japon, fausse audace économique, vrai nationalisme"par Katsumata Makoto.
Le Japon à l’heure du virage nationaliste, par Martine Bulard.
Last but not least, the video of the conservative Fujita asking to retrial Tokyo Trials
“The Henry S. Stokes nationalist book controversy” on Youtube.
Rq: The Tokyo War Crimes Trials (1946-1948) :
“On October 6 MacArthur received a directive, soon approved by the other Allied powers, granting him the authority to proceed with the major trials and giving him basic guidelines for their conduct. As they had done in Germany, the Allies set up three broad categories. "Class A" charges alleging "crimes against peace" were to be brought against Japan's top leaders who had planned and directed the war. Class B and C charges, which could be levelled at Japanese of any rank, covered "conventional war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," respectively. On December 23, 1948, General Tojo and six others were hung at Sugamo prison.” (PBS.org)
Conclusion
There is something sinister in this poor episode of what appears as a manipulation. An old man suffering form Parkinson disease is played-friend in this later sense of hypocrisies by a conservative right-winger and many others today in Japan are approaching the foreign observers and media to exonerate Japan from war crimes and history massacres during WW2 and early stage during the colonisation of Korea, China and South East Asia.
Errors may have been happening in the search for justice from all parties. But it's maybe time now to review treaties of impunity and to finally agree to settle history cases in a spirit of fairness, equity and justice and to finally deliver, without equivocal statements, "Victim's Justice." A duty to honour for the peace, security and prosperity of East Asia and Pacific.
In no way such a group of manipulators, without any desire to apologise and repair, may belong to the collective of FCCJ Bona Fide members unless an "Amende honorable" is properly addressed and a review by the Board of Directors of what happened within the walls of our news gathering devoted institution.
Update May 13, 2014
The Parkinsonian suffering author changed his mind. But the Kyodo press agency keeps its first recorded interpretation: "...Kyodo News in turn released a statement dated Friday, saying it was “confident in the accuracy of the article,” which it said “drew on its interview with the former Tokyo bureau chief.” The agency also said the interview was taped."
in Time, Kirk Spitzer news-story: “Lucy Birmingham, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, said the foreign press corps in Japan has come under increasing attack from conservative news media for alleged anti-Japanese bias in recent years, and pressure to toe the line is likely to continue. “It’s difficult to know exactly what Henry Scott Stokes’ views are. He has been quoted as saying diametrically different things in different publications,” says Birmingham, a freelance writer who has written for TIME and other publications."
Update May 13, 2014
The Parkinsonian suffering author changed his mind. But the Kyodo press agency keeps its first recorded interpretation: "...Kyodo News in turn released a statement dated Friday, saying it was “confident in the accuracy of the article,” which it said “drew on its interview with the former Tokyo bureau chief.” The agency also said the interview was taped."
in Time, Kirk Spitzer news-story: “Lucy Birmingham, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, said the foreign press corps in Japan has come under increasing attack from conservative news media for alleged anti-Japanese bias in recent years, and pressure to toe the line is likely to continue. “It’s difficult to know exactly what Henry Scott Stokes’ views are. He has been quoted as saying diametrically different things in different publications,” says Birmingham, a freelance writer who has written for TIME and other publications."
