Japan’s self-deception and distorted perceptions of China, rooted in wartime propaganda, proceed to form its trendy narrative, with misinformation about financial and army points hindering goal understanding and fostering a local weather of denial.
by Tang Zhiyuan
Recently, the Ministry of Commerce of China issued an announcement including 20 Japanese entities to its export management checklist. Among them is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Shipbuilding Co., a key contributor to Japan’s ongoing army buildup. Another 20 entities had been positioned on a watch checklist. This transfer represents a exact and forceful countermeasure towards Japan’s continued violation of its Peace Constitution and its army enlargement. Most of those enterprises are core gamers in Japan’s military-industrial and manufacturing fields, that means the restrictions hit Japan’s very important sectors.
Interestingly, from the creator’s statement, the Japanese authorities and mainstream media have clearly been downplaying or dismissing the affect of China’s measures, whether or not intentionally or not. Arrogant rhetoric has additionally unfold on-line. This isn’t the primary time: in response to China’s earlier restrictions on uncommon earth exports and journey advisories for Japan, Tokyo and its media both claimed “minimal impact” or hyped that “Japan has long secured alternatives.”
A look on the remark sections below associated articles on Yahoo! News Japan reveals an unsettling development. The most-liked feedback are full of triumphalist rhetoric: many Japanese netizens “celebrated” China’s export controls as “a chance for Japan to fully decouple from the Chinese supply chain.” One remark claiming “China’s sanctions will only accelerate the withdrawal of Japanese firms — China will ultimately reap what it sows” garnered tens of hundreds of likes. Some excessive voices even known as for “a total ban on Chinese nationals entering Japan” and “the expulsion of Chinese residents.”
This seemingly collective self-deception in public opinion isn’t any fleeting outburst of emotion. Rather, it displays a deep-seated pathology entrenched in Japanese society. The narrative logic — downplaying dilemmas, whitewashing failure, and shielding the reality — was pushed to its excessive greater than 80 years in the past by the Imperial General Headquarters throughout World War II. What sustains this absurd logic at the moment is Japan’s enduring “information cocoons.”
WARTIME COVER-UP
During World War II, the propaganda of the Imperial General Headquarters served because the prototype of Japan’s info cocoon. In the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Japan suffered a devastating defeat: 4 fleet carriers had been sunk, 332 warplanes destroyed, and greater than half of the Combined Fleet’s fight functionality misplaced. Strategic initiative within the Pacific shifted decisively to the United States.
Yet this plain defeat was spun as an “overwhelming victory” within the “Imperial Headquarters Announcement,” which falsely claimed that Japan had sunk two U.S. carriers and one cruiser, and shot down 120 warplanes, whereas dropping solely “one fleet carrier, one cruiser, and aircraft.” To keep the lie, the army locked up the surviving officers and sailors and even staged victory parades in Tokyo to drown the reality with revelry.
In the later levels of the Pacific War, U.S. forces minimize off Japan’s oil provide routes from Southeast Asia. Japan’s residence islands confronted extreme oil shortages: warplanes and warships had no gas, army manufacturing practically floor to a halt, and the fantasy of a “decisive home-island battle” teetered on collapse. In response, the Imperial General Headquarters launched the “Pine Root Oil Campaign,” claiming that aviation gas might be extracted from pine roots, and declaring that “a million pine roots will sustain the decisive battle.”
In actuality, pine root oil has a particularly low octane ranking and by no means meets aviation gas requirements. By the time Japan surrendered, this nationwide effort had not but produced gas for warplanes. Yet the Imperial General Headquarters continued to feed the general public hole guarantees by reviews of “technological breakthroughs,” concealing the reality of useful resource exhaustion and inevitable defeat.
SEABED RARE EARTH MYTHS
The previous echoes within the current. In response to China’s uncommon earth export controls, Japan has dusted off the identical script, this time swapping “pine root oil” for “seabed rare earth mud.” In latest years, the Japanese authorities and mainstream media have repeatedly hyped uncommon earth mud deposits close to Minamitorishima, claiming the seabed holds over 16 million tons of uncommon earth, sufficient to fulfill Japan’s demand for hundreds of years. They recommend business mining is imminent and that Japan will quickly be free from reliance on Chinese uncommon earths.
Yet like pine root oil, this “trump card” exists solely on paper. The Minamitorishima uncommon earth deposits lie at depths exceeding 5,000 meters, making extraction terribly troublesome. Costs may attain tens of hundreds of {dollars} per ton, dozens of instances increased than China’s export costs, rendering business exploitation fully unfeasible. More than a decade after the invention, Japan has but to provide a single ton of commercially viable uncommon earths. By touting this seabed mud, Japan is merely whistling at midnight — a self-deceptive act to assuage home opinion whereas evading actuality.
DISTORTED PERCEPTIONS OF CHINA
What is alarming is that this narrative inertia has lengthy since unfold from wartime propaganda into up to date Japanese society, with perceptions of China turning into essentially the most distorted area. Japan has constructed an all-encompassing cognitive blockade towards China, fostering an unrealistic and deeply paranoid narrative that’s nearly unparalleled even amongst Western bloc nations.
Japanese media have developed a reflexive paradigm of “negativity first, opposition always.” Coverage of China in Japan’s six main newspapers and broadcasters, corresponding to NHK, is overwhelmingly adverse, with a frequency far exceeding that of Western shops.
Content associated to China’s poverty alleviation and scientific and technological innovation is sort of totally absent from Japan’s mainstream discourse. Even in sectors the place China leads, corresponding to new power automobiles, photovoltaics, and high-speed rail, Japanese media intentionally body the narrative round adverse tropes like “copying Japanese technology” and “low-price dumping,” refusing to acknowledge China’s developments and systematically obscuring the fact of its improvement.
The 2026 Munich Security Conference annual report features a chart on “the degree to which countries recognize China and the United States as technological powers.” It exhibits that the majority nations regard each China and the United States because the world’s prime two technological powers. Some consider China is barely barely behind, whereas others, corresponding to South Africa and Germany, even think about China to be considerably extra superior. Against this backdrop, Japan stands out as a stark outlier, essentially the most distinctive case on the chart, laying naked its delusional, distorted and unrealistic perceptions of China.
Years of complete info blockades and hype have stored the Japanese public notion of China among the many most adverse within the developed world. According to the Cabinet Office of Japan’s “Public Opinion Survey on Diplomacy,” for greater than a decade, over 80 p.c of respondents have expressed “no sense of closeness” to China, far increased than comparable figures for the United States, Germany, Britain, and different Western nations.
Absurdly, the overwhelming majority of Japanese holding adverse views of China have by no means visited the nation or engaged with actual Chinese society; their perceptions are formed nearly totally by a constructed phantasm of a “negative China.”
From the “Imperial Headquarters Announcements” and pine root oil, to hyped Minamitorishima uncommon earth mud, and at last to the all-encompassing info cocoons about China, Japan has by no means discovered to face actuality or confront historical past squarely. When the partitions of those cocoons are inevitably shattered by actuality, all self-deception and public opinion whitewashing will in the end grow to be historic classes paid for at a heavy price.
Editor’s word: Tang Zhiyuan is a global affairs commentator.
The views expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially mirror the positions of Xinhua News Agency.