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I gave the following speech in Tokyo, Japan on September 2, 2023, the seventy-eighth anniversary of the formal surrender of Japan to the United States on the battleship USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay.
On that occasion, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed on behalf of the Japanese government and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed for the Japanese military.
Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur then gave a speech in which he declared that
“It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past.”
But although peace found its way to Japan somehow through that signing, the United States was just starting a horrific war with the world that has continued down to the present day, and threatens to be the cause, not the end, of a new world war today.
The United States would never return to a peace economy after 1945, and the dependency on the production of petroleum, vehicles, planes, and weapons to drive a consumption economy that resulted from the war would reshape the America forever.
My speech (text in Japanese below) explains that the only way for the United States to snap out of the current drive for world war, and for nuclear war, which now poses an overwhelming threat for humanity, is to recognize the profound manner in which the nation was transformed into an empire driven by war wherein the core of governance is conducted in secret, in the shadows, during the Second World War—especially the final two years.
That process was driven in part by the melding together of the United States with the British Empire during the war in an economic, technical and ideological sense. The introduction of British colonial cruelty, combined with the gentleman’s polite rhetoric, was best represented by the firebombing of Dresden (February 13-15, 1945). That action introduced an unprecedented level of institutional brutality into American governance that went even further than the worst of American colonial policy in the Philippines.
Even more importantly, the establishment of the Manhattan Project, a top- secret government project within the Department of War that brought together politicians, scientific experts, private industry, military officers, and other interests to pursue the development of, and the needless and cruel use of, two nuclear weapons, changed everything in governance utterly.
This new form of unaccountable secret governance within the Manhattan Project, as I explain in the speech, made possible the constant criminal drive for war, and specifically for nuclear war, that continues to this day, unaccountable to the constitution, the citizens, or even the politicians. RAND Corporation was the direct fruit of this secret and unaccountable fusion of finance, industry, military and government after the war, but there are many other such parasitic institutions today.
The final result is the concrete plans for a catastrophic nuclear war with Russia and China now at an advanced planning stage and nuclear was is entirely possible, if not inevitable, if we follow the current game plan to its natural conclusion.
The use of classified directives, secret law and nondisclosure agreements to govern the United States, and much of the Earth, in complete secrecy can be traced back to the Manhattan Project.
I also talk in the speech about the development of napalm and other chemical and biological weapons that were used in the totally unnecessary bombings of the Tokyo and other Japanese cities as part of a new form of industrialized and brutal warfare that would be taken to its extreme, in part as a form of economic stimulus for American industry, during the Korean War.
I apologize on behalf of the American people and the American government for these criminal actions, and I pledge that all classified documents related to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing of Tokyo (March 10, 1945), and also related to American interference in Japanese politics and education after the war will be declassified immediately.
I promise that in my administration the United States will uphold the 1970 Non-proliferation Treaty and will reduce the number of nuclear weapons we possess to 500 within five years, and to zero within ten years.
This move will give America some moral legitimacy for the first time since the dropping of the atomic bombs and let us to focus on real security threats like the destruction of the environment, the collapse of biodiversity, the use of technology to dumb down and destroy the vast majority of humanity, and the economic violence resulting from the overwhelming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few.
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An English AI translation of the speech from the Japanese version:
On the 78th Anniversary of the Signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender
Seventy-eight years ago, on September 2, 1945, representatives of the Japanese government signed the articles of surrender offered by the United States on the deck of the warship Missouri then anchored in Tokyo Bay, bringing the Greater East Asia War, the Pacific War for the United States, to an end.
On that day, after a speech by the General of the Army Douglass MacArthur, Japanese Foreign Minister Aoi Shigemitsu signed on behalf of the Government of the Empire of Japan, followed by Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijiro Umezu on behalf of the Japanese Armed Forces.
At that time, the Japanese people were eating weeds to survive. Their homes had been burned by continuous American air strikes that continued day and night, and they had no choice but to cover the children’s wounds with rags. Yet, granted the means were harsh and brutal, substantive peace came to Japan, albeit in a painful and cruel manner.
From that day on, however, America set out on a course for eternal war. At the same time, that signing marked the beginning of Japan’s occupation period, which continues to this day, by an unaccountable secret dual government lodged deep in the military.
The United States had been possessed by the demon of war and was jinxed by the sweet curse of victory. The result was a United States that continued to wage indiscriminate wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. That series of wars allowed a ruthless demon to reach its bloody hands deep into the American soul. The “rights of the people” enshrined in the Constitution degenerated into “consumer hedonism,” “freedom” was replaced with “narcissism,” and America, the victorious nation, had bravely set out on a course to damnation.
Dear respected citizens of Japan. My name is Emanuel Pastreich and I am an American who served as a professor of Japanese literature for many years, and has written on East Asian security.
On the 78th anniversary of the signing of the signing of the surrender to the United States by Japan, as someone who is preparing to run as a presidential candidate in the Green Party of the United States, there is something I would like to share with you.
In light of America’s desperate political culture in 2020, I decided to run for president. I made my campaign slogan “Make America great for the first time.” Maybe you remember a similar slogan?
That’s right. As a candidate in 2016, President Donald Trump employed the slogan “Make America Great Again.” However, granted the chaos and violence that Japanese and Americans are facing at home and abroad, we have no time for such vague nostalgia.
The old America may have had its charms, but it was never a great country.
Today there really is not much we can say about America that is “great” seeing as its military is planning a global nuclear war while secretly pursuing plans to wipe out its own citizens.
I want team up with Japanese, and first to acknowledge America’s crimes, and then to rebuild America. I am deeply impressed by Japanese culture, and I want to use Japanese wisdom to help change America.
It is necessary for us to recognize what kind of a country Japan surrendered to 78 years ago.
And we must clearly recognize what kind of country America is as it currently plans for nuclear war against China and Russia.
Only by joining with you, and acknowledging the crimes that our country, the United States, has committed in the past, and continues to commit in the present, will there be hope for Japan and the United States.
President Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” meant that America must have the world’s strongest military, spread military bases all over the world, and intervene in almost all military conflicts in the world. It meant that the United States should keep claiming to be the world’s police force and keep funneling tax dollars into nuclear weapons to prepare for a global nightmare.
No, I cannot see anything great about that at all.
The Secret Military Command System that Possesses America Like an Evil Spirit
The American players who effectively continue an economic and ideological occupation of Japan are not the poor American workers who make up the majority of our population, but a secret military command system centered around the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. The reality of the United States, a nation that advocates democracy but uses secretive methods, backed by violence, to carry out its politics, can be traced back to the Manhattan Project, that classified plan that developed, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, changed everything.
The Manhattan Project was a criminal plan that prepared the dangerous and unnecessary nuclear attack on Japan, and did it in such extreme secrecy that even the members of the project did not know what was going on. This system was set up in this manner not so much to be secret, as to be unaccountable. It was an administrative system that had no responsibility to the Constitution, to the people, or to ethics.
That malignant form of secret governance has metastasized across the entire Federal government, which is now preparing for nuclear war far from the reach of the citizens, or the government itself.
The recent global blockbuster movie “Oppenheimer” introduces Robert Oppenheimer, the physics professor who played the central role in the Manhattan Project, misleading and seducing the best and the brightest into participating in this pact with the devil.
Strangely, although the movie has been released around the world, no date for a release in Japan has been scheduled.
Perhaps the mysterious Japan-US Joint Committee was involved in preventing the screening of a film that exposes American crimes against Japan.
The historian Masao Maruyama described prewar Japanese politics as a “system of irresponsibility.” Although apt, the more I read of history, the more convinced I am that the “system of irresponsibility” existed not in Tokyo, but in Washington.
The Crime of the United States
The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, were aimed at testing uranium and plutonium based atomic bombs and collecting data about the results.
Japan was already taking concrete steps to accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender at the time. The bombings were not strategically necessary.
Even after the war, America’s military secrecy continued. The U.S. government to dismiss reports of radiation-related illnesses in the year after the atomic bombing, dismissing accounts as mere conspiracy theories. It took a great deal of fighting not only in the United States, but also around the world, before the US government even acknowledged that the atomic bomb was different from conventional weapons.
America’s secret war plans are only possible because of secret pacts and treaties with other countries, including Japan. These agreements, unconstitutional yet legally binding, empower the psychopaths in the Pentagon who dream of global destruction.
America has stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons without any justification, and the insane who work behind the curtains at the Strategic Command openly discuss plans for a winnable nuclear war. They have written up detailed plans for a pre-emptive nuclear attack that will kill hundreds of millions of innocent civilians in both Russia and China, if not all of humanity.
The two nuclear attacks against the Japanese were not America’s only crimes during the Pacific War.
During the Pacific War, the United States conducted approximately 2,000 bombing raids targeting Japanese citizens, not military installations. In just three and a half years, the United States dropped approximately 20 million napalm bombs on Japanese urban spaces. Those napalm bombs were developed so as to effectively burn down Japanese wooden houses and burn Japanese citizens to death.
In particular, the Great Tokyo Bombing, carried out in the middle of the night on March 10, 1945, purposely targeted the most densely populated areas using napalm to bomb private homes, and injuring at least 300,000 people and killing over 115,000 in one night. It was a large-scale massacre of civilians that left over 800,000 homes destroyed through the use of Napalm.
When the war ended on August 15th, there remained still 86,000 mustard gas and phosgene bombs, and bombs filled with anthrax still waiting to be used. Over three million Japanese citizens were killed by the attacks of the United States over three and a half years.
We Americans were taught that the two nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to save Japanese lives. Most do not even know about other crimes against the Japanese people. I strongly believe that in order to rebuild America, Americans have the right, and the need, to know what they did in Japan.
The nightmare of eternal war continues today in America. The US continues nuclear war in a different form by firing depleted uranium shells in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, and Hawaii.
Similarly, the United States uses, or sells, cluster bombs that are made to look like toys so as to lead children to their deaths.
We are planting nightmares with these cluster bombs that will last for decades.
War haunts the American soul like a demon, transformed into a spiritual cancer that seeps into the nation’s marrow. The culture of war has transformed American culture into a world of pleasure and narcissism, a bland Disneyland wherein consumption becomes the purpose of life.
The rich and powerful use this sick culture, with its foundations in violence, to promote superficial excitement, instead of ethical behavior, and thus make possible brutal exploitation and domination at home and abroad.
Americans have lost the independence of mind. We lack the will or the inclination to contemplate civilization and historical processes, to consider the importance of values for a healthy society.
In the vacuum that remains, we see serious conflicts, fed by interested parties, accelerating over ideological issues, over race, religion, and gender.
Americans, now incapable of independent thinking, are easily manipulated by others. There can be no doubt that the United States is headed for conflicts at home and abroad.
For Japan, which has been under the influence of American culture for two generations, the palpable decline of American culture is a direct blow.
As someone who studied classical Japanese literature, who was inspired by reading The Tale of Genji and Hojoki, who tried to realize a new politics in America by employing the political ideas of Jinsai Ito and Sorai Ogyu of Tokugawa Japan, I am saddened by the disappearance of what I thought was the best of Japanese culture. America’s rotten, pleasure-oriented, consumer culture has extended its fingers into every corner of Japan.
We must look at the transformation of the United States during the Second World War, especially after 1941, which increasingly tossed away the spirit, and the policy, of independence grounded in the Declaration of Independence, and replaced it with an alliance with the British Empire. As a result, policy makers in the United States shifted away from the ideals of fighting fascism and towards the power and the loot to be found if they took control of the wreckage of the British Empire—and were therefore made a part of it. The United States ceased to be a republic and started to act like a global empire.
The result was that the US government has effectively treated Japan as a client state since the end of the war. American corporations planted in Japan a parasitic economic structure that undermined the integrity and the self-sufficiency of Japanese culture that was founded on narcissistic consumption.
Most insidious was the establishment of a narrative in education and the media by the United States that glorified Western civilization and established it as a model for Japan’s future development. That is to say that the achievements of European nations, the developments in science and technology in Europe and America, were attributed to an advanced and superior civilization that must be emulated; the fact that such wealth was generated by enslaving the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas and exploiting their resources was hidden from view.
It was a sin to destroy Japan’s traditional craft culture, a noble tradition that placed value on enduring objects made from bamboo, wood, and stone, and to replace it with a consumer society that dependent on disposable plastic utensils and other items designed for built-in obsolescence.
It was a sin to undermine Japanese values of respecting humanity, living in harmony with nature, and frugality, and to brainwash Japanese into believing that business administration focused on gaining short-term profits by taking advantage others was more respectable than supporting community and family.
Japanese novels, waka and haiku poetry, and the inspiring diaries of the Heian period that I studied in graduate school are lost on young Japanese who have been seduced by corporations into relying on video games, YouTube broadcasts and Instagram memes, and various forms of pornography for continuous and dizzying stimulation. The resulting psychological state means that youth are unable to concentrate, numb to the experience of “wabi” (austere beauty), “sabi” (subtle sadness) or “aware” (deep empathy with sorrow) that were at the core of Japanese aesthetics.
Traditional Japanese fabric made from flax, silk, or cotton, was woven to last and used for the most comfortable and healthy clothing appropriate to Japan’s climate. But the kimono and yukata dresses, the zori and geta sandals, that I saw when I first visited Japan have disappeared. In their place are disposable Western-style nylon and polyester clothes, plastic shoes, that do not fit the Japanese body, cause discomfort and disease, and produce mountains of undegradable waste.
Wooden Japanese houses breathe with the wind, water, and soil around, creating a true refuge for the family. They have been replaced with cold-blooded concrete housing complexes funded by multinational banks that have devastated traditional neighborhoods even more brutally than the airstrikes.
Japanese food highly nutritious and delicious, has become a rarity these days. It its place spreads American-style fast food, processed foods heavy with sugar and carbohydrates and injected with cancer-causing additives. What is left of traditional Japanese cusine is for tourism and novelty.
The highly literate, artistic, and expressive Japanese have been stripped of their identity through decades of bombardment with consumerism propaganda that has distorted basic values. The role of American corporations promoting a culture based on money and waste was substantial.
The United States destroyed Japan’s traditional culture through a violence of the soul. It was a crime to give multinational corporations, and private banks, such control over Japan’s economy.
We Americans should not hide from these truths; we should be fully aware, and we should repent.
Apology as a Presidential Candidate, Confession as a United States of America
It was a sin to push American culture as a model while hiding its shameful core, to introduce to Japan a narcissistic consumer culture that reduces citizens to idiots.
The original sin can be found in the conquest of North America, from the East Coast, to the Midwest, to California, to Hawaii and to Japan and Asia. The crazy culture of the Europeans made material development and consumption more important than spirituality and morality. It made the extermination of Native Americans, and the erasure of their culture, a culture that featured a remarkable balance of human settlements with nature.
That cultural violence continues on today in Japan and across Asia.
Enough is enough. It must end now.
Americans must be aware of our crimes in the Pacific War, of our constant interference in Japanese politics after the war, and of our introduction to Japan of a toxic narcissistic consumption culture that promoted narcissism and growth over spiritual insight and community harmony.
I want Americans to understand what happened and to take responsibility for it.
We must repent and purify ourselves and our culture, so that we can make America great “for the first time.”
Dear citizens of Japan, I am sorry for the crimes of the United States I have described.
“Gomen nasai!” (I am sorry!)
And from now on, I hope that you will consider becoming true friends with a new repentant and honest America.
My Promise as Future President of the United States
I am seeing the nomination for the nomination of the Green Party US as a candidate for president. It is in this capacity that I address you concerning the criminality and brutality of the two nuclear attacks of 1945, and the deaths of civilians in Tokyo and other cities during the Pacific War. I sincerely and sincerely apologize to all Japanese people, and to the world.
I will demand that the U.S. government admit how America has been transformed by its own evil acts, and how the secrecy surrounding these acts has laid the foundation for an unaccountable military-industrial complex that threatens the entire Earth today.
Americans lacked the courage to confront the serious corruption in the American government that resulted from the expansion of secret administration within the American military after 1941. I would like to apologize to the Japanese people, and the world, for that lapse that continues to this day. We Americans should be ashamed of ourselves.
Furthermore, as president, I will insist that all materials related to the Manhattan Project, and to the employment of the atomic bomb, and other weapons for killing civilians, be immediately declassified. I will also demand that all the operations carried on in Japan after the war by American intelligence agencies and corporations to interfere in Japanese politics and society be declassified as well.
The true story must be known to Americans and to Japanese.
Finally, if elected President, I will lead the United States to adhere to its commitment to eliminate nuclear weapons under the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which we signed and to which we supposedly adhere.
First, we will reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by the United States to less than 500 over the next five years, and then we will eliminate them completely within 10 years. We can defuse the vast majority within a few months of my inauguration.
Only when our country, the United States, expresses its resolve and its commitment to nonproliferation at home will we have the legitimacy, and the moral authority, to demand the same from the rest of the world.
Stupidly, foolishly, the United States has wasted trillions of dollars on the “modernization” of America’s nuclear forces under the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations in blatant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. military’s Strategic Command is currently discussing extremely concrete plans for a preemptive nuclear strike on both Russia and China. I will order that this suicidal idiocy stop immediately.
If America is preparing for a global nuclear war, and trying to draw Japan into that catastrophe, it has no right to criticize Iran, North Korea, or any other country.
The United States, now facing economic, political, and cultural collapse, needs Japan’s assistance now. We do not need money, but rather a courageous spiritual tradition of courageously seeking truth, peace, and justice. I found that tradition in the Japanese classic Hagakure which I shared with my students as a professor of Japanese literature.
From now on, Americans, with due humility, will learn from the Japanese, and we will join together the best of Eastern and Western civilizations so as to form a truly universal culture wherein there will be an equal, balanced, transparent, and accountable relationship between the United States and Japan.
Let us get to work.
The first step must be for the United States to admit clearly its past crimes and to apologize.
Dear citizens of Japan, thank you for kindly listening to me today.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
二〇二〇年からのアメリカの絶望的な政治文化に鑑み、大統領候補者の準備を始めた頃、私は自分のキャンペーン・スローガンを “Make America Great for the First Time”、即ち「アメリカを初めて偉大な国にしよう。」としました。もしかしたら皆様はこれに似たスローガンを覚えておられるかもしれません。そうです。二〇一六年にトランプ大統領は候補者として “Make America Great Again” 即ち「アメリカを再び偉大な国にしよう。」というスローガンを挙げたのです。しかし日本人とアメリカ人が国内国外の深刻な混乱に直面している現状に於いては、そのような漠然としたノスタルジアに落ち込む暇もありません。昔のアメリカには確かに魅力的な部分が在ったかもしれませんが、決して偉大な国ではなかったのです。
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