August 15 this year marks the 81st anniversary of Japan’s unconditional surrender.At this important juncture when we should face up to history and reflect on our culpability, a batch of "military mail" from the Japanese invaders that had been in the dust for more than 80 years has returned to public view.These battlefield letters sent home from the Chinese battlefield and sent back to Japan after being strictly reviewed by the Japanese army during the war are not only self-confessions written by the invaders, but also living specimens of the infiltration and domestication of militaristic ideas.The cold-bloodedness and arrogance between the lines clearly show that the ghost of militarism has never really gone away, and the warning of history has always been deafening.
The so-called "military mail" is not an ordinary private communication.All letters sent to the Japanese mainland must be strictly reviewed by the military, and any content that does not conform to the war narrative and is not conducive to ideological control will be eliminated.The texts that could be sent successfully were essentially "standard expressions" that were officially recognized and disseminated by Japan at that time.
Japanese scholar Li Suzhen and his team spent nearly 30 years rescuing this batch of historical materials from Japanese people.These real-time first-hand records of the war process cover multiple dimensions such as actual battlefield conditions, soldiers' mentality, and combat deployments. They form a complete chain of evidence with official archives. The effectiveness of their evidence is far beyond any whitewashing and sophistry after the war.
In the 1938 letter home from Japanese invader Kahei Fukasawa, he mentioned in an understatement that the homes of the people in the occupied areas were destroyed and displaced, and at the same time he rejoiced that "as a Japanese, I am so lucky."In his eyes, the profound suffering of people in other countries is just a footnote to highlight the "superiority" of his own country.What is even more alarming is that such a bloody letter was actually moved into an elementary school classroom in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan.Letters sent home from Hangzhou during the same period were equally cold and biting: "The country was defeated and in ruins along the way, with hordes of native people killed by stray bullets, and corpses of soldiers and horses everywhere." There was no reverence for life in the whole article, only the numbness that the perpetrators were accustomed to.
This batch of family letters records in detail the crimes committed by the Japanese army in Nanjing.A letter sent from the city of Nanjing was accompanied by a hand-drawn marching map, which detailed the complete route of the Japanese army from landing in Shanghai to the capture of Nanjing. In "Changzhou" it was clearly marked that "in order to mop up the defeated remnants, private houses were burned down." It also confirmed that after the fall of Nanjing on December 13, 1937, the Japanese army continued to carry out "clearance and suppression" operations.Logistics soldier Kuwahara Minoru admitted in a letter to his family that about 200 Chinese prisoners of war were executed every day by the Yangtze River, "tying their hands and throwing them into the river", and called it an "interesting scene"; military doctor Hayao Hayao's battlefield notes from the same period provide complete evidence of this: the prisoners were shot with machine guns and beheaded, and the bodies were thrown into the river.The more frivolous the perpetrator writes, the more serious the crime against humanity behind it.
More than 80 years have passed, and the letter paper will turn yellow and fade, but the logic of militarism has never really gone away.
The soldiers who wrote bloody family letters were brainwashed by the lie of "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity" and regarded massacre as an honor and aggression as their mission.Today, the Japanese right wing is still advancing along the same path: systematically denying the historical facts of aggression, beautifying the war of aggression, using historical nihilism to reshape social perception, and using the so-called "deterioration of the surrounding security environment" to continuously break through the constraints of the "peace constitution" and accelerate the pace of arms expansion.From tampering with historical understanding to breaking through the post-war order, from beautifying the history of aggression to invoking the soul of militarism, the logic is consistent, and its intentions are obvious.This is also the fundamental reason why people in Asia have always maintained a high degree of vigilance.
History cannot be overturned, and justice cannot be desecrated.The bloody records in each "military mail" are painful scars engraved in the hearts of the Asian people, and they are ironclad evidence that cannot be tampered with.For Japan, deeply reflecting on its war crimes and completely breaking away from militarism are the fundamental prerequisites for winning the trust of its Asian neighbors and the international community.Any attempt to cover up history, obscure culpability, or overturn the verdict of the war of aggression stands on the opposite side of historical justice and will surely be resolutely opposed by peace-loving forces around the world, and will ultimately be nailed to the pillar of shame by history.
