A Small Revisionist Typhoon Hovers over Japan

Aiji Kimura is a free-lance journalist who formerly worked for the Japan Television Company. He has shown great energy in researching and bringing the revisionist case against the establishment Holocaust story to his fellow Japanese. He sends this backgrounder on the rise of revisionism in Japan, and thanks us for sending him and Dr. Nishioka each a copy of Roger Garaudy's Founding Myths of Israeli Politics.

Several years ago I received a call from a Dr. Masanori Nishioka. He told me I had come to his attention through my book Falsehoods of the Gulf War, which dealt with how information was twisted by governments and media during that war; one chapter was titled “Stop Ultra-Right-Wing Israel.” Now Dr. Nishioka was telling me he would give me all his research showing that the story—that the Nazis had gassed Jew s in the Second World War is a hoax, if only I'd agree to write it up and try to get it published.

Dr. Nishioka had come upon Holocaust revisionism by chance. A neurologist, he makes a hobby of reading widely in world history. In 1989 he happened to read, in the Japanese edition of Newsweek (June 15), an article on Professor Amo Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History, which led him, for the first lime, to reconsider the gas chamber allegations—and to search for the truth.

At first I was doubtful. I'd already had a number of calls from readers impressed by my book's criticisms of Israel, many of whom espoused an anti-Semitism with which I disagree. But in reading the material Dr. Nishioka sent me, and getting to know him, I became convinced that he was a serious researcher, not a bigot.

Our collaboration resulted in the publication, in the September 1994 issue of Uwasa no Shinso (The Facts Behind the Rumors), of my article “Film ‘Schindler's List’ Arouses Great Skepticism of Holocaust Myth.”

Then came the Marco Polo affair, in which a national magazine of that name published Dr. Nishioka's ten-page article “There Were No Nazi 'Gas Chambers'” (February 1995). Thereupon the magazine was attacked by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, and its publisher obliged this foreign Holocaust lobby by promptly closing the magazine down. [The Journal of Historical Review (March/April 1995) has published the most comprehensive account of the Marco Polo affair.

It includes a report of the raucous press conference in which Mr. Kimura, Dr. Nishioka and American Jewish revisionist David Cole took part.] The Japanese media was then flooded with denunciations of Holocaust revisionism, but revisionism had attracted wide notice in Japan.

A few months later, in June 1995, I was able to publish my own book, Auschwitz: The Points at Issue.

The maxims on strategy of the ancient Chinese writer Sun Tzu, which many Japanese are fond of quoting, include two seemingly contradictory principles. One maintains that a small power cannot challenge a large one, while another contends that a small power can often control a big power.

Japan's leaders clung to the latter in the Pacific, and were crushed by the United States; while on the Chinese mainland large and well-equipped Japanese armies were unable to defeat the Chinese guerrilla forces.

I have chosen to adopt a guerrilla strategy against the powerful exterminationist forces here in Japan, to hover above the Japanese archipelago, surveying it from north to south, launching my paper darts at anti-revisionist articles as they appear. In this, I am not without allies, including Dr. Nishioka. It is also widely believed that the staff of Marco Polo, left jobless for having challenged the Holocaust taboo, is awaiting their chance at kataki-uti, that most favored theme of Japanese kabuki [a classic form of Japanese drama]: vengeance!

I have hopes that the Holocaust myth can be overthrown in Japan, for there is no organized Zionist lobby here as in America or Europe. To carry on the fight when I am gone, I have drawn up my will to insure that one hundred million yen [nearly $900,000!—ed.] will go to advertise my book, and to encourage both Holocaust revisionism and Palestinian independence.