1989, Jan. 15.
To the Editor of the Japan Times (ignored):
I disagree with Mr. Shusuke Nomura's argument (Jan. 12, p.3) that the emperor system because of its 2000 years of history is an indispensable inheritance from the ancestors.
When we go further back in history we will find ancestors who not only for 2000 years but for more than 200 000 years did the same thing, namely live in caves. Fortunately, later people found caves dispensable and now we live in central heated condominiums.
For umpteen thousand years our ancestors worshipped who knows whom or what ever, probably a mother goddess, as terracotta findings all over the world of big vulval women far advanced in pregnancy suggest. And Amen-Ra of Egypt, too, became dispensable, after he was worshipped even for 4000 years.
When the emperor system loses its charisma it will be abolished, too. That is an inevitable, natural process. And the Japanese people will have to decide when its time for it.
I don't think it is proper that foreigners, like foreign missionaries did, incite people against the Emperor and lead Anti-Tenno-demonstrations. Just imagine, Japanese leading Anti-Christ-demonstrations in front of churches in America.
Mr. Nomura is surely right, that when people discuss the emperor system they should not only focus on the first two decades of the Showa area but look at the long history this system has. And since Christians (Japanese and foreign) are such strong adversaries of the emperor system, he should have pointed out that in the 2000 years of Christianity there is hardly a decade where the Christians didn't commit the most heinous atrocities. Still, there is no public discussion to abolish Christianity.
Everybody abhors the German Nazis and people have become critical of Japan's involvement in war but nobody even knows that at the same time in Croatia the Catholics tried to exterminate the Orthodox Serbs (of course also the Jews and Gypsies) and that the third largest concentration camp at that time on European soil was Jasenovac run by Catholic clergymen, Jesuits and Franciscan monks, because the Church has the power to suppress such information.
Branko Bokun, a representative of the Red Cross who wanted to ask the Pope to do something against the massacre in Croatia tried for four years in vain to get an audience with the Pope. During that time the Pope received the mass murderer Pavelic and other members of the Ustasha several times and gave them his blessing.
When Bokun tried after the war to have his diary published more than 30 publishers refused its publication, and only 1973, it was published.
Also Vladimir Dedijer had difficulties to have his well documented account about the Vatican and Jasenovac published. (This book is now available at AHRIMAN.)
The Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit (both mayor German newspapers) refused advertisements for church-critical books and the Church succeeded in intimidating a printing-shop that was willing to print material for an anticlerical group.
We see that although they no longer pull out the tongues and chop off the hands or kill heretics they still find ways to muzzle them. The Church felt never sorry or apologized for its crimes. John Paul II, too, refused an apology to the survivors of the atrocities of the clericofascist Ustasha regime, although very fond of travelling, he rather had his trip to Yugoslavia failed.
Although the Church commits recently only minor crimes (security fraud, intimidation, gross insult, for example, women who have an abortion are called Auschwitz-murderer, persecution of Atheists in countries like West Germany where the government makes it easy etc.) we should look at its long history and seriously consider to abolish Christianity. The Gospel made the people neither better nor happier.
Holger Hermann Haupt
PS: The rightist Shusuke Nomura later committed Seppuku in an
Asahi Shimbun (newspaper) office because he could not bear the
insult that the newspaper had published a cartoon that made fun
of Mr. Shusuke Nomura's "Wind" movement by writing the
character for 'wind' without one important stroke that it read
'lice'.
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