ebookland Chapter 896 The Truth
Chapter 896 The Truth
On the high platform, those who had just been roaring for their "noble bloodline" and were now remnants of the old era, facing the impending judgment, subconsciously turned their gaze to the huge screen.
There, what is about to unfold is the other side of them, and their fathers, that they most wanted to erase from history...
There was no narration, and no background music.
There was only a cold, noisy, and oppressive black and white.
The scene takes place in a pristine white room that resembles some kind of medical research facility. Several men dressed in white lab coats and wearing masks, with only their cold eyes visible, are gathered around a cold operating table.
On the stage lay a naked man from China, tightly bound. He was still struggling, and from his throat came muffled, distorted sobs.
Immediately afterwards, a gasp of surprise arose from the group of cherry blossom survivors below the stage.
"Baka! What are you Chinese trying to do?! How can you show such cruel scenes to children?! Turn it off right now!"
A well-dressed, middle-aged man who looked like a corporate executive stood up from the crowd. His face carried a strong sense of unease and superiority, typical of "civilized people," towards this "barbaric" scene.
In his view, Japan was civilized and just. Their army was there to liberate the ignorant "Chinese" and to spread the seeds of "civilization."
Therefore, for the Chinese to broadcast such obviously fabricated, bloody images intended to smear the "Imperial Army" is a blatant insult to the "Bushido spirit" of their Yamato people.
However, on the screen, a cold, added-in-post Japanese character, like a label, slowly appeared.
—"The Kwantung Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Headquarters, also known as the Ishii Unit or the Black Sun Unit."
—"Experimental Project: Vivisection"
Immediately afterwards, in the scene, a researcher picks up a scalpel that gleams with a cold light.
Then, under the gaze of that bound Chinese man, his eyes filled with endless pleading.
Slowly, it parted his still slightly rising and falling, healthy chest.
……
"vomit--"
Immediately, a chorus of retching sounds filled the stadium.
Many people, especially women with children, instinctively turned their heads away, unable to bear to look any longer.
But many more people, especially the young students, such as Tanaka Naruto and his class monitor Miyuki, were frozen in place, staring blankly at the screen.
The education they received from childhood—that "the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is a sacred and just cause" and "the Imperial Army is the sower of civilization and order"—is being torn to shreds piece by piece by the bloody and cruel reality before them.
The images on the screen continued to appear.
"Experimental Project: Extreme Freezing Test"
Several innocent civilians from the Dragon Kingdom were stripped naked, and their hands were forcibly immersed in a huge wooden tub filled with ice water. A researcher nearby meticulously recorded the time it took for their skin to change from rosy to bluish-purple, and finally to complete necrosis, using a stopwatch.
"Experimental Project: Virus Injection"
Experimental subjects infected with plague, cholera, and anthrax were confined one by one to small, transparent observation rooms. Their bodies began to fester, they developed fevers, and they convulsed. Meanwhile, researchers on the other side of the wall meticulously recorded every painful statistic of their final moments, as if observing a petri dish under a microscope.
……
Scene after scene.
One after another.
Watching everything unfold on the big screen, the tens of thousands of ordinary people in the stadium, who had initially been just watching with a bit of curiosity, were completely stunned.
Their brains stopped thinking.
Because everything before their eyes had completely overturned their understanding.
Those are fake, right?
Those must have been fabricated by the Chinese to smear us, right?
After all, in the minds of the Japanese government and all its officials, their past propaganda had always been so "open and aboveboard".
Their army and their commanders were portrayed as embodiments of "justice" who would lead the entire ignorant and backward Asia out of darkness and toward civilization!
They are using their own blood to create a great "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" that belongs to all Asian people and will never again be bullied by Western powers.
Even the devastating Pacific War, in which the US lost to the US, was portrayed in official propaganda as nothing more than a ruthless and despicable suppression of the "rise of the yellow race" by the "white elite" led by the US.
However, now...
These bloody, cruel, unedited, and unembellished raw truths were presented to them abruptly and without reservation.
That illusory sense of national pride they had always firmly believed in as being on the "side of justice" was utterly shattered and collapsed at this moment.
However, this is only the beginning.
After broadcasting the heinous crimes committed by the Japanese army in China, crimes that would shock any human being with a conscience.
On the big screen, the image changed.
Those devils in white coats have vanished. In their place are officials in gorgeous kimonos and recruitment posters that look full of "hope" plastered throughout the streets and alleys of the cherry blossom country.
"For holy war! For the future of the nation! Young women, the time has come to contribute your strength!"
— Recruitment plan for the Nanyang Women's Volunteer Team.
"Work? Make money?"
"Bullshit! My sister believed their lies back then!" In the crowd, a burly man who looked like a dockworker jumped up from the ground when he saw the poster. His eyes, bloodshot with anger, stared at the ashen-faced former noble war criminals on the platform, and he roared like a wounded beast!
“My sister was fooled by this damn poster because our family was so poor! They said she could go to a factory in Southeast Asia to work as a textile worker and earn tens of dollars a month!”
"But what happened? She left and never came back!"
"It wasn't until later that I learned from a fellow villager who had managed to escape that I realized they weren't there to do any factory work! They were sold to brothels in Southeast Asia! They were used as cheap prostitutes to entertain the soldiers on the front lines!"
"All the money they earned was used as so-called 'patriotic donations'! And in the end, they all died in that damned, unknown rainforest filled with malaria and miasma!"
His words, like a spark, instantly ignited another flame of anger in the crowd, one that was even closer to their own.
"The Manchukuo Immigration Program..."
“Back then, my grandfather also responded to the government’s call, gave up his farmland in the countryside, and took his whole family to that godforsaken place! But when they got there, all they were allocated were saline-alkali lands that couldn’t grow any crops at all! In less than two years, most of them starved to death!”
“And those exorbitant taxes! They’ll levy any kind of tax they can find to fund the war! What ‘head tax’ and ‘defense tax’! My father’s legs were broken by those damned tax officials because he couldn’t pay them!”
If the numerous crimes committed by the Japanese army in China before could not evoke such direct and empathetic anger in the ordinary people of Japan present due to geographical and ethnic barriers, then...
So, on the screen, these policies of exploitation against their own compatriots, so cruel and outrageous, thoroughly touched the deepest nerve in the soul of each of them, a nerve that had long been suppressed and numbed.
Because the vast majority of people present, their parents, or rather, themselves, had their lives irreversibly altered because of these damned policies.
Suddenly, the whispers that had been like an undercurrent in the crowd began to grow louder and louder.
Countless gazes, filled with shock, bewilderment, and raging fury, shot towards the figures on the high platform, like sharp swords, from all directions. These figures were once regarded as "gods" by them.
"Are all of these... are they real?!"
"Answer us! You bunch of liars! Is what's written here true?!"