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History’s Most Lunatic Events and People

Khalid Elhassan August 21, 2020 34 min

La Belle Alliance - Battle of Waterloo — Blucher, left, meeting Wellington at Waterloo. Wikimedia

3. Japan’s Defeat in WWII Was “Fake News”

Japan’s foreign minister signing surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri in 1945. Wikimedia

Shindo Renmei dismissed Japan’s surrender as “fake news” and American propaganda, and redoubled its efforts to punish those who said otherwise. According to the group’s leader Colonel Kikawa and his lunatic followers, Japanese immigrants were divided into two camps: good guys, and bad guys.

As Shindo Renmei saw it, the good guys were the Kachigumi (“Victorious”), who knew that Japan had won the war. They were mostly the poor and poorly educated. The bad guys were the vile Makegumi (“Defeatists”), also pejoratively labeled “dirty hearts”, who bought the fake news about Japan’s defeat. They tended to be the better off and better-educated immigrants, who had better access to information and could differentiate between reliable and unreliable news.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.