The name of former Malaysian foreign minister Ghazali Shafie crops up quite often on ultra-rightist Japanese websites which quote him as having said

“Why does Japan apologise? Without Japan South East Asia would not have gained independence”

The quote seems to have originated from a 1991 book “Sekai kara mita Dai Towa Sensou (Dai Towa War in the World’s Eye)” by Futaranosuke Nagoshi and published by Tendensha, which uses quotes attributed to famous people both in Asia and in the West to establish that Japan’s war was a holy war of independence for Asia, and to explode the ‘myth’ of Japanese invasion of Asia.

Since Ghazalie Shafie is not a well known politician in Japan, oftentimes you will see the websites use photos of Sukarno or Mahathir Mohammad instead so that the unwary reader will be impressed by an image of someone they think they recognize.

It is amazing to see how a lot of Japanese people read these quotes from a famous Malaysian foreign minister and suddenly start to believe that the world history that they learned at school was a form of American brain-washing. From that day on, these people start to ‘discover’ the hidden history of Japan’s holy war in Asia and the deep gratitude that all Asian nations feel toward Japan for having liberated them from colonialism.