This essay examines how communist ideology and postwar infiltration shaped Japan’s major media institutions. Drawing on testimony by Masayuki Takayama and Hiroshi Hasegawa, it analyzes NHK’s reporting and demonstrates that it shares the same structural ideology as the Asahi Shimbun.

I was thus led to the firm conviction that NHK shares the same structural makeup as the Asahi Shimbun.
2016-12-20
As already noted, Masayuki Takayama has taught us that, amid the chaos following Japan’s defeat, large numbers of resident Koreans and others infiltrated media organizations such as NHK.
Yesterday, as I watched NHK’s news programs at 7 p.m., 9 p.m., and 11 p.m., a certain passage from Who Turned Asahi Shimbun into What It Is? by Hiroshi Hasegawa and Kiyoshi Nagae came vividly to mind.
I was thus led to the firm conviction that NHK, too, shares the same structural foundations as the Asahi Shimbun.
For any proper national broadcaster of Japan would naturally correct the attitude and opinions of Onaga.
All emphasis in the text except for headings is mine.
“Are there any reporters at Asahi who are not left-wing?”
Nagae.
At the outset, the text reads, “I feel as though I am standing in a wasteland.”
This was Hasegawa’s reaction after reading the August 5, 2014 feature examining the comfort women reporting, and it was indeed sobering.
“I felt that I, too, must take this with that level of seriousness.
Reading the explanatory statement by the executive in charge of editing, I thought, ‘Even in defeat, there should be an aesthetic to how one loses,’ but I fully agree with Hasegawa’s observation that it was ‘nothing more than an attempt to blur the grave failure of the Yoshida Seiji testimony reporting and to shift the focus of the debate.’
That said, I could understand the internal atmosphere at Asahi, where one of the editorial writers who led the comfort women coverage reportedly sneered loudly to Hasegawa during the AERA days, asking, ‘Are there any reporters at Asahi who are not left-wing?’ Yet the notion that Asahi has been filled with communists both before and after the war made me think, ‘Is that really so?’
Reading anecdotes such as the one in which Fumio Kawatani, who demonstrated his skill in the evening column “Sunago,” remarked that ‘Asahi might have changed if Shin Saeki had become president,’ and that when Saeki stepped down as an executive he commented that ‘fortunately, we have entered an era in which one can serve as an editorial executive even without loyalty to the socialist bloc,’ leaving the room cold, I found myself thinking that perhaps knowing nothing at all is not such a bad thing (laughs).
I believe it was in 1965 that the U.S. Congress took issue with the biased Vietnam War coverage of Asahi and Mainichi.
In hearings of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Fulbright clashed with senior State Department officials, and the State Department bluntly stated, ‘There are many communists in both Asahi and Mainichi. Asahi alone has 200,’ causing a major uproar in Japan.
This was even taken up by teachers in high school political economy classes.
Kaname Tanaka, then managing editor of Mainichi and later its president, vehemently protested, calling it ‘an insult,’ and Asahi, if I recall correctly, also wrote in an editorial that it was ‘regrettable.’
Whether related or not, the application forms when we joined the company included a field asking for one’s “supported political party.”
In the 1970 entrance exam, among our peers it was said, ‘The Communist Party and Komeito are out. The Liberal Democratic Party is out of the question. The Democratic Socialist Party is also tough. Writing no supported party will not do. You have no choice but to write the Japan Socialist Party.’
Omitted hereafter.