Through Masayuki Takayama’s column, this chapter examines the Asahi Shimbun’s reporting posture over the Wuhan virus. It criticizes the way early domestic infection reports obscured China’s involvement and shifted the impression of responsibility toward Japan, while questioning the relationship between postwar Japanese media and Chinese propaganda.

May 28, 2020
During the previous SARS outbreak, China concealed the disease for three whole months after confirming infections, but this time Xi Jinping shortened the concealment period by one whole month.
That, they call decisive.
I cannot understand Takada’s mind in praising it so lavishly, but I will leave that aside here.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s column, which closes this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho, released today.
Once again, he proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
The German people must ask themselves what true reporting is.
They must ask themselves where true reporters are.
They must read the essays of his that this column has introduced until now, and deeply reflect on their own ignorance and on the many unforgivable acts of rudeness they have committed against Japan.
Already during the First World War, Japan had proved that it was the finest country in the world through the treatment it gave to German soldiers interned at the Bando Prisoner-of-War Camp in Tokushima Prefecture.
Nevertheless, the foolish elements in Germany rode on the propaganda of China, the country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, a country that has no concept of prisoners of war and knows nothing but slaughtering those it captures.
They not only forgot the debt of gratitude they owed for the generous treatment at the Bando Prisoner-of-War Camp.
There is more.
Japan, because of the Asahi Shimbun and Matsuoka, chose the wrong partner for an alliance.
That was also the inevitable result of America’s mistaken perception of Japan.
Japan’s defeat may have been fated, but there remains an unforgivable rudeness toward Japan, Germany’s ally in the Second World War.
That is the crime of using the reporting of the Asahi Shimbun, which may fairly be called a traitorous newspaper, to brainwash the German people into believing that Japan was a criminal state like the Nazis.
For the Germans who have been this way until now, and for Germans who remain this way, there is no gate to heaven.
Only King Enma waits in hell.
The people who make their living at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and at the state television stations that have broadcast John Rabe’s Nanjing Massacre every December, should understand this without being told.
I, the Nobunaga living in the present age, declare to the entire world in a great voice that there is no gate to heaven for you.
For your posture is as malicious as that of China and South Korea, no, even more malicious.
Except for the headline, emphasis in the text is mine.
Reporters descend into comfortable posts after retirement.
On January 16, the Japanese government announced that the coronavirus had already entered Japan from China.
According to an article by Shuichi Doi of the Asahi Shimbun, the first patient in Japan was “a man in his thirties living in Kanagawa Prefecture.”
This man traveled to Wuhan at the end of the year, and after spending time there with a pneumonia patient, “he himself developed a fever on January 3,” so he hurriedly returned to Japan and was hospitalized at a hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture.
As a result of testing, his infection was confirmed.
Naturally, he became the first patient in Kanagawa Prefecture.
One week later, the “first patient in Tokyo” was found.
Alongside that article, the Asahi Shimbun ran a dispatch from Masayuki Takada, its Beijing correspondent, praising Xi Jinping for taking “resolute and decisive measures” by locking down Wuhan, a major city of 11 million people.
What was decisive about it?
During the previous SARS outbreak, China concealed the disease for three whole months after confirming infections, but this time Xi Jinping shortened the concealment period by one whole month.
That, they call decisive.
I cannot understand Takada’s mind in praising it so lavishly, but I will leave that aside here.
Three days later, at a press conference, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare announced that the number of domestic infections had reached seven, and that the seventh, “a sightseeing bus driver in his sixties living in Nara,” was the first Japanese person to be infected.
I was astonished.
There had been reports that coronavirus patients had appeared here and there, but all of them had been Chinese.
In other words, the man whom Doi had described as having “returned from Wuhan” was not Japanese either.
He was a Chinese resident in Japan.
Yet Doi wrote “traveled” and “returned.”
If he was Chinese, the article should have said that he “went home to Wuhan” and “re-entered Japan.”
Moreover, the maliciousness of this man also became clear.
After being infected by his father in Wuhan and developing a fever, he decided to come back because he thought Japanese hospitals were better than Chinese hospitals.
He deceived quarantine at Narita by taking fever-reducing medicine.
Whether intentional or not, this was a full-fledged act of biological-weapon terrorism.
Around that time, the first patient also appeared in Chiba.
She was a female bus guide who had accompanied a Chinese tour group.
She too was Chinese.
One would think that she had been infected by her compatriots, but the Asahi concealed her nationality and wrote that the source of infection was “the bus driver who was the first Japanese patient.”
It thoroughly hides “China,” and even turns the source of infection into a Japanese person.
Then, in mid-February, a large number of infections emerged among taxi drivers and others who had attended a New Year’s party on a yakatabune houseboat on the Sumida River.
This was the case that caused an uproar as the first cluster, and from there the coronavirus crisis in Tokyo began to expand steadily.
Since Chinese tourists had been enjoying themselves on that houseboat just before the event, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government believed that the infection had spread from Chinese tourists, to the houseboat staff, and then to Japanese customers.
There is nothing particularly wrong with that.
Two decades ago, when lock-picking crimes were rampant, the Metropolitan Police Department made a leaflet saying, “If you see a Chinese person, call 110.”
In the same sense, it meant that people should also be careful from a public-health standpoint when dealing with Chinese tour groups.
However, the Asahi took issue with that.
Five reporters, including Yuki Okado, all joined forces and began a large-scale project titled “The 100 Days Since the First Infection in Tokyo.”
The first installment was this “houseboat” issue.
They said that when all the Chinese people who had returned to China were checked, not a single one had developed symptoms.
They argued that “Chinese people were the source of infection” was a rash conclusion by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, that this claim then took on a life of its own, and that the Chinese were innocent.
Why do Asahi reporters go so far to protect Chinese people?
The hint lies in He Qinglian’s China’s Great Propaganda.
Beijing hires foreign reporters who have served China for high pay.
Among them, the one Beijing valued most was Katsumi Yokobori, a former Beijing correspondent of the Asahi Shimbun.
Through articles that continued to beautify China, he became the person in charge of the Japanese edition of People’s China.
In the past, China allowed Kazuo Asami of the Mainichi Shimbun, who wrote about the “Hundred-Man Killing Contest,” to live permanently in Beijing, and allowed his daughter to enter Peking University.
Ieei Akioka, the Asahi correspondent who reported that Lin Biao was still alive even after he had died in a plane crash, was appointed the Japanese representative of the People’s Daily.
The Asahi has a bad reputation.
Even after retirement, it is difficult for its reporters to find reemployment.
But if they serve China, China will surely take care of them.
They write their articles believing that.
Do not make people read such pages.