This article reexamines the unreasonable attacks Toyota suffered in the United States and the lineage of America’s yellow press, including The New York Times and the Associated Press, through the writings of Masayuki Takayama. It sharply criticizes the distorted U.S. media coverage of Toyota’s brake issue, the pressure of America’s government, Congress, and litigation society, and the reality of the American media that Asahi Shimbun and NHK so eagerly rely upon.

July 17, 2026
The New York Times That Vilified Toyota and the Lineage of America’s Yellow Press: Masayuki Takayama Exposes the Distortion of U.S. Journalism
April 27, 2026
Originally published on July 15, 2019.
This chapter was prompted by an article in The New York Times, which NHK reported as if it were major news placing President Trump in desperate political danger.
It questions the true nature of American journalism.
Through the writings of Masayuki Takayama, it criticizes the Toyota brake issue, the distorted reporting of the American media, and the lineage of fabricated journalism running through The New York Times, the Associated Press, Pulitzer, and Columbia Journalism School.
July 15, 2019
The New York Times that vilified Toyota.
In Japan, Obama and that woman would have been arrested for fraudulent obstruction of business.
Last night, on NHK’s 7 p.m. news, Asahi Inoue treated it as major news from the very beginning, reporting as if President Trump had been driven into a desperate corner.
The source of that news was an article in The New York Times, which they so dearly love.
Then what kind of newspaper is The New York Times?
The following is from a recent work by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is a book that all Japanese citizens must read, especially those who merely subscribe to the Asahi Shimbun and watch NHK.
When the Toyota brake issue occurred in the United States, I happened to see footage of a woman from the American Midwest giving testimony.
I immediately understood that the story was fraudulent.
That was because I myself was a driver at the time.
Emphasis in the text, apart from headings, is mine.
The tyranny of America’s yellow press, which took money from Toyota.
The distorted reporting by American newspapers in the case in which 1.2 billion dollars was extorted.
The televised broadcast of a “runaway Prius.”
It was five years earlier that Transportation Secretary LaHood condemned Toyota, saying that Toyota cars were running out of control.
Following his remark, Lexus and Prius vehicles began running wild all over America.
One woman’s Lexus supposedly jumped to 160 kilometers per hour even though she had not pressed the accelerator, making her fear for her life.
In California, a police car rushed to the scene of a runaway Prius and drove alongside it, while the incident was broadcast live with instructions such as, “Stay calm. Now shift into neutral.”
David Gilbert, an associate professor at Southern Illinois University, analyzed the supposed runaway Prius and showed on ABC footage of a tachometer that jumped up on its own.
Thus Toyota sales declined, and the U.S. Congress summoned President Akio Toyoda, intimidating him by saying that as many as fifty American citizens had died and demanding to know what he would do about it.
Toyota vehicles were brought to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and examined thoroughly.
Any car can be said to have some abnormality.
Or a pretext can be attached to it.
In the 1980s, Audi, the German car that had been selling extremely well in America, was subjected to such a detailed inspection and was found to have a defect.
Its sales fell by 85 percent at once.
It was, in effect, driven out of the American market.
GM and Ford filled the gap and recovered.
It was the usual scenario.
However, unfortunately for them, not the slightest defect was found in Toyota.
The U.S. government took the matter to NASA and spent another year investigating, but it was useless.
Meanwhile, it was discovered that the runaway Lexus involved a foolish woman who had layered two extra floor mats.
It was also revealed that the man who had staged the live broadcast of the runaway incident had deliberately caused the car to run wild in order to extort money from Toyota.
The New York Times that vilified Toyota.
The professor from Southern Illinois University also admitted that he had fabricated false data after being paid by litigation lawyers.
Yet during those two years, just as Obama had hoped, Toyota lost market share in the United States, and GM recovered.
In Japan, Obama and that woman would have been arrested for fraudulent obstruction of business.
The American newspapers, including The New York Times, which vilified Toyota so viciously with racial prejudice mixed in, should first have apologized.
But no one apologized, and no one was arrested.
I wondered whether American citizens intended to play innocent together, and then I read in the newspaper that Toyota had agreed to pay 1.2 billion dollars to the U.S. federal prosecutors in settlement of the matter.
Japanese people are astonished.
Isn’t it supposed to be “America pays Toyota”?
This is like paying extra money to a fraudster.
Eric Tucker of the Associated Press explained this bizarre affair.
I thought he might begin by writing, “As one American citizen, I am so ashamed that I would like to crawl into a hole.”
But that expectation was also wrong.
The headline was, “It is difficult to indict Toyota executives.”
According to U.S. prosecutors, Toyota had tried, as a company, to conceal a dangerous defect.
They threatened Toyota by saying that if the company continued to coordinate its story, everyone would be arrested, but in the end, they merely imposed a 1.2-billion-dollar penalty and made no arrests.
They claimed that behind this was the complex structure of a cunning Japanese company, making it impossible to know who was responsible.
They attached a pretext to the “floor mat.”
It was written as if Toyota were a sly criminal enterprise.
Then what exactly had Toyota concealed?
They claimed that Toyota had been vague about “the possibility that lubricant in the accelerator pedal might harden and prevent it from returning,” and about “the floor mat problem that caused the San Diego accident in which four members of a family died, by folding under the accelerator pedal and causing the runaway.”
Wait a moment.
This is not a Korean car or an American car.
NASA had already investigated and proven that Toyota had made no such elementary mistake as lubricant hardening.
The issue is the “floor mat.”
This began with a lawsuit over a Corolla rear-end collision in Georgia two decades earlier.
Although the cause was inattention by the driver, the driver sued Toyota, claiming that the accelerator had failed to return.
When scientific examination of the accident vehicle showed that the accelerator was normal, the plaintiff changed his claim and said that the brakes had failed.
When Toyota scientifically denied that as well, he then insisted that the floor mat had folded and prevented the accelerator from returning.
Toyota could not scientifically refute even such a lie.
The federal district court, seemingly delighted, ordered Toyota to pay two million dollars in damages.
Since then, the pretext used against Japanese cars in America has been the “floor mat.”
Tucker should instead have explained why floor mats fold only in America, in terms of climate, local character, and the level of civic culture in the United States.
More than that, I wish he had pointed out the naivety of Japanese people who believed that Japan could conclude the TPP with such a country and conduct fair negotiations.
Incidentally, the man who wrote this racially biased commentary was nevertheless a graduate of Columbia Journalism School.
This was the first graduate school created to train “proper journalists,” founded according to the wishes of Joseph Pulitzer, the owner of the New York World.
Fabricated reporting comes from Columbia.
Pulitzer’s newspaper was called a yellow paper and was filled with vulgar, discriminatory, and false articles.
UFOs were also fabricated by this newspaper.
During the Sino-Japanese War, it had correspondent James Creelman report that “the Japanese army brutally killed 60,000 women and children in the city of Port Arthur.”
Japan was saved because Belgian minister A. d’Anethan denied it as “a false report intended to degrade the Japanese,” but Pulitzer’s newspaper was full of such malicious false reporting.
Before he died, Pulitzer regretted his past wrongdoing and established a graduate school for newspaper reporters at Columbia University in order to reform the fabricated reporting that had become the habitual nature of American newspapers.
He also arranged for the Pulitzer Prize to be awarded to reporters who wrote good articles.
Many of today’s journalists, including Tucker, have graduated from that school.
And yet this is what they have become.
To put it in the style of Momoe Yamaguchi: “Boy, what on earth did you learn?”
May 2014 issue
Now, in the face of the latest reports from the United States concerning Kioxia, I strongly feel the need to republish this chapter about Toyota as well.
Toyota, Toshiba, and now Kioxia.
Whenever Japanese companies attempt to expand their strength in the world, the forces of American litigation, politics, finance, and media stand in their way.
The Japanese people must never overlook this structure.