2020, this article republishes a chapter originally posted on November 19, 2018. It criticizes a February 12, 2017 essay by Asahi Shimbun political editor Hirotoshi Sako, arguing that the true threats to freedom, human rights, and world order are not Donald Trump or Shinzo Abe, but China and the Korean Peninsula.

April 13, 2020
I am republishing the chapter I posted on November 19, 2018, under the title, “On February 12, 2017, an essay by Asahi Shimbun political editor Hirotoshi Sako was published on page seven of the Asahi Shimbun.”
The following is the chapter I sent out to the world in utter astonishment at an article published in the Asahi Shimbun after President Trump took office on January 21, 2017.
On February 12, 2017, an essay by Hirotoshi Sako, political editor of the Asahi Shimbun, was published on page seven of that newspaper.
Every Japanese person with a sound mind who read it must have felt not only genuine astonishment, but even anger.
From the very opening, it was abnormal and grotesque.
It was an essay in which hostility toward Shinzo Abe was laid bare.
The writer was speaking as though he were an omniscient and omnipotent god, while remaining completely unaware of just how distorted his own mind and the minds of those around him were.
This was a political editor of a newspaper that should, in truth, have ceased publication three years earlier, in August, when it admitted and officially apologized for its fabricated reporting on the comfort women issue and the Fukushima nuclear power plant issue.
Moreover, as I have said many times, this was a man who was in no sense one of Japan’s finest.
Yet with his own mind, he was making outrageous judgments about a president chosen over the course of two years in the United States, the true leader of the world.
Without the United States today, the world would be a state of demons and monsters in the darkness, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the earth and mankind would already have disappeared.
The passages between asterisks are mine.
For U.S. President Trump, who seeks to carry through “America First” even in alliance relations, the standard by which U.S.-Japan relations are evaluated lies solely in whether they benefit the American economy.
The world’s attention has focused on his close relationship with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during Abe’s visit to the United States, but it has left the impression of a relationship utterly separated from the U.S.-Japan relationship that had previously contributed to multilateral cooperation.
Should Japan keep its distance from Trump, who has become a threat to universal values such as freedom and human rights and to the world order, or should Japan draw closer to him?
Except for those who have become agents of China or the Korean Peninsula through money traps, honey traps, and other operations conducted by their intelligence services, all people in the world with sound minds should silently understand that those who have become “a threat to universal values such as freedom and human rights and to the world order” are China and the Korean Peninsula.
When one considers that this is a fact even an elementary school child can understand, it is no exaggeration to say that the intellectual level of Asahi Shimbun reporters and editorial writers is, in fact, below that of elementary school children.
The prime minister bet on the latter course.
His judgment was probably that Japan’s position should be instilled before the new administration’s diplomatic policies toward China, Russia, and other countries were settled.
After the war, Japan built its foreign policy around its relationship with the United States, upon which it depended for security……the rest is omitted.
The world, too, should be astonished by the dreadful state of the minds of the Asahi Shimbun’s editorial writers.
People who are, in truth, third-rate, are judging and looking down on the president of the world’s greatest nation through their own distorted ideology, pseudo-moralism, and pseudo-socialism.
This man is no different from Hotsumi Ozaki.
Rather, with this man’s mind, he would never be able to understand that Shinzo Abe is a rare politician of modern times, and that he is both the finest realist and a democrat.
In any case, this is not merely dreadful.
This childishness and this malice are extremely dangerous not only for Japan, but also for the world.
The Japanese people and people around the world must realize that such people have attacked and weakened administrations by hunting for flaws in cabinet ministers, have exhausted every form of fabricated reporting, and have continued to belittle Japan.