This article compares NHK Watch 9 and TV Tokyo’s WBS coverage of the WHO and China on the night of May 18, 2020. It criticizes NHK for avoiding China’s responsibility while spending extensive time criticizing the United States, and examines what the interview with a Japanese WHO official, the absence of Takeshi Kasai, and the comments of Arima and Wakuda reveal about masochistic historical views and pseudo-moralism.

2020-05-18
Among my readers, those who, like me, watched NHK’s Watch 9 tonight and then watched TV Tokyo’s WBS must all have been astonished once again, thinking that NHK’s reporting on the WHO and China was “far too terrible!”
To put it in extreme terms, the difference was like heaven and earth.
Astonishingly, NHK did not touch at all on China’s responsibility, and, unbelievably, spent a long segment reporting that there had been shortcomings on the part of the United States.
As for the Japanese official at the WHO, NHK naturally did not have Mr. Kasai appear, even though today’s Sankei Shimbun editorial had named him as a person suitable to become director-general, and instead broadcast at length Arima’s interview with a woman named Shindo, whom almost all Japanese citizens were probably seeing for the first time.
The opening part was probably NHK’s editing, but it was an appalling piece of content praising China.
However, at the end, this Shindo said something extremely natural: that Japan is truly wonderful.
In response to that, after the interview, in a conversation with his colleague, Arima spoke as if it were only natural that he had asked her, “Is that really so?” about her evaluation of Japan, that is, about the excellence of Japan that most Japanese citizens know as a matter of course.
All people of keen insight must have recognized once again just how much Arima possesses a mind filled with a masochistic view of history.
Yesterday, I mentioned that entering and graduating from national universities represented by the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, or from Waseda and Keio, the leading private universities, is in itself nothing, and that, just like society itself, they are a mixture of the excellent and the worthless.
Wakuda is probably a person who can no longer be repaired.
Her comment about the WHO was the very height of “hypocritical pretence,” in other words, pseudo-moralism.
All people of keen insight must feel nauseated by NHK’s Watch 9.
This article continues.