This article examines the reaction of Renho, the Asahi Shimbun, and others to Finance Minister Taro Aso’s remark that Japan’s lower COVID-19 death toll reflected the “different civic standards” of its people. Referring to Sankei Shimbun’s Sankei-sho column, it argues that Japan should have confidence in its own approach rather than being trapped by the postwar pathology that cannot tolerate Japan doing well.

2020-06-07
Precisely because every country is different, Japan, too, may have confidence in the Japanese way of doing things.
And yet, among some people, a strange disease has become severe: unless Japan is inferior to other countries, or has failed and is being scolded, they cannot feel at ease.
The day before yesterday, Finance Minister Aso apparently said at a press conference that, when officials from various countries kept asking whether Japan must be using some kind of medicine because Japan had succeeded in its coronavirus response, he answered, “Perhaps it is because the civic standards are high,” and the officials were impressed.
Immediately, the Asahi Shimbun Online joyfully reported that Renho of the Constitutional Democratic Party, who had continued hiding the fact that she had held dual nationality and then, once it was exposed, tried to explain it away with a pack of lies, had bitten at this remark.
When I saw this, I immediately thought, “As I expected, Renho is not Japanese.”
At the same time, I thought that the Asahi Shimbun is a newspaper beyond redemption to the very end.
However, since I am not someone who makes a living from public discourse, I did not immediately feel like writing about it.
The following is from the next day’s Sankei-sho column.
It perfectly writes what a proper journalist should write about this sequence of events.
Of course, nothing in this world is 100 percent, but the time has long since come for people around the world to know that, in today’s Japan, the real newspaper is the Sankei Shimbun.
I can only hope that newspapers like the Asahi Shimbun are not the newspapers that represent your countries.
Sankei-sho
The fact that Japanese people are criticized as if it were somehow shameful or wrong to take pride in Japan’s distinctive qualities is probably one of the bad legacies of the postwar period.
On the 4th, in the Diet, Finance Minister Taro Aso said the following about why the number of deaths from the novel coronavirus infection is extremely low in Japan compared with major European and American countries.
“The civic standards of the people are different.”
He was reportedly referring to the words he used when foreign officials asked about the “mystery” of how requests for self-restraint and appeals had worked, even though Japan could not legally take the coercive measures, such as lockdowns, implemented in Europe and America.
In response, Renho, deputy leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, immediately bit at him on Twitter.
“How great do you think you are, Minister Aso?”
I cannot understand the context in which expressing confidence in the high cultural level of the people becomes a statement that Aso himself is great.
Renho also criticized him by saying that he was “not standing with the feelings of those who died of coronavirus infection, regardless of nationality, or with the feelings of their families,” but this is surely nothing more than a forced interpretation.
As expected, several newspapers took up Aso’s remarks critically in their morning editions on the 5th.
“It is a statement that could demean other countries” (Asahi),
“It could cause ripples” (Mainichi).
And yet they do not particularly regard as a problem countries such as South Korea, which praise their own coronavirus response and look down on Japan.
In the international section of this newspaper’s morning edition on the 5th, reporter Mina Mitsui reported on the current situation in France, where looseness is conspicuous.
Because of a national character that resists rules, the government has no choice but to impose them by unquestionable law, she wrote.
The article concluded, “The forms of countries vary.”
Precisely because every country is different, Japan, too, may have confidence in the Japanese way of doing things.
And yet, among some people, a strange disease has become severe: unless Japan is inferior to other countries, or has failed and is being scolded, they cannot feel at ease.