How are suspicions created and amplified through reporting?
Written on July 31, 2020, this article introduces Masayuki Takayama’s column “After Kagoike,” examining the 1966 ANA crash in Tokyo Bay, the subsequent accident investigation, the reporting of the Asahi Shimbun, and the Moritomo Gakuen controversy in order to question the relationship between facts, conjecture, journalism, and public opinion.

2020-07-31
The July 30, 2020 issue of Shukan Shincho, released on July 22, carried Masayuki Takayama’s regular column Henken Jizai.
This article, dated July 31, 2020, introduced the installment entitled “After Kagoike.”
Takayama linked the crash of ANA Flight 60 in Tokyo Bay on February 4, 1966 with the later Moritomo Gakuen controversy, arguing that unsupported suspicions can be magnified through media coverage.
ANA Flight 60 was a Boeing 727 flying from Chitose to Haneda.
It crashed into Tokyo Bay, killing all 133 passengers and crew, and the cause was ultimately not determined.
Regarding the sale of state-owned land to Moritomo Gakuen, the land had an appraised value of 956 million yen and was sold for 134 million yen after an estimated 819.74 million yen in underground-waste removal and disposal costs and other factors were taken into account.
Japan’s Board of Audit later found deficiencies in the valuation process and said that important details of how the sale price was determined could not be adequately verified.
The judgments and causal claims concerning the Asahi Shimbun, the aviation investigation, the Moritomo controversy, and the individuals mentioned below are therefore preserved as Takayama’s argument as presented in 2020.
Quotation
“There are, however, quite a few people in the world with highly suspicious minds.
Among them, the Asahi Shimbun was pathological.
It became suspicious because Hidehiko Kimura, who headed the accident investigation, had been involved in ANA’s selection of aircraft and had helped choose the Boeing 727 in question.”
Text
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column published under the title “After Kagoike” at the end of last week’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
This article, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
In 1966, an ANA aircraft flying from Chitose to Haneda crashed into Tokyo Bay in the darkness of night.
Its last communication with air traffic control from over Kisarazu was at 7:00:20 p.m.
Forty seconds later, it failed to respond to the controller’s call.
The route between Kisarazu and Haneda was searched, and the bodies of all 133 passengers and crew, together with aircraft wreckage, were found at a point 13 kilometers from Kisarazu.
The Ministry of Transport commissioned a team headed by Hidehiko Kimura, a Nihon University professor and leading figure in Japanese aviation, to investigate the cause.
The aircraft was Boeing’s state-of-the-art 727, whose performance was said to be almost comparable to that of a jet fighter.
Indeed, there is an anecdote that when Prime Minister Eisaku Sato flew to Naha in the same type of aircraft in connection with the reversion of Okinawa, the Air Self-Defense Force F-86 fighters escorting him could not keep up.
Its descent performance was particularly remarkable, and three accidents had already occurred in the United States in which pilots descended too far without realizing it.
No particular abnormality was found in the recovered wreckage, and most people accepted the explanation that the pilots had failed to master such a high-performance aircraft and had made a “pilot error.”
There are, however, quite a few people in the world with highly suspicious minds.
Among them, the Asahi Shimbun was pathological.
It became suspicious because Hidehiko Kimura, who headed the accident investigation, had been involved in ANA’s selection of aircraft and had helped choose the Boeing 727 in question.
It raised suspicions such as, “If the aircraft he selected himself had a structural defect, he would lose face,” and, “He intended from the start to blame the pilots.”
There was no evidence.
It was pure conjecture, but once viewed through such eyes, even “burns on passengers” could be interpreted as evidence of an aircraft defect if they had occurred before the crash.
Any number of insinuations could be constructed.
The Asahi became particularly fixated on the case of one passenger who was reportedly found “wearing a rosary around the neck, something the passenger did not normally do.”
Fire races through the cabin and the aircraft plunges downward.
Perhaps the passenger, realizing that death was imminent, placed the rosary around the neck.
Kunio Yanagida described this episode and received the Oya Soichi Nonfiction Award.
The rosary story became accepted as “truth,” and the public began to suspect Hidehiko Kimura.
But the accident occurred within thirty seconds.
Panic psychology holds that when events exceed the brain’s processing capacity, people can no longer act logically.
The rosary story was too convenient to be true, the column argues, yet in the end the Asahi’s suspicions prevailed, and the final conclusion of the Tokyo Bay investigation was distorted into “cause unknown, with the possibility of an aircraft defect.”
Having acquired a taste for this, the Asahi thereafter began competing through vulgar suspicions.
One such case was the controversy over state-owned land sold cheaply to Moritomo Gakuen.
The Asahi conjectured that because Akie Abe knew Kagoike of Moritomo Gakuen, she must have intervened to secure the land-price reduction.
The Ministry of Finance certainly reduced the indicated price by around 800 million yen from approximately 900 million yen, but this had been a pond used for industrial-waste disposal.
Dig into it and piles of rubbish appear.
Aircraft approaching Itami Airport also pass overhead.
The column argues that a discount was therefore natural, pointing as well to the neighboring park acquired by Toyonaka City.
However, opposition parties wishing, in Takayama’s view, to divert attention from North Korean missiles embraced the Asahi’s suspicions, and television stations joined the uproar.
An employee at a regional Ministry of Finance office subsequently took his own life.
But the original allegation, the column argues, was merely conjecture.
Without fire, there could be no smoke.
The affair ended by petering out.
Then, the column argues, the Asahi remembered the Tokyo Bay accident.
The campaign to bring down Abe would proceed through unscientific emotional argument.
The widow of the employee who had taken his own life then sued the government.
Arguments had recently been heard at the Osaka District Court, and the Asahi’s coverage, Takayama writes, was extraordinary.
The front page heightened emotion with the headline, “I Want to Know the Truth About My Husband’s Death,” while the social-affairs page pressed ahead with a tear-jerking account, “On His Final Morning, My Husband Said, ‘Thank You.’”
An editorial asked, “Does the government have a conscience?” as though Abe bore responsibility for the suicide.
Yet, the column argues, just as with the suicides of two Monju employees, it was the media—making a commotion without looking at the facts—that caused the tragedy.
Moreover, the Kagoike couple, who had long been central figures in the Moritomo controversy, did not appear at all in this “all-Moritomo” coverage.
Kagoike had stated online that he had been “deceived” by anti-Abe figures including Tamotsu Sugano and Mizuho Fukushima.
Those who interfere with the preferred line of conjecture are discarded.
That, the column says, is characteristic Asahi consideration.
The employee’s widow, too, will be discarded tomorrow.
That is what makes her pitiable.