This article examines the controversy surrounding the proposed liquidation of Japanese corporate assets in South Korea and criticizes the reporting stance of NHK’s News Watch 9. It discusses the wartime labor issue, the Japan–Korea relationship before 1945, postwar settlements, and the 1965 normalization agreements while asking how Japanese journalism should deal with history and national interests.

August 10, 2020
After the baseball broadcast ended, I switched the channel to NHK’s News Watch 9.
Why does South Korea continue to take an attitude toward Japan that I find utterly unacceptable?
The comments made by Mr. Arima a short while ago illustrate, in my view, one reason.
NHK entrusts one of its flagship news programs to a person who speaks in this manner.
I believe that precisely this kind of attitude within the Japanese media encourages the South Korean government to continue making increasingly uncompromising demands of Japan.
Regarding the so-called wartime forced-labor issue, scholars in South Korea who had long remained silent have begun publicly questioning the conventional account and presenting their own examinations based on documents and historical evidence.
Yet instead of expressing anger at the prospect of Japanese corporate assets being liquidated—something I regard as wholly unacceptable—he spoke in a manner that appeared to defend South Korea.
Was this because his historical outlook is fixed in what is often called Japan’s “self-denigrating view of history,” according to which Japan alone bears all responsibility?
He referred to President Moon Jae-in in connection with what he described in substance as “75 years since Japanese colonial rule.”
I want to ask a fundamental question.
In what sense was the Japan–Korea union “colonial rule” in the manner in which they describe it?
At that time, the Korean Peninsula was one of the poorest regions in the world, burdened by a rigid status system and a state whose finances were in collapse.
Japan invested enormous amounts of public money there.
Funds equivalent to more than 20 percent of Japan’s national budget at the time were devoted to building schools throughout the Korean Peninsula, developing an education system, and constructing dams, ports, railways, roads, and other infrastructure.
The modernization of the Korean Peninsula was thereby advanced rapidly.
After Japan’s defeat, Japan also relinquished claims to many of the assets it had left on the Korean Peninsula.
I believe that this postwar settlement is an important historical background for understanding the relationship established by the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea and the related agreements.
For further details, please reread the relevant chapters of this publication.
I regard NHK as a public broadcaster with extraordinarily large public influence within Japanese society.
Yet a presenter of its flagship news program can calmly use expressions such as “75 years of Japanese colonial rule” and speak in a manner that appears to adopt South Korea’s historical narrative.
In that, I see something of the historical outlook underlying NHK’s news division itself.
It is an outlook that tends to regard criticism and condemnation of Japan as self-evidently correct and to place responsibility exclusively upon the Japanese side.
I cannot avoid asking whether the people who dominate NHK’s news division have become a group for whom “anti-Japanese” rhetoric and perpetual “apology” have become almost automatic.
This broadcast alone was enough to reinforce that impression.
Watching this program is genuinely difficult for me, even when it is merely playing in the background.
What I cannot understand is an attitude that criticizes one’s own country and government while showing what seems to me excessive deference toward the governments of countries such as China and South Korea.
To condemn one’s own country’s history unilaterally while accepting another government’s claims with little critical examination is not, in my view, healthy journalism.
A Japanese news organization should first examine the facts, verify the historical record, and scrutinize the arguments of both Japan and the other country before reporting.
Criticizing one’s own country is not, by itself, journalism.
The responsibility of journalism is to stand on verified facts and to refuse to accommodate either domestic power or foreign governments.