This section argues that the Japanese government failed to act decisively in August 2014, missing a critical opportunity to confront Asahi Shimbun over its role in narratives aligned with China’s strategic messaging.

Under worsening Japan–China relations, narratives portraying the Abe administration as “dangerous far-right militarists” mirrored Beijing’s diplomatic line. The author contends that Japan’s failure to summon and sanction major media outlets at that time resulted in incalculable reputational and strategic damage.

2017-07-20
Amid the worst deterioration in Japan–China relations, the Xi Jinping administration began with an overtly hostile posture toward Japan and clearly signaled its intent to seize the Senkaku Islands.
Its initial diplomatic strategy sought to drive a wedge between Japan and the United States by propagating the claim that the Abe administration was a dangerous far-right government plotting a revival of militarism, but this strategy failed.
It is widely known that Asahi Shimbun’s editorial writers were advancing arguments strikingly similar to this Chinese (Xi Jinping’s) diplomatic strategy.
Is this not truly chilling?
An editorial writer named Tominaga even went so far as to post on French social media that Prime Minister Abe was a Nazi.
This was not the act of a rank-and-file employee, but of an elite editorial writer at Asahi Shimbun.
The Japanese government should have summoned this newspaper to the Diet three years earlier, in August, subjected it to rigorous questioning, and shut it down.
It must be called a grave failure of governance.
Asahi Shimbun is a collection of people who would never, even in death, place full-page advertisements in major newspapers around the world to atone for their comfort women reporting and restore Japan’s honor and credibility.
At that time, had the government summoned the paper before the Diet and informed all Japanese citizens that the damage Japan had suffered was incalculable—astronomical in scale—and that even selling all of Asahi Shimbun’s assets would not suffice to compensate for it,
it should have shut down Asahi Shimbun as compensation and revoked the broadcasting license of TV Asahi as an accomplice.
Had that been done, no matter how bottomlessly malicious and deceitful Korea and China might be, they would not have been able to engage in the kind of arrogance and lawlessness seen today.
People around the world would instantly have known that the comfort women reporting was fabricated.
There would have been no opportunity for criminals residing in places such as Georgia or Germany to commit wrongdoing.
Because of the Japanese government’s grave failure, even the King of Hell awaiting these villains would have lacked enough cauldrons to inflict the harshest punishments upon them.