An analysis of entrenched global bias against Japan, exposing how Western media and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan perpetuate prejudice and distorted narratives. Drawing on a WiLL magazine dialogue, this essay explains why the author continues to publish the truth about Japan to the world—sometimes in as many as eighty languages.
Date: 2017-08-31

The world is the greater problem.
That is why I continue to transmit my words to the world, sometimes in as many as eighty languages.
In the current issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, pages 124 to 137 feature a dialogue titled “The World’s View of Japan Is Still Filled with Contempt and Prejudice,” between Earl Kimmonds and Yoshihisa Komori.
It also explains why the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which left me utterly astonished the other day, is able to collude with the Asahi Shimbun and commit such vicious acts.
The true nature of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which even granted an award to the Moritomo Gakuen coverage—coverage that cannot even be called journalism.
At the same time, the very title of this dialogue was something I immediately realized back on July 16, 2010, when I reluctantly stepped forward in this arena.
Not only Japan domestically, but the world itself is a far greater problem.
That is why I continue to send my message to the world, sometimes in as many as eighty languages.
What I write is not only the truth for Japan, but the truth for the world as well.
[Earlier text omitted. Emphasis in the text is mine.]
Komori:
When it comes to biased reporting on Japan by Europe and the United States, I have had experiences like this as well.
It was already August 2006, when Prime Minister Koizumi was visiting Yasukuni Shrine every year, that I received contact from a man named David McNeill, who claimed to be a Tokyo-based correspondent.
He said, “I am writing about the Yasukuni issue for the British newspaper The Independent, and I would like to hear your opinion.”
So we met at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo.
However, in reality, the Yasukuni issue was merely a pretext.
What he kept questioning me about was Japan’s Institute of International Affairs, which is funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
On the English-language site of that institute, a scholar named Masaru Tamamoto, who had also been contracted to write editorials for The New York Times, had published an extremely unusual article.
Although the site was often regarded as reflecting the views of the Japanese government, it openly mocked Japan’s official policies, particularly toward China.
Because the site was filled with excessively anti-establishment, left-leaning articles, I pointed this out in a column for the Sankei Shimbun.
As a result, the institute acknowledged its lack of responsibility, and Tamamoto’s English-language site was shut down.
However, among Japan’s left-wing circles and America’s liberal left, this process came to be portrayed as “Komori of the Sankei suppressing free speech.”
As a member of that group, Mr. McNeill went so far as to lie in order to summon me, with the intention of writing an article denouncing me.
He was Irish, and not a regular reporter for The Independent.
He likely wrote articles on a contract basis from time to time.
It was later revealed that he had never intended from the outset to interview me about the Yasukuni issue or publish anything in The Independent at all.
Kimmonds:
I also know this person named McNeill, and I have debated with him many times on online forums.
Komori:
Mr. McNeill published an article based on my interview on an internet forum that they themselves operated, and furthermore placed my photograph on the front page of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s members-only bulletin, Number One Shimbun, attacking me by saying, “Komori is saying such terrible things.”
But since I myself was also a member of that correspondents’ club, attacking a fellow member in the club’s own bulletin is strange in itself.
Moreover, that bulletin had long been hijacked and controlled editorially by left-wing activist types such as Mr. McNeill himself.
For someone to come from Ireland to Japan and then lecture Japan’s internal affairs from a lofty vantage point—declaring this unacceptable and that wrong—is nothing but arrogance.
In general, many correspondents from Europe and the United States tend to look down on Japanese people, which is why they intensely dislike statements such as Prime Minister Abe saying that Japan wants to revise its constitution in order to become a normal country.
When Japan argues that it is natural for a country to possess a military to defend itself, just like any other nation, they immediately cry, “A revival of militarism. Japan is planning to invade China again.”
Regarding the comfort women issue as well, they simply repeat the claims of China and South Korea, insisting that only right-wingers and ultra-nationalists oppose them.
Such a framework has already been firmly established.
In short, they look down from above on any movement by the Japanese people to run their own country independently, and condemn it as unacceptable.
This, too, may be a matter of what Professor Kimmonds earlier referred to as “culture.”
In that sense, I believe that one of the bases of biased reporting on Japan is the Foreign Correspondents’ Club located here in Japan.
(To be continued.)