Challenging the conventional narrative of wartime responsibility, this essay argues that in Japan it was Asahi Shimbun that instilled the ideology that led the military to war, revealing for the first time the decisive role of newspapers in shaping the mindset that made war possible.

2016-05-27

The other day, I wrote about war in a chapter titled after my hometown’s Teizan Canal.
At that time, I had once again arrived at an idea that was the first of its kind in the world.
I wrote that the twentieth century was a century of war.
I pointed out that what brought about the wars of the twentieth century was Western colonialism and competition for the acquisition of colonies.
However, in Japan, people have been steeped in a completely different historical view created by Asahi Shimbun (a truly absurd historical view, in reality).
That is to say, the Japanese military began the war.
Asahi Shimbun has continued to write that the ultimate source of that military was the Emperor, and therefore that the Emperor bore responsibility for the war; there is no room for debate on this point if one looks at the existence of Yayori Matsui, the Korean newspaper world that can be said without exaggeration to be a child of Asahi Shimbun, the Okinawan newspaper world, or overseas readers such as Alexis Dudden.
Those of us, myself included, who subscribed to Asahi Shimbun for many years must all have thought that way.
But would military men really think of starting a war?
To start a war, one would need, so to speak, an ideology.
I declare, for the first time in the world, something completely opposite to what society believes: the military does not start wars.
It was Asahi Shimbun that made the military start the war.
Before the war, there was of course no internet, not even television. What existed? Needless to say, only newspapers existed. As an appendage to them, radio must have existed, occupying virtually the same position that television does today.
People of every class and stratum throughout Japan were reading newspapers, with Asahi Shimbun at the forefront.
It is inconceivable that all military men were reading ideological books intended to start a war.
Almost everyone read newspapers. They may also have listened to the radio.
It is no exaggeration to say that their ideology consisted of newspapers and radio.
In other words, it was newspapers that made the military wage war.
Yes, a fact that no one had ever mentioned before flashed into my mind, a mind granted by God precisely for that purpose.