This essay examines a fabricated New York Times story and an NHK program that emulated its methods, showing how a Sankei Shimbun reporter’s on-site investigation uncovered the mechanics of distortion and propaganda funded by public license fees.

2016-05-27

The following is taken from a work by Masayuki Takayama, introduced in the previous chapter.
License fees that turn into NHK’s false programs
Four generations ago, the Tokyo bureau chief of The New York Times was Nicholas Kristof.
At the time of the Tiananmen Square incident, he happened to be at the Beijing bureau and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
With such a background, one might think it acceptable for him to serve as Tokyo bureau chief, but the articles he wrote in Tokyo were astonishing.
He dug into what he portrayed as the peculiarity of the Japanese and emphasized it in a vulgar style.
Between the lines one could even sense a hatred toward the Japanese.
For example, he nitpicked the shrill voices of department-store elevator girls.
At a time when people were saying that the less intelligent one is, the higher one’s voice becomes—like the war cries of Indians—he arbitrarily defined that “the status of Japanese women is low; therefore, to gain men’s favor, they deliberately adopt girlish high voices.”
At a school his son attended, they played musical chairs.
In the end, his son and a girl remained, and he wrote that “the girl yielded victory to my son. Japanese women, who exist only as playthings for men, are trained from childhood to yield to men.”
If that were so, the girl would never have survived to the final round of the game.
Even easily exposed lies, Sam Jameson of Los Angeles Times once said, tend to be indulged by American newspapers if they serve to demean the Japanese.
Even so, Kristof’s front-page story with photographs claiming that “Japanese soldiers ate human flesh” went beyond the limits of such indulgence.
In brief, he extracted a confession from an old soldier in a rural town in Mie Prefecture: that he had killed a fourteen-year-old Chinese boy on the Chinese front and eaten his flesh.
The old soldier was described as revealing “a secret he had never told even his wife of many decades,” saying that “it was only a single bite, but he is still haunted by nightmares,” while “his hands, like withered branches, trembled.”
Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese have no custom of cannibalism.
A reporter from Sankei Shimbun, suspicious of the article, visited the old man in Mie.
The old man said Kristof had come and asked whether he had eaten human flesh. When he replied that such a thing was impossible, Kristof pressed him about rumors.
Being pestered, he told a story from when he had been stationed in central China.
“Unusually fresh beef appeared at the market. Since it was rare, we bought it and all enjoyed sukiyaki together for the first time in a long while.” Then the military police came asking if anyone knew a certain person; they were pursuing someone accused of killing a child.
A comrade then joked that perhaps this meat came from that killed child.
It was merely a way of saying how fresh it was.
Kristof picked and chose bits of that story and turned it into “Japanese soldiers butchered a fourteen-year-old child and made sukiyaki.”
Was the child’s age his own inspiration?
Truly, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter.
The other day, NHK broadcast Asia’s “First-Class Nation,” depicting Japan’s rule over Taiwan.
In Kristof’s manner, it began with the lie that “Taiwan belongs to the Han Chinese,” and imitated his methods by having an elderly graduate of Taipei First High School speak.
The old man said he had been “discriminated against,” and therefore “changed his name to a Japanese-style one.”
Chiang Kai-shek, who fled from the mainland, first carried out the February 28 Incident, massacring Taiwan’s intellectuals; this too was presented as the natural result of their having “become Japanized and betrayed the Han Chinese.”
Taiwan, it claimed, is not actually pro-Japanese.
People had simply been unable to say so until now, and only at last had they voiced their true feelings to NHK.
This structure mirrors that of the old soldier who confessed his “secret cannibalism even from his wife” to Kristof.
When classmates from Taipei First High School who watched the program questioned the old man in astonishment, he protested that “I never said such things,” accusing NHK of intentional cut-and-paste editing.
For example, Tsai Kun-tsan explained that “for Taiwanese, the creation of new surnames and name changes required permission and were generally not allowed,” contrasting this with Korea’s notification-based system.
Regarding the February 28 Incident, Kō Bun’yū said, “Chiang Kai-shek slaughtered people as if on a monkey mountain, killing the old bosses to show who was superior.”
However, program producer Masayasu Tanabe avoided such facts and, following Kristof’s example, cut and pasted fragments of the elderly man’s words to fabricate a fictitious Taiwanese.
Kristof fabricated lies to please American readers who enjoy seeing Japan demeaned.
Tanabe, by contrast, poured license fees paid by Japanese people into fabricating lies in order deliberately to demean those very Japanese.
What possible reason is there to pay license fees to such an NHK?
(Issue of April 23, 2009)