Based on a work by Masayuki Takayama, this article exposes the fabricated cannibalism story written by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times and the identical editing methods later used by NHK.
A Sankei Shimbun reporter’s investigation revealed deliberate distortion funded by license fees.

May 27, 2016

The following is from a work by Masayuki Takayama introduced in the previous chapter.

License fees that turn into lies on NHK.

Four generations ago, the Tokyo bureau chief of The New York Times was a man named Nicholas Kristof.
He happened to be in the Beijing bureau during the Tiananmen Square incident and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
Given that background, one might think he was qualified to serve as Tokyo bureau chief, but the articles he wrote in Tokyo were astonishing.
He dug into what he called the peculiarity of the Japanese and emphasized it in a vulgar style.
Between the lines, one could even sense hatred toward the Japanese.

For example, he complained about the shrill voices of department-store elevator girls.
At a time when it was being said that the lower the intelligence, the higher the voice—like the war cries of Indians—he arbitrarily defined it as follows: “The status of Japanese women is low. Therefore, to win the favor of men, they deliberately use childish, high-pitched voices.”

At his son’s school, they played musical chairs.
In the end, only his son and a girl remained, and he wrote, “The girl yielded the victory to my son. Japanese women, who exist merely as playthings for men, are taught from childhood to yield to men.”
If that were so, there would be no reason for a girl to survive all the way to the final round of the game.

Sam Jameson of the Los Angeles Times once said that even obvious lies tend to be overlooked by American newspapers if they serve to make a fool of the Japanese.
Even so, the story Kristof wrote with a front-page photograph—“Japanese soldiers ate human flesh”—went beyond the limits of indulgence.

In brief, he claimed to have heard a confession from an old soldier in a rural town in Mie Prefecture: that the soldier had killed a fourteen-year-old Chinese boy on the Chinese front and eaten his flesh.
The old soldier was said to have confessed a “secret he had never told even his wife of many decades,” adding that “it was only a single bite, but he is still haunted by nightmares,” as he “trembled his hands like withered branches.”
Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese have no custom of cannibalism.

A Sankei Shimbun reporter who found this article suspicious visited the elderly man in Mie.
The old man said that Kristof had come and asked whether he had eaten human flesh. When he replied that such a thing was unthinkable, Kristof pressed him further, asking about rumors.
Being so persistent, the old man said he told him a story from the time he had been stationed in central China.
“Fresh beef appeared unusually at the market. Since it was rare, we bought it and all enjoyed sukiyaki together for the first time in a long while.” Then military police came and asked whether we knew a certain person, saying they were searching for him on suspicion of killing a child.
One of the comrades joked that perhaps this meat had come from that murdered child.
It was merely a joke to express how fresh the meat was.

Kristof picked out parts of that story at will and turned it into “Japanese soldiers butchered a fourteen-year-old child and made sukiyaki.”
The child’s age—was that his own inspiration?
Indeed, worthy of a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter.

Recently, NHK broadcast Asia’s ‘First-Class Nation’, depicting Japan’s rule over Taiwan.
Using Kristof’s style of beginning with a lie—“Taiwan belongs to the Han people”—and imitating his method, the program had 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 Taiwanese intellectuals; this too was presented as a natural consequence of their “Japanization” and betrayal of the Han people.

Taiwan is not actually pro-Japanese, it claimed.
People had merely been unable to say so until now, and at last had revealed their true feelings to NHK.
This structure is identical to that of the old soldier who confessed to Kristof his “great secret of meat-eating even hidden from his wife.”

When alumni of Taipei First High School who watched the program were astonished and questioned the old man, he protested that “I never said such things,” accusing NHK of intentional editing.
For example, Mr. Tsai Kun-tsan explained that “for Taiwanese, adopting Japanese-style surnames and given names required permission and was generally not allowed,” contrasting it with the notification system used in Korea.
Regarding the February 28 Incident, Mr. Kō Bun’yū said, “Chiang Kai-shek killed off the old bosses as if it were a monkey mountain, slaughtering them to show who was in charge.”

However, the program’s producer, Masayasu Tanabe, avoided such facts and, following Kristof’s example, cut and pasted fragments of the old man’s words to fabricate a fictitious Taiwanese narrative.
Kristof fabricated lies to please American readers who delight in denigrating Japan.
Tanabe, however, spent the license fees paid by Japanese citizens to deliberately denigrate those very Japanese.
What reason is there to pay license fees to such an NHK?

(Issue dated April 23, 2009)