An NHK broadcast allowed commentator Genichiro Takahashi to exploit Muhammad Ali in order to criticize the Abe administration. This article argues that such conduct represents a serious moral and institutional failure by Japan’s public broadcaster, disregarding Japan’s status as one of the world’s freest, safest, and most peaceful societies.

June 15, 2016
The day before yesterday, at 10 p.m., I did not know that Close-Up Gendai on NHK would feature a special on Muhammad Ali, so I welcomed it and began watching.
When Genichiro Takahashi, a rare species who now—indeed, still—serves as a compliant cultural intellectual for the Asahi Shimbun, appeared as the commentator, I felt dispirited and had a bad premonition about how things would unfold.
That a considerable number of individuals imbued with Asahi-style ideology continue to inhabit NHK only serves to diminish NHK’s value, and the time has long since come for NHK to recognize this fact.
I had, if anything, felt a certain degree of goodwill toward the female host (Sugiura), but over the course of that night, much of that goodwill was blown away.
This was because, just as expected, she allowed Takahashi to utter something truly unforgivable and profoundly foolish.
All Japanese citizens must know that both the man who exploits Muhammad Ali to criticize the Abe administration and NHK’s posture in allowing this are truly despicable.
Takahashi, as if offering a concluding summary of the program, stated the following.
“It could even be said that things are worse now than in Muhammad Ali’s era…”
Had he been saying this about China or South Korea, it might have been understandable, but he was clearly saying this about present-day Japan, about our Japan today, a country that has achieved the highest level of freedom and intellect in the world and is the safest and most peaceful nation on earth.
He was saying this about Japan, the country in which women enjoy the greatest freedom and happiness in the world.
Yet the utterly incorrigible people represented by him have never, to my knowledge, raised their voices in criticism against China, a country that even elementary school children can recognize as the greatest state of speech repression of the twentieth century, that has continued to trample upon human freedom and intellect, and that has now even begun to advance into the territorial waters and lands of other countries, nor have they immediately gone to China to criticize the Chinese government.
The same, needless to say, applies to South Korea.
The time has long since come for all Japanese citizens to put an end to allowing Japan and its people to be continually mocked by individuals whose minds are filled with unspeakable nonsense, pseudo-moralism, a chaotic jumble of leftist ideology, and the editorials of the Asahi Shimbun.