This essay examines coverage of the Japan-China foreign ministers’ meeting at the ASEAN conference and questions the conduct of Japanese media.
It reflects on how diplomatic statements are framed and what this reveals about postwar media structures in Japan.

Moreover, this was spoken by the foreign minister of a country whose official organ had declared at the time of Liu Xiaobo’s death, “Outsiders should keep their mouths shut.”
2018-01-21
The following is a chapter I originally published on August 10, 2017.
The NHK program Watch9 the night before last was truly strange.
Taro Kono, son of Yohei Kono, headed to the ASEAN conference as his first assignment after becoming foreign minister.
As I have previously noted, I consider China’s Foreign Minister Wang to be the most pitiable man in the world… yet at the same time the most deplorable.
He is a truly pitiable figure whose job, as an official of a one-party communist dictatorship, is to call black white and white black without cease.
Using the ASEAN gathering, Foreign Minister Wang and Foreign Minister Kono held a Japan-China foreign ministers’ meeting.
Wang spoke first.
Watch9 broadcast his remarks at astonishing length, likely because his statements and their sentiments were aligned.
His remarks were extraordinarily rude.
“…You are the son of a wonderful man, and we had high expectations. …But we are deeply disappointed by what you said at your press conference.”
Wang was attacking the Japanese foreign minister for not making conciliatory remarks toward China like those of media outlets such as The Asahi Shimbun.
Such words should never be addressed to the foreign minister of Japan—a country that remains effectively the world’s second-largest economy and that provided the greatest economic and technological assistance in human history at the time of the Japan-China Peace and Friendship Treaty, helping build today’s China.
Especially not by the foreign minister of a country whose official organ declared at Liu Xiaobo’s death that outsiders should keep quiet.
Now to the main point.
All discerning observers must have watched with bated breath to see how Taro Kono would respond to Wang’s extremely rude remarks.
At that moment, Kono proved that Prime Minister Abe had carefully chosen him for this important post by delivering an entirely proper rebuttal to Wang.
“China, as a major power, must behave in a more mature manner.”
And then—
NHK suddenly panicked and had its anchor abruptly cut off the remainder of his remarks.
“We have just received breaking news.”
But it was merely ordinary news about a typhoon.
Seeking to convey what this scene signified to a Japanese public that has grown naive and foolish, I realized that it closely resembled a scene from the past.
When The Asahi Shimbun began its fabricated reporting on wartime comfort women, the Song Dou group simultaneously manipulated a housewife in Oita to begin searching for comfort women in South Korea. North Korean agents seized upon this.
Mizuho Fukushima and others joined in, and when North Korean-linked groups gathered supposed comfort women and staged an event after instructing them on what to say, something occurred.
When a Southeast Asian woman who spoke later in the program began telling the truth—“The Japanese army treated us very well…”—contradicting their prior coaching, Fukushima and her associates hurriedly cut the power to the venue, turned off the microphones, and silenced her.
The Watch9 broadcast the other night was exactly like that incident.
In other words, the reason they aired Wang’s rude remarks at length was that those controlling NHK’s news division—aligned completely with The Asahi Shimbun in attacking the Abe administration—wanted Taro Kono to follow in his father Yohei Kono’s footsteps and uphold the “Kono Statement.”
However, unlike The Asahi Shimbun, they could not do so openly, so they acted in a more insidious manner—if anything, more malicious.
Taro Kono, in a manner befitting Japan’s 2,600-year history that has produced countless great figures, delivered genuine and principled words entirely contrary to their intentions.
At the very moment when everyone wished to hear more—wished for him to speak even more forcefully to China—NHK abruptly cut the broadcast.