Asahi Shimbun’s long-running “Paradise on Earth” campaign on North Korea contributed to a tragic mass repatriation of 100,000 people.
Despite the consequences, serious accountability was lacking.
This essay also examines Asahi’s uncritical praise of the AIIB, arguing that its reporting often blurred the line between fact and imagination.

January 11, 2019
She portrays the head of this fraudulent bank, Jin Liqun, as a “white-haired and plump” gentlemanly figure. Does she not know that swindlers often look exactly like that.

Many readers and former readers of the Asahi Shimbun must have thought that President Moon Jae-in’s remarks yesterday sounded exactly like Asahi itself.
The chapter I published on July 12, 2018, titled “Asahi Social Affairs Department’s ‘Paradise on Earth’ Reporting,” is one that all Japanese citizens and people around the world must reread.
The following continues from the previous chapter.
Asahi Social Affairs Department’s “Paradise on Earth” reporting.
The reporter himself may have thought it was merely news, but readers take it as fact.
Yet he says that is the readers’ problem.
Those who are deceived are at fault.
At the same time, Hiroshi Iwadare was in the Social Affairs Department.
Together with colleagues, he wrote articles declaring that “North Korea is a paradise on earth.”
“The pace of North Korea’s economic construction is astonishing,” “apartments are being built one after another, factories operate 24 hours a day,” and “citizens enjoy spiritually and materially stable lives under Kim Il-sung.”
This paradise-on-earth campaign continued for more than twenty years.
Even suspicious ethnic Koreans in Japan came to believe it after such a prolonged campaign.
As a result, 100,000 people returned to hell.
The Asahi Shimbun acknowledged its error only thirty years later, after nearly all 100,000 had been effectively destroyed.
After Kim Jong-il admitted the existence of many abductees including Megumi Yokota, and several returned home, clearly proving that place was hell, Asahi quietly published “The Real Face of North Korea” on July 8, 2004.
There Iwadare admitted that because “there was little information” and “sufficient reporting was impossible,” he had imagined hell as if it were heaven.
Ordinarily, a reporter does not write when reporting is impossible.
Writing based on imagination is called fabrication.
Not only Koreans but also 3,000 Japanese wives were killed as a result, yet neither Iwadare nor Asahi offered a single word of apology.
They seem to believe that this brief excuse settles everything.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, launched by Xi Jinping last year, had been predicted to fail from the beginning.
For example, China’s trade volume fell by 15 percent last year.
“In terms of GNP, that is minus three percent, equivalent to the Lehman shock,” according to Yoichi Takahashi.
Thus, although the AIIB was launched, it still has no credit rating.
In other words, it cannot issue bonds.
Yet the one who seriously promoted the AIIB was editorial board member Keiko Yoshioka.
In her column “Hammon Fuma,” she repeatedly praised the AIIB and criticized the Abe administration’s lack of foresight in not joining, asking, “Is it acceptable for Japan to remain absent?”
She even wrote that “the United States is considering membership.”
Even the Chinese would not go that far in lying.
She portrays the head of this fraudulent bank, Jin Liqun, as a “white-haired and plump” gentlemanly figure.
Does she not know that swindlers often have exactly such appearances.