Excerpt from p.162 of Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media (first published February 10, 2019), a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru.
It discusses entrenched Marxism-Leninism within the Asahi Shimbun, internal factionalism, praise of North Korea, and the Japan Teachers’ Union’s political activity, including taboos sustained by ideological affinity and advertising ties.
Using a sex-education controversy and related statistics, it criticizes how rare cases are generalized to justify increasingly explicit instruction from junior high school onward.

February 16, 2019.
In fact, there were fewer than 700 such cases across all of Japan.
That shows how firmly social moral standards are upheld, and I would even say it is a figure that deserves praise.
Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media, first published on February 10, 2019, a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, is a book that every Japanese citizen who can read printed text must read.
Takayama, the one-of-a-kind journalist in the postwar world, and Abiru, the finest active newspaper reporter, senior and junior colleagues at the Sankei Shimbun, conduct their discussion in dialogue form, and the book is also easy on readers with presbyopia.
The following is an excerpt from page 162.
● Marxism-Leninism, the Asahi Shimbun, and the Japan Teachers’ Union.
Abiru.
Reading the writings of Hiroshi Hasegawa, formerly of the Asahi Shimbun, one finds that the Asahi was internally divided into a pro-Soviet faction and a pro-China faction, opposing each other.
Both the Soviet faction and the China faction were hopeless.
Above all, they were people who could not see reality.
Takayama.
Kim Il-sung of North Korea is exactly that structure.
Pro-Soviet or pro-China.
They fight to the death and purge the other side completely.
Abiru.
According to Mr. Hasegawa, Marxism-Leninism remained quite deeply rooted.
The Asahi Shimbun praised North Korea, but other newspapers did the same to a certain extent.
And the Japan Teachers’ Union was no different.
Motofumi Makieda, who served as chairman for twelve years from 1971 and was called “Mr. Nikkyoso,” was someone I also interviewed, and he stated plainly that the person he respected was Kim Il-sung.
Makieda himself even went to meet Kim Il-sung and praised North Korea by saying, “There are no thieves in this country,” and he received a medal from North Korea.
Choson Sinbo, the organ of Chongryon, introduced Makieda’s greeting at a Chongryon central assembly in its October 15, 2007 issue as follows.
“Japan, which had been a perpetrator against Korea, has, since the war, raised the abduction issue without apologizing or compensating, leaving the settlement of colonial rule unresolved.
This led to an abnormal relationship.
Above all, the settlement of colonial rule must be the starting point.
Koreans in Japan are still sanctioned and suppressed and suffer severe human rights violations.
If Japanese people work together to eliminate discrimination against Koreans in Japan, lift sanctions, and encourage measures such as flood-relief support for Korea, diplomatic normalization will surely be achieved.”
It is nothing other than North Korea’s own claims.
In addition, prefectural-level unions of the Japan Teachers’ Union have maintained various exchanges with North Korea and have donated money as well.
And until quite recently, the Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun wrote no criticism of the Japan Teachers’ Union whatsoever.
In the past few years, partly because the Sankei Shimbun wrote about Nikkyoso’s political activities, they have begun to mention it somewhat, but until then it was taboo.
Today it is less noticeable only because Nikkyoso does not happen to be a frequent topic.
One reason is that ideologically they are comrades.
Another reason is that they can receive advertising from Nikkyoso.
Nikkyoso places advertisements in Asahi’s newspapers for children.
There also seems to have been a stereotyped view that unions equal the “good side.”
Takayama.
Even now, that has not been severed.
In March 2018, it became a topic of controversy that an extremely explicit sex-education program was being carried out at a ward-run junior high school in Tokyo.
After an LDP member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly raised the issue and the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education decided to provide guidance, the ward board of education resisted, and the Asahi Shimbun reported this in large headlines.
Soon after that, the Asahi Shimbun ran an article on March 30 with the headline, “32 cases of pregnant or childbearing high school students ‘voluntarily withdrawing’ at the recommendation of their schools.”
It reported that a Ministry of Education survey found 32 cases in fiscal years 2015–2016 in which schools encouraged students to leave school due to pregnancy or childbirth, and as a result the students withdrew.
But reading the article carefully shows that there were 371 cases of “voluntary withdrawal based on the decision of the student or guardian” in full-time programs and 271 in part-time programs.
That makes 674 cases in total of students leaving high school.
At first I was surprised that there were so many, but if one thinks carefully, the denominator is about 2.3 million students.
As a percentage, it comes to about 0.0003 percent.
It is an exception among exceptions and cannot be generalized as a matter of overall principle.
In fact, there were fewer than 700 such cases across all of Japan.
That shows how firmly social moral standards are upheld, and I would even say it is a figure that deserves praise.
However, the Asahi Shimbun does not see it that way, and instead, from a Nikkyoso-style judgment, it ends up arguing that increasingly explicit sex education from junior high school onward is necessary so that students will not become pregnant.
To be continued.