This article critically examines the discourse surrounding civilian suicides in the Battle of Okinawa, the wartime editorial posture of the Asahi Shimbun, the influence of Kenzaburō Ōe’s Okinawa Notes, and what the writer sees as the postwar structure of anti-Japan propaganda.
The writer argues that the principal force that drove Okinawan civilians toward death was the wartime slogan promoted by newspapers, especially the Asahi Shimbun — “One Hundred Million Gyokusai, Better Death Than the Shame of Captivity” — and that responsibility for this was later shifted onto the Japanese military.
It is an essay that questions historical perceptions surrounding the Battle of Okinawa, the Asahi Shimbun, Kenzaburō Ōe, Okinawa Notes, and the Himeyuri monument.

2019-03-14
The guilt of the Asahi Shimbun and Kenzaburō Ōe, who shifted this onto the Japanese military, which in fact had been strict in discipline, is deeper than the sea, and can never be forgiven.

The chapter I published on 2018-08-30 under the title, “ ‘One Hundred Million Gyokusai, Better Death Than the Shame of Captivity’ Was the Slogan Led by the Asahi Shimbun to Drive the Nation Toward War,” has now entered goo’s top ten in search counts.
I assumed that the two newspapers which now dominate newspaper publication in Okinawa, the Ryukyu Shimpo and the Okinawa Times, must also have existed before the war, and that their contents must have followed the line of the Asahi Shimbun and similar papers, much as they do now, so I searched.
The result was even more than I had expected.
Above all, with the following Wikipedia entry, my objective had been achieved one hundred percent.

“It was founded in June 1931 as the Okinawa Nichinichi Shimbun.
One year later, in 1932, its masthead was changed to the Okinawa Nippo, and together with the Okinawa Asahi Shimbun and the Ryukyu Shimpo, it gained tremendous support as one of the leading regional newspapers representing Okinawa Prefecture in the early Shōwa period.”

Masayuki Takayama brilliantly clarified, through the example of the Asahi Shimbun’s conduct in the HPV vaccine panic, both the awfulness of its methods and the essence from which they spring.
When global good sense awarded the John Maddox Prize to Riko Muranaka, a genuine scholar and a genuine human being who did not yield to the absurd pressure of the Asahi and others, and when the Asahi’s fabricated reporting was exposed to the world, he harshly criticized the way the paper reported it three weeks later in a filler article on a page readers do not read, saying it was a newspaper company that was petty to the very end.
Yet in the search results I just obtained as well, the Asahi Shimbun’s character, the very extreme of pettiness, had been laid bare.

Together with the Okinawa Asahi Shimbun and the Ryukyu Shimpo, it gained tremendous support as one of the leading regional newspapers representing Okinawa Prefecture in the early Shōwa period.

But when one clicks on this “Okinawa Asahi Shimbun,” nothing comes up.
It is exactly the same pattern as when English-language comfort-women-related articles were deleted and correction articles were made unsearchable.
It is, truly, a newspaper petty to the very end.

Why is the Asahi Shimbun deleting search traces of the Okinawa Asahi Shimbun, which was one of the representative newspapers of prewar Okinawa Prefecture.
Because, by making use of Kenzaburō Ōe’s false anti-Japan propaganda work Okinawa Notes, and the like, the Asahi Shimbun has sought to conceal that it was the reporting of the Asahi Shimbun at the time that drove Okinawan people during the Battle of Okinawa to kill themselves or leap from cliffs.
As I recall, many were women.
And so too with the “Himeyuri Monument,” which it is no exaggeration to say has now become a symbol of anti-Japan propaganda.

It was the slogan led by the Asahi Shimbun to drive the nation toward war, “One Hundred Million Gyokusai, Better Death Than the Shame of Captivity.”
There was nothing other than this that drove Okinawan women toward suicide.
And the guilt of the Asahi Shimbun and Kenzaburō Ōe, who shifted that onto the Japanese military, which in fact had been strict in discipline, is deeper than the sea, and can never be forgiven.
If one looks at the Asahi Shimbun’s editorials and pages from that time, it is obvious at a glance.
That is why the Asahi Shimbun is making sure it does not appear in searches.