This essay, dated March 9, 2019, criticizes the reality that Japanese television journalism, including NHK, spreads bias and ignorance in both historical interpretation and political reporting because of its lack of independent reporting ability.
Through its discussion of NHK’s coverage of Unit 731, the Khabarovsk Trials, TV Asahi’s so-called “Tsubaki remarks,” and the reporting on the Moritomo and Kake scandals, it argues that television stations, while pretending to oppose power, in fact operate on reflexive anti-LDP and anti-Abe sentiment without serious thought.

2019-03-09
NHK does not even know that.
The Khabarovsk Trials were a fabrication created by the Soviet Union, which had enslaved 600,000 Japanese servicemen, following the GHQ line in order to justify itself by claiming that “the Japanese military was brutal.”
NHK failed to see through even that.

I am reposting here the chapter I published on 2018-05-01 under the title, “TV Asahi was not destroyed for it, yet even now it shows no sign of reflection.”
In the monthly magazine Seiron released today, Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column Orisetsu no Ki opens the issue.
His essay in this month’s issue, too, is a magnificent piece that strikes the very center of the target and proves to the fullest extent that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
Every Japanese person capable of reading print must dash to the nearest bookstore and buy it.
For unless one does so, one can never understand the truth of things.
All emphases in the text are mine.

Watching the wide shows the day after the newspaper holiday the other day, Station A, Station B, and Station C all spent a long time on Shohei Ohtani’s great performance two days earlier, and next came the power harassment scandal involving Kazuhito Sakae, who bullied Kaori Icho.
And that too was merely a rehashed version of what they had already done the day before, while they did not even touch the tense Syria situation then being watched by the entire world.
Why?
Television, including NHK, has a shameful characteristic.
It lacks reporting ability, and its standard form is always to make programs by relying on newspapers.
But from time to time it puts on airs and tries to produce something on its own.
NHK’s “Unit 731” program aired last year is a good example.
In the fourth year after the war, a war crimes tribunal was held in Khabarovsk, and Japanese soldiers confessed to human experimentation.
The audio tape of that confession was found.
And NHK excitedly made a great fuss, saying once again, “The Japanese military really was cruel.”
But NHK is arrogant and incapable of reporting or verifying anything.
As for Unit 731, in the 1990s the Japan-hating Bill Clinton ransacked the U.S. National Archives and investigated it.
The Chinese also cooperated, but not even the first letter of human experimentation emerged.
This story is one of the tales fabricated by GHQ for the sake of a masochistic view of history.
Its line is convenient enough.
“The humane United States, which did not conduct human experiments, spared Lieutenant General Ishii in exchange for the provision of valuable experimental data.”
Yet one of the alleged experiments, the so-called “vacuum killing,” was shown to be a complete lie in light of the actual circumstances of the vacuum death that occurred on the Soviet Soyuz 11.
Likewise, the story of the experiment involving the injection of syphilis bacteria into the eyeballs was exactly the same as experiments conducted by U.S. government agencies on Guatemalan prisoners during the same period.
This was human experimentation carried out to learn the effects of penicillin, and Obama, only seventy years later, finally acknowledged the atrocity and apologized.
The United States also conducted human experiments on Black people, and for that Clinton apologized.
The fiction of Unit 731 was fabricated by a nation of human experimentation pretending to be a paragon of virtue.
NHK does not even know that.
The Khabarovsk Trials were a fabrication created by the Soviet Union, which had enslaved 600,000 Japanese servicemen, following the GHQ line in order to justify itself by claiming that “the Japanese military was brutal.”
NHK failed to see through even that.
It collects viewing fees and broadcasts such masochistic lies.
No matter what the Supreme Court may say, refusal to pay will spread.
If television stations attempt independent reporting, they get hurt.
That is why, after a newspaper holiday, every station can do nothing but recycle the previous day’s material.

Perhaps to hide such incompetence, television has contracted a strange illness.
It is called Tsubaki Syndrome.
In the 1990s, when the traitorous duo of Kiichi Miyazawa and Yohei Kono appeared and the momentum of the LDP began to weaken,
Tadayoshi Tsubaki, Director of News at TV Asahi, seized the opportunity and boasted at the Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association that “In the general election, our TV Asahi carried out organized negative reporting against the LDP.”
The other television stations also got excited, saying, “Ours did the same,” but Sankei Shimbun reported it.
Tsubaki apologized for the remark, though he denied that the negative reporting had been organized.
That is why TV Asahi was not destroyed for it, yet even now it shows no sign of reflection.
And not only TV Asahi.
All the stations that raised their voices together with Tsubaki at that time also have anti-LDP sentiment at their core.
That is not the result of thought.
They do not have enough intelligence to think it through.
The reason is simply that saying “the media is anti-power” sounds somehow stylish.

Taking account of this characteristic of television, the essence of the Moritomo and Kake issues comes into view.
At the root of both Moritomo and Kake lies the Asahi Shimbun’s deep resentment toward Abe.
Because of Abe, the lies about the comfort women were exposed, presidents lost their positions, and falling circulation cut salaries in half.
Moritomo was merely a case in which the local finance bureau tried to deceive the swindler Ryuchi, was found out, and got bargained down, but by chance the name of Mrs. Akie appeared there.
Asahi aimed at a “soft target.”
It relentlessly brought up Akie’s name.
Television repeated it, and the opposition parties amplified it because they wanted to appear on television.
In the Kake issue, on the flimsy basis that Abe’s friend was the head of the school, they stirred up suspicion with the classic pattern of “money politics in which politicians and bureaucrats collude.”
Because it was at the level of a cheap TV suspense drama, television people were delighted.
Only, the crucial money in the suspense drama never appeared.
In their incompetence they still have not noticed the absurdity of it.
Asahi too seems satisfied that it got fools to dance and turned it into a political situation, but as journalism it is shameful.
To be continued.