A chapter first published in April 2018, dealing with producer Kozo Nagata’s claim that Shinzo Abe had summoned the broadcasting director in advance and said, “You won’t get away with this. Read between the lines,” rose to No. 1 in goo’s top 10 search rankings.
This article examines the 2001 NHK program on the “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal” and the 2005 Asahi Shimbun reports on the alleged program alteration, critically discussing VAWW-NET Japan, its ties to North Korea, the false nature of internal whistleblowing, and the coordinated attempt to bring down Shinzo Abe and Shoichi Nakagawa.
It also reflects on why the attempt to turn anti-Japanese propaganda into a major social movement failed, and how that failure later developed into a broader political and media campaign.

2019-03-05
What happened was that they failed in their attempt to create a massive social boom as anti-Japanese propaganda with content exactly as they wanted, that is, content that was even more one-sided and purely anti-Japan.

A chapter I published in 2018-04 under the title, “Furthermore, producer Kozo Nagata testified that Shinzo Abe had summoned the broadcasting director in advance and said, ‘You won’t get away with this. Read between the lines,’” has appeared in first place in goo’s top 10 search rankings.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

And there is one incident that Asahi Shimbun must absolutely never be allowed to forget, namely the false reporting scandal over the NHK program alteration issue.
In 2001, NHK broadcast a program called the “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal,” a people’s court style project in which Emperor Showa and others were treated as defendants and unilaterally condemned by citizens without lawyers, and judged with conclusions such as “Hirohito is guilty” and “the Japanese government bears state responsibility.”
When it was shown in a preview to the department head after production, the content was so abnormally biased that the responsible department head became furious, saying things like, “This is out of the question as it is,” “This cannot be broadcast,” “This is different from the original proposal,” and “You set me up,” and immediately ordered revisions.
Three days later, the revised version was shown again to the department head, but it had hardly changed at all, and he again became furious, saying, “It hasn’t changed at all,” and “You call this a trial, but this is a rigged performance,” after which he presented a correction plan and again instructed them to revise it.
Based on the department head’s instruction that including opposing views might allow them to avoid violating the Broadcasting Act, they hurriedly made an appointment with Diet member Shinzo Abe on January 26, explained the contents of this mock trial, and recorded an interview on January 28.
However, at the director-level preview on January 29, Chairman Ebisawa and Broadcasting Director Matsuo issued an operational order for further revision because of how terrible the content was.
Then, after revising it overnight, though in truth there was no time left for another preview so it was simply sent to broadcast as it was, it was aired on January 30 as part of the ETV Special series, “How Should War Be Judged? Night Two: Wartime Sexual Violence on Trial,” under the title “The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery.”
Various problems were occurring before and after the 2001 broadcast.
It was after this, in 2005, that Asahi Shimbun made its move.
That was the year after 2004, when Abe, then Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary, supported Koizumi’s visit to North Korea, North Korea admitted the abduction of Japanese citizens, and the return of the families of five abductees was realized.
On January 12, 2005, Asahi Shimbun reported under the headline, “NHK ‘Comfort Women’ Program Altered: Nakagawa and Abe Called in Executives the Day Before to Point Out ‘Bias in Content,’” claiming that Shoichi Nakagawa and Shinzo Abe had intervened in NHK’s program production.
The reporter who wrote it was Masakazu Honda.
Then, in perfect coordination, the day after this article appeared in Asahi Shimbun, Akira Nagai, chief producer in NHK’s program production bureau, made an internal whistleblowing accusation, claiming that Abe and Nakagawa, having learned about the contents of the program under production, had exerted pressure on the production process.
However, because Ebisawa was still serving as chairman at the time and NHK had not yet been completely taken over by the NHK labor union as it has now, NHK conducted an internal investigation.
As a result, it became clear that Nakagawa had met NHK executives three days after the broadcast, among other things, and that chief producer Akira Nagai’s internal accusation was fabricated.
Yet Nagai, apparently seeking to remove Chairman Ebisawa as well, claimed as though Ebisawa too had known the facts and had colluded with Abe.
Furthermore, producer Kozo Nagata testified that Shinzo Abe had summoned the broadcasting director in advance and said, “You won’t get away with this. Read between the lines,” and acted in coordination with the Asahi Shimbun article in an effort, by any means necessary, to bring down Shoichi Nakagawa and Shinzo Abe.
The Asahi Shimbun article was false, and the testimony and whistleblowing of Nagai and Nagata were also false.

The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal was organized by VAWW-NET Japan, and VAWW-NET Japan was a group established by Yayori Matsui, a former editorial writer of Asahi Shimbun.
VAWW-NET Japan was also extremely close to North Korea, and its claims were like carbon copies of North Korean claims.
It was also a group that desired unification led by the North.
Two of those who played the role of prosecutor in the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, Hwang Ho-nam and Jeong Nam-yong, were people recognized as North Korean agents.
Hwang Ho-nam in particular was a North Korean high-ranking official who had served as Kim Il-sung’s interpreter during Kanemaru’s delegation visit to North Korea and had also attended as an interpreter during Koizumi’s visit to North Korea.
In other words, a high-ranking North Korean official had directly entered the site of program production.
To put it simply, the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal was anti-Japanese propaganda by North Korea.
And even a North Korean government high official was present at the actual production site.
I think this tells you just how black, or rather red, NHK’s production floor was.

The NHK producer Eriko Ikeda, who had this North Korean propaganda program, the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, broadcast, was a founding member of VAWW-NET Japan and also an operating committee member of the tribunal.
In other words, she used her own position to have a political movement, namely North Korea’s anti-Japanese propaganda carried out through a group she herself had created, broadcast as a special program.
In light of the Broadcasting Act, NHK could justifiably have had its broadcast waves suspended over this Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal matter alone.
And then there was Akira Nagai, who made an internal accusation in step with the Asahi Shimbun article.
And Masakazu Honda of Asahi Shimbun, who wrote the fabricated article as if it were a scoop.
Both men had participated in the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal.
In other words, all of the people who tried to bring down Shinzo Abe and Shoichi Nakagawa were insiders of VAWW-NET Japan.

To return briefly to the point, if one were to describe the NHK program alteration issue in extremely rough terms, it was this: people connected to VAWW-NET Japan created an anti-Japanese propaganda program together with North Korea and tried to broadcast it by privatizing the public broadcaster for their own purposes, which caused a major problem inside NHK, and even after that they forcibly aired an extremely radical version, leading to a situation where politicians themselves came to question what had happened.
What happened was that they failed in their attempt to create a massive social boom as anti-Japanese propaganda with content exactly as they wanted, that is, content that was even more one-sided and purely anti-Japan.

I would like to consider this from another angle.
There was a structure in which, whenever North Korea became economically endangered, the management of Korean banks in Japan somehow also became endangered.
I think the reason is obvious without writing it out.
And when those Korean banks collapsed, Hiromu Nonaka poured in large subsidies to rescue them, but this wave of Korean bank collapses began in 1998, a period when North Korea itself was in a very difficult position.
The program in question was broadcast on January 30, 2001, against precisely that background.
The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal was far too far removed from common sense to create any social boom, and as propaganda it ended in a result that could hardly be called a success, but since it is fair to say that our domestic leftists have a habit of never thinking that the cause of failure lies within themselves, I believe the people connected to VAWW-NET Japan also did not want to simply let the matter of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal pass as a failure.
Then North Korea, again pushed into economic difficulty, admitted the abduction of Japanese nationals and allowed only five of them to return temporarily to Japan, and it is reasonable to view this as having been done in order to obtain economic aid.
At the time, Hitoshi Tanaka of the Foreign Ministry had been arranging a deal under which the abductees would be sent back to North Korea immediately and North Korea would receive economic assistance, so it was reported to some extent that he became furious and lodged complaints over Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Abe’s decision not to send the five temporarily returned abductees back to the North.
Hitoshi Tanaka, who had close relations with North Korea.

To be continued.