Originally published on March 1, 2019, this chapter sharply criticizes The Asahi Shimbun for publishing an interview with Keiko Ochiai without even carrying out the most basic fact-checking, thereby allowing false statements to appear in print unchallenged.
In particular, it questions Ochiai’s claim that family registry documents were required for admission to public schools, arguing that even a minimal inquiry would have shown the statement to be false, yet neither the reporter nor the desk checked it.
The piece further presents this as part of The Asahi Shimbun’s structural failure since the Seiji Yoshida reporting, arguing that its willingness to circulate falsehoods and manipulative impressions is not merely mistaken reporting but a malicious anti-Japan act carried out under the name of journalism.

2019-03-01
Masataka Watanabe, the current man, said he would swear before God to verify the facts.
But this time, neither the reporter nor the desk did so, and they let Keiko Ochiai’s lie pass through.

I am reposting the chapter I published on 2018-10-22 under the title, The Article Says the Reporter in Charge Was Misako Takahashi, but Why Did She Not Look Into It and Point Out the Lie.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

False reporting seen in the poison gas weapons story.

After the last war, the Japanese military surrendered, was disarmed, and handed over all its weapons to the Allied forces.
The same was true on the Chinese mainland.
In materials unearthed by Mizuma Masanori in 2007 and later confirmed by the Ministry of Defense, there is a record stating that “tear gas shells and the like were handed over in Shanghai to Chinese Army First Lieutenant Chen Yonglu,” and similarly, documents have been found at the Siberia Museum in Yamagata Prefecture showing that weapons were handed over to Allied forces on the mainland.

Nevertheless, the Mainichi Shimbun prints articles along the lines of, “A suit was filed in the Tokyo District Court claiming that forty-four Chinese were killed or injured by poison gas weapons abandoned by the Japanese military in Qiqihar.”

They were neither poison gas nor abandoned weapons.
By pandering to such baseless claims by Chinese, Asahi and Mainichi have in the end steered matters so that as much as sixty trillion yen in disposal costs for so-called abandoned poison gas weapons would be borne by the Japanese government, that is, by the blood-tax money of the Japanese people.

They report with intent while knowing it is false.
That is not the sort of thing that can be called a mere erroneous report.
It may rightly be called a malicious anti-Japan terrorist act carried out in the name of journalism.

That sort of malicious poison is also hidden in columns that appear almost pleasant and harmless.
The interview article with Keiko Ochiai that appeared in Asahi last month is one such example.

She comes from being a Cultural Broadcasting personality with the nickname “Lemon-chan.”
She sold cuteness as her commodity, and when that began to wither, she quickly shifted over to Weekly Friday.
Was her role that of a foolish older sister of the baby-boomer generation.
And what she talked about was anti-war peace, anti-nuclear weapons, and anti-nuclear power.
No thought was needed.
So long as she kept repeating the same things, she passed as a progressive cultural figure.

The same was true in this interview article.
She spoke of love and spoke of anti-war and peace.
For fifty years, she has gone on repeating the same lines without change.
It is an easy life.

It also connects to the enormous false reporting on Seiji Yoshida.

However, there was this passage in it.

“At that time, public junior high schools and high schools required the submission of a family register.”
“My mother looked for a school that did not.”

For a moment, I thought that she must have been an illegal entrant without a family register, or perhaps had grown up in a family that concealed its origins like Renho, but when I read that, I remembered that she had been what is called the child of a mistress.
Back in those days, children of kept women, as in the phrase about the stylish black fence and the pine beyond it, were actually not at all rare even in public schools.
Such things were not an issue.
And yet she says, “Public schools required the submission of a family register.”
If that had been so, it would have revealed that she had a different surname from her father and was the child of a mistress.
Then she goes on to say that her mother struggled and sent her to a private school.

But this is strange.
A little checking is enough to show it.
Back then as now, all one needed to enter a public school was a resident record showing the school district.
The reason illegal Chinese entrants can calmly send their children to school is that in Japan there was no scrutiny of such matters.

Why does she tell such a transparent lie.
The article says the reporter in charge was Misako Takahashi, but why did she not look into it and point out the lie.
And ordinarily, the desk in charge as well would think that something was odd.
If so, then that person should have pointed it out and had it checked.

At Asahi, ever since the days of Seiji Yoshida, they did not do the work of verifying the facts.
That led to a massive false report, and Kimura Iryo had to offer up his head.
Masataka Watanabe, the current man, said he would swear before God to verify the facts.
But this time, neither the reporter nor the desk did so, and they let Keiko Ochiai’s lie pass through.

To be continued.