Originally published on March 1, 2019, and reposted here in corrected form after duplicated passages were removed, this chapter draws on Masayuki Takayama’s essay “Japan’s Century” in Shukan Shincho and sharply criticizes The Asahi Shimbun’s Japan-denigrating tone, its indulgent view of China, and its failure to understand Japan’s technological strength.
By examining the anti-Japan perspective found in Tensei Jingo and political reporting, the optimistic view of the Chinese Communist regime, and the decline narrative promoted by Keizai Doyukai, it introduces foreign thinkers who have reappraised Japan and argues that the country from which the world should learn in the twenty-first century is Japan.
It also touches on the Osaka North Yard redevelopment and The Asahi Shimbun Company’s real-estate strategy, raising deeper questions about the very nature of the company itself.

2019-03-01
The Asahi Shimbun is, without flattery, dull.
One of its selling points, Tensei Jingo, is written in an explanatory tone that can scarcely be called a column, bringing in books and figures no one knows, and in most cases ending with, “And after all that, Japan is bad.”

This is the chapter I originally published on March 1, 2019.
The text had been posted with repeated passages.
I am correcting it and reposting it.

A friend of mine, one of the most devoted readers I know, bought and brought me today’s newly released issue of Shukan Shincho.
He did so in order to let me read Masayuki Takayama’s utterly unique essay in the postwar world.
The annotations marked by asterisks are mine.

Japan’s Century.

The Asahi Shimbun is, without flattery, dull.
One of its selling points, Tensei Jingo, is written in an explanatory tone that can scarcely be called a column, bringing in books and figures no one knows, and in most cases ending with, “And after all that, Japan is bad.”
Even regarding the outrageous conduct of South Korea, it shifts the issue by saying things like, “Because Japan colonially ruled Korea,” while ignoring that it was annexation, not colonial rule.
It also speaks of the last war only from the American point of view, saying, “It was a war of aggression,” and “It exploited the peoples of Asia and subjected them to misery.”
And then such distorted columns are advertised with the line, “They appear on entrance exams, so copy them out exactly.”
That is even worse than MacArthur’s brainwashing operations.

Its political reporting is terrible as well.
It mocks Olympic Minister Sakurada by saying he was tongue-tied or misspoke.
How different is that from jeering at a stutterer for stammering.
It never ceases to vilify Japan, yet shows the fullest warm consideration toward China and Korea.

China has stolen advanced technology from other countries and made money by producing imitations with it.
The pseudo-Shinkansen is a good example.
But the moment Trump and Pence resorted to actual force, saying intellectual property would no longer be allowed to be stolen, China immediately began to gasp for breath.
In addition, there is the seventy-two-year theory of Communist states.
Quite a number of Communist states have been created.
But all of them were short-lived and collapsed.
Even the Soviet Union, the longest-lasting of them, fell after seventy-two years.
China’s Communist regime will enter its seventy-second year next year.
History and Kaori Fukushima both say that around there lies the limit.

And yet Asahi editorial writer Hara Makoto says, “I went to China, everyone was lively, and Alibaba executives said they were not worried in the slightest.”
More than that, he says China’s GDP is “closing in on that of a fading America and will overtake it sometime in the 2020s,” and that “it is America’s desperation and fear that makes it wage a trade war.”
He predicts that ruthless and vulgar China, which makes a living stealing intellectual property and carries out brutal ethnic elimination in Uyghur and Tibet, will become tomorrow’s superpower.
Japanese people feel disgusted merely imagining such a country running the world, but Hara seems to regard it as cause for celebration.

One would like Japan to drive a needle into the very crown of such a China, but Asahi brings forward Koichi Kobayashi, representative secretary of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, to say, “That will not happen.”
According to Kobayashi, “Technological powerhouse Japan is a thing of the past.
Now technology has been stolen by China, communications are dominated by Huawei, and yet the Japanese are in a boiled-frog state, not even aware of such a situation.”
He also condemns them by saying, “Degenerated Japanese no longer even have the energy to challenge new things.”

But Japan has continued challenging itself all along.
For example, in the 1970s it produced a nuclear-powered ship with its own technology, following only the United States, the Soviet Union, and Germany.
The dream reactor, the fast breeder reactor, was also brought to practical application ahead of the rest of the world, but both of these were destroyed by fake news led by Asahi.
Kobayashi, through lack of study, does not know that fact.
If he did know it, he would hardly speak in Asahi of a boiled-frog Japan.

Kobayashi also treats “Japan’s 175 trillion yen debt” as a grave problem and laments that “funds for next-generation technological development” cannot easily be produced.
But no, enormous sums in scientific research funding are being spent.
It is simply that they have been scattered to anti-Japan leftists in the humanities such as Jiro Yamaguchi.
Kobayashi does not know that either.

Then does the world also view Japan pessimistically.
Michael Schuman, author of Confucius and the World He Created, states flatly that “the challenge of the twenty-first century is to establish strong industrial power capable of prevailing in international competition, and the model for that, astonishingly enough, is Japan.”
He says, “We have entered an age in which the strength of tradition, not something hastily patched together like China, will count.”

Adair Turner, a leading authority in British economic circles, takes the same view as Yoichi Takahashi, saying, “An aging Japan has through technological innovation made labor possible up to the age of seventy,” and, “People say a national debt exceeding twice GDP is a shackle, but if one looks at the reality it can be offset by government assets, and with the Bank of Japan’s interest earnings, the real figure is only sixty percent of GDP.”
His conclusion is, “The twenty-first century should learn from Japan.”

Daniel Moss of Bloomberg also says, “The eyes of the world, once turned toward China, will turn toward Japan, which has cleared the hurdles of aging and deflation.”
When Asahi and the Japan Association of Corporate Executives disappear, Japan will clear.

The redevelopment of Umeda North Yard was a powerful obstacle to attracting tenants for the Nakanoshima Twin Tower Building on which The Asahi Shimbun Company staked the fate of the company.
It was the detonator and trump card for Osaka’s revival, a place of the highest location in Japan that God had left behind.
That is why Yodobashi Camera Umeda records the number one sales among all its stores.
Yet that North Yard project was thrown into confusion through Yuko Takenaka of the Osaka Association of Corporate Executives.
Incidentally, the building on which Asahi staked the fate of the company was constructed by Takenaka Corporation.
Thanks to the scheme to crush North Yard and to the economic boom brought about by Abenomics, Asahi was able to secure all its tenants.
As a result, it seems that The Asahi Shimbun Company has now become a company that earns profits through real estate and has built a structure by which the company can survive even if the newspaper itself collapses, but will God truly continue to let this company of the lowest and worst traitors and betrayers of the nation survive.