Published on April 17, 2019.
Based on an essay by Masayuki Takayama, this piece examines the Asahi Shimbun’s anti-Japan reporting, its praise of China, the false narrative of Japan’s decline, and the technological strength and resilience of Japan that leading global thinkers continue to recognize.
Criticizing the pessimism of Makoto Hara and Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, it argues that the 21st century is in fact an age in which the world should learn from Japan, while exposing the harmful role of the Asahi Shimbun and Keizai Doyukai.

2019-04-17
Japan will clear when the Asahi and Keizai Doyukai disappear.
A little while ago, a friend of mine, one of the most devoted readers I know, bought me the issue of Shukan Shincho that was released today.
He did so in order to let me read the essay of Masayuki Takayama, the one and only figure of his kind in the postwar world.
Masayuki Takayama.
The Century of Japan.
The Asahi Shimbun is, without flattery, boring.
One of its selling points, Tensei Jingo, is written in an explanatory tone that hardly seems like a column at all, bringing up books and people no one knows, and for the most part ending with, “and all this only proves that Japan is bad.”
Even when speaking of the lawless conduct of South Korea, it shifts the subject by saying things like, “because Japan ruled it as a colony,” while ignoring the fact that it was annexation, not colonization.
It also speaks of the last war only from the American point of view, saying, “it was a war of aggression,” and “Japan exploited the peoples of Asia and subjected them to misery.”
Such a distorted column is even advertised with the instruction, “It appears on entrance examinations, so copy it down exactly.”
It is worse than MacArthur’s brainwashing campaign.
Its political reporting is terrible as well.
It mocks Olympic Minister Sakurada by saying he is tongue-tied and misspoke.
How different is that from jeering at a person with a stutter for stammering.
It never stops vilifying Japan, yet extends the fullest warm consideration to China and Korea.
China has stolen cutting-edge technology from other countries and profited by making imitations from it.
The imitation Shinkansen is a good example.
But the moment Trump and Pence took concrete action and said intellectual property would no longer be allowed to be stolen, China immediately began gasping for air.
In addition, there is the theory that communist states last 72 years.
Quite a number of communist states were created.
But all of them were short-lived and collapsed.
Even the Soviet Union, which lasted the longest, collapsed after 72 years.
Next year China’s communist regime will reach its 72nd year.
History and Kaori Fukushima both say that around there lies its limit.
But Asahi editorial writer Makoto Hara says, “I went to China.
Everyone was full of energy, and Alibaba executives said they had not the slightest concern.”
Not only that, he says China’s GDP will “draw close to that of a fading United States and overtake it sometime in the 2020s,” and that “for the United States to launch a trade war looks like a struggle and a sign of fear.”
He predicts that the merciless and vulgar China, which lives by stealing intellectual property and carries out horrific ethnic elimination in Uyghur and Tibet, will become tomorrow’s superpower.
Japanese people feel sick at the mere thought of such a country ruling the world, but Hara seems to regard it as cause for celebration.
One would wish Japan could at least prick such a China at the top of its head with a needle, but the Asahi brings in Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, representative secretary of Keizai Doyukai, to say, “That will not happen.”
According to Kobayashi, “Japan as a technological great power belongs to the past.
Now its technology has been taken by China, communications are Huawei’s exclusive domain, and yet the Japanese remain like frogs being boiled without even realizing the situation.”
He also harshly says, “Degraded Japanese people no longer have the energy to take on new things.”
But Japan has continued its challenges all along.
For example, in the 1970s it created a nuclear-powered ship through its own technology, following the United States, the Soviet Union, and Germany.
The dream reactor, the fast breeder reactor, was brought to the point of practical use ahead of the world, but both of these were destroyed by fake news led by the Asahi.
Kobayashi, through lack of study, does not know that fact.
If he knew it, he would not speak of boiled-frog Japan in the pages of the Asahi.
Kobayashi also makes an issue of “Japan’s 175 trillion yen debt,” and laments that “funds for next-generation technological development” cannot easily be produced.
No, enormous research funds are being distributed.
It is simply that they have been scattered among anti-Japan leftists in the humanities such as Jiro Yamaguchi.
Kobayashi does not know that either.
So does the world as a whole view Japan pessimistically as well.
Michael Schuman, author of Confucius and the World He Created, states flatly, “The challenge of the twenty-first century is to establish strong industrial power capable of winning in international competition, and the model for that, astonishingly enough, is Japan.”
He says that “we have entered an age in which the force of tradition, not something slapped 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, turned people up to the age of seventy into labor power,” and “although people say that a national debt exceeding twice GDP is a burden, if one looks at the reality it can be offset by government assets, and with the Bank of Japan’s interest income, in fact it amounts to only 60 percent of GDP.”
The conclusion is, “In the twenty-first century, learn from Japan.”
Daniel Moss of Bloomberg also says, “The eyes of the world, which had been fixed on China, will turn toward Japan, which has cleared the hurdles of aging and deflation.”
Japan will clear when the Asahi and Keizai Doyukai disappear.
The redevelopment of Umeda North Yard, which was a powerful obstacle to the effort to fill tenants in the Nakanoshima Twin Towers building on which the Asahi Shimbun staked the company’s fortunes… that place, one of the finest locations in Japan, which God had left behind as the trigger and trump card for the revival of Osaka… that is why Yodobashi Camera Umeda ranks first in sales among all its stores… they threw that North Yard project into confusion by using Yukiko Takenaka of the Osaka Keizai Doyukai… incidentally, the building on which the Asahi staked its fate was constructed by Takenaka Corporation… thanks to the scheme to crush North Yard and to the economic upturn brought about by Abenomics, the Asahi was able to secure all its tenants, and as a result, the Asahi Shimbun Company has now apparently become a company that earns profits from real estate, establishing a structure in which even if the newspaper collapses, the company itself will survive… but will God truly continue to preserve the company of these lowest and worst traitors and enemies of the nation?