This essay connects Asahi Shimbun’s pro-China posture, China’s propaganda and influence operations against Japan, and the global competition over nuclear power and railway exports.
It probes, with sharp intuition and pointed questions, the structure lying behind China’s export strategy, anti-nuclear discourse within Japan, and efforts to undermine Japan’s technological superiority.

2019-04-13
At the same time, I suddenly became convinced that the possibility that every one of them had first fallen into a honey trap was close to 100 percent.

This is the chapter I published on 2018-05-05 under the title:
With large headlines reading…
Nuclear Power and Railways: Export Offensive…
To Become the Pillars of Infrastructure under the “Belt and Road”…
Improving Technological Capability, Accelerating Domestic Production…

On the closing day of that summer’s Koshien tournament, the president of Asahi Shimbun delivered the closing address with an unnaturally dark expression.
Considering that high school baseball at the time was in its age of baseball schools and spirit-driven baseball, perhaps it was a kind of parallel.

After President Hirooka Tomoo neglected even the shareholders’ meeting, accepted an invitation from the Chinese government, stayed in China for more than a month, and returned home,
Asahi Shimbun did not merely become unbelievably biased in favor of China.
It became the vanguard of China’s propaganda operations against Japan.
The clearest and most
damaging manifestation of that,
which brought about the loss of honor for Japan and the Japanese people,
which caused astronomical sums of our tax money to be directed to China as ODA,
and which led to the arrogance and outrageous demands of today’s one-party Communist dictatorship,
is Honda Katsuichi’s China Travels.
That is now an undeniable fact.

Ever since the Hirooka line,
probably all of the present editorial writers have visited China.
The other day it suddenly occurred to me that many of them must have gone there within a close relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.
At the same time, I suddenly became convinced that the possibility that every one of them had first fallen into a honey trap was close to 100 percent.

As a person who visits Kyoto, I believe I may well be the one in the world who has done so the greatest number of times.
In recent years, not to mention Kyoto, vast numbers of Chinese tourists have flooded into Osaka as well.
It is probably also a well-known fact that Koreans, before plastic surgery, are by no means especially attractive in their original appearance.
But among Chinese there are actually quite a few beautiful women like Japanese women.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the atmosphere these women give off is close to that of Japanese women.
After all, it is a nation of 1.3 billion people.
Even in terms of probability alone, it would hardly be difficult to find beautiful women.

When I mentioned such things to a book-loving friend, he said:
Of course that is so.
China is, so to speak, a mixed-blood country.
From ancient times, without even needing to cite the examples of princesses being offered up from neighboring countries and from the Korean Peninsula,
it has been a country conquered every few centuries by different ethnic groups.
And it is generally the rule that there are no ugly people among those of mixed blood…

Moreover, especially among the elite strata, there was a tradition of saying things like, “It is a shame for a man not to partake of a meal that has already been set before him.”

On page 8 of today’s Yomiuri Shimbun there were large headlines reading:
Nuclear Power and Railways: Export Offensive…
To Become the Pillars of Infrastructure under the “Belt and Road”…
Improving Technological Capability, Accelerating Domestic Production…
It was probably part of a series.
Forty Years of Reform and Opening, Part Two: “Scientific Great Power.”

I immediately thought:
This inference of mine, like my other inferences so far, is probably almost 100 percent correct.
The anti-nuclear movement championed by Mizuho Fukushima, Naoto Kan, Masayoshi Son, and others, with Asahi Shimbun acting as the chief standard-bearer.
When China positions nuclear power and railways as the pillars of its export strategy, it goes without saying that Japan is not merely a thorn in its side, but its most formidable rival.
China wishes Japan, through a pseudo-moralism beneath even that of kindergarten children, to let its nuclear technology decline.
If that happens, then in every possible sense China will rejoice, the operation will have been a great success,
and it hardly needs to be said that the completion of that operation would benefit, first, China, and second, the Korean Peninsula.

It is precisely because Chinese influence operations have penetrated almost all media that, in recent years, the mass media do not report at all on the frequent pollution from PM2.5.
Even though one can tell simply by looking at the sky over Umeda from my house.
And when I search China just to make sure, I find scattered dark-black markers showing unbelievable PM2.5 pollution levels.
Even PM2.5 itself frequently rides the winds aloft and assaults us.
At a time when China, our neighboring country, is carrying out a plan to have more than 100 nuclear reactors in operation by 2030 and stand alongside the United States,
my inference that every one of the Asahi Shimbun editorial writers who obstinately preach opposition to nuclear power
has fallen into some kind of Chinese trap
must surely be 100 percent on target.

The offensive in nuclear power and railway exports.

On a seaside road lined with thatched-roof houses, trucks pass back and forth raising clouds of dust.
They are headed for the Shidaowan Nuclear Power Plant in Rongcheng, Shandong Province, near this port town known for aquaculture.
Within the power plant grounds, where many cranes can be seen, construction is progressing on a demonstration reactor for the “high-temperature gas-cooled reactor,” expected to be a next-generation reactor.

Japan too has research reactors for basic experiments, but this is the world’s first demonstration reactor to conduct power-generation tests.
Liu Xuegang, associate researcher at Tsinghua University and an expert on nuclear power, says, “It will go into operation within this year. We will gain various new kinds of knowledge.”

In China, which had lagged behind Japan, the United States, and Europe in nuclear plant construction, the Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Zhejiang Province only began transmitting electricity in 1991.
There were even occasions when inspection teams from Japanese electric power industry organizations instructed the Chinese on know-how such as how to tighten piping bolts.

But China introduced technologies from the United States, France, Russia, and others, while also devoting effort to human-resource development.
According to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, as of January 2018, China had 37 nuclear reactors in operation, ranking third in the world after the United States and France, if Japan, where most reactors remained halted because of tighter regulations after the Fukushima Daiichi accident, is excluded.
Aiming to become a “nuclear power great power,” China is increasing the pace of construction in response to domestic energy demand and the reduction of greenhouse gases.
By 2030 it plans to have more than 100 reactors in operation and stand alongside the United States.
To be continued.

Until August four years ago, Asahi Shimbun had ruled Japan.
Using their favorite expression, it is an unmistakable fact that Asahi Shimbun ruled every sphere and every stratum as Japan’s Nazis.
There can be no doubt that even the Special Investigation Division of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office had all long subscribed to and carefully read Asahi Shimbun.

What is more,
Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world,
told us that in the past, against a Prosecutor-General who had not followed Asahi Shimbun’s wishes,
Asahi had, in a manner like the regime-overthrow operations it carries out today,
taken up some kind of issue involving the Prosecutor-General and women, repeatedly launched major reports on it, and brought about his downfall.

The article below, whether directly or indirectly, concerns not only nuclear power.
In order to damage the credibility of Japan’s railways, the strongest and most formidable rival in the world,
just when construction began on the Linear Shinkansen, the world’s highest railway technology, which would widen the gap still further against China,
an investigation was launched into Japan’s general contractors, who possess the finest technology recognized by the world and of which Japan is proud, under the name of bid-rigging,
in a manner that even former prosecutors have cast doubt upon.
It is an undeniable fact that the one country in the world rejoicing over this is China.

The following is the continuation of the Yomiuri Shimbun article from the previous chapter.

High-speed rail also narrowed the gap with foreign countries through the introduction of overseas technology.
In September 2017, the “Fuxing” high-speed rail service, boasting the world’s fastest speed at 350 kilometers per hour, began operation.
Its name comes from the Xi Jinping administration’s slogan, “The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation,” and it reaches Shanghai, 1,300 kilometers from Beijing, in four and a half hours.

China has received railway technology from Japan, Germany, and others,
but Professor Yang Zhongping of Beijing Jiaotong University said, “The Fuxing was entirely designed, tested, and developed by China itself as a ‘purely domestic’ product. The technology has risen to another stage.”
As part of its giant economic-zone concept, the “Belt and Road,” China is aiming to export infrastructure technology overseas.
Its two main pillars are nuclear power and high-speed rail.

At a symposium on the nuclear industry held in Tokyo on April 10, an executive of a Chinese company involved in exporting nuclear plants explained the domestically produced “Hualong One” reactor and emphasized, “We can fully meet customers’ demands with our nuclear plant safety systems.”
Hualong One is a new type of reactor based on French technology.
Taking the Fukushima Daiichi accident into account, it is said to withstand strong earthquakes and tsunamis.
Exports to Britain and Argentina have already been decided.

High-speed rail, too, has won construction projects from Laos and Indonesia, among others.
Professor Yang explained, “We have the strength of having developed rolling stock capable of handling the various terrains and climates within China.”
Japan is also putting great effort into selling nuclear plants and high-speed rail overseas, but China, once its “pupil,” now stands before it as a formidable competitor.

However, Hualong One has no operational track record, and whether it can truly cope with accidents or trouble remains unknown.
A Japanese researcher points out the opacity of information disclosure, saying, “Once they establish the technology, foreign people can no longer enter the facilities.”
In high-speed rail as well, there are conspicuous cases in which projects stagnate because of heavy-handed methods at the time of winning orders and overly optimistic prospects.
Professor Wei Yuezhou of Guangxi University, a specialist in the nuclear fuel cycle, points out, “There is still much to learn from Japan, which has long experience.”

At the same time, operational data from nuclear plants and high-speed rail are valuable material for research and development even for Japan, where research funding has stagnated.
Watanabe Hiroshi, senior researcher at the Overseas Electric Power Survey Association, drawing on his experience of watching China for thirty years, says, “China needs Japan for its development, and Japan too can make use of China. The relationship should be built strategically.”
(The end. This series was handled by Makita Kazuhiko and Funakoshi Sho.)