Originally published on April 12, 2019.
This article introduces a significant passage from The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, focusing on the relationship between the Asahi Shimbun and GHQ, the spread of anti-Japan sentiment in postwar Japan, and the shaping of views on the comfort women issue and the atomic bombings.
It is a revealing chapter on anti-Japan propaganda from the Korean Peninsula and China, those who align themselves with it, and how education and the media can reshape historical consciousness.

2019-04-12

This chapter makes clear just how base and malicious the Korean Peninsula, China, and those who sympathize with their anti-Japan propaganda truly are.

This is a chapter I published on 2019-02-18 under the title:
“The Asahi Shimbun moved exactly as GHQ wished, in order to preserve the newspaper’s standing and avoid being dismantled by the occupation authorities.
There was not even anyone inside the Asahi Shimbun who criticized it.”
This chapter makes clear just how base and malicious the Korean Peninsula, China, and those who sympathize with their anti-Japan propaganda truly are.
The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media, first published on February 10, 2019, by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, is a book that every Japanese citizen capable of reading print should read.
It takes the form of a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, the finest active newspaper journalist, a senior and junior colleague from the Sankei Shimbun.
One should not only head immediately to the nearest bookstore to buy it, but because elderly people in particular are often information-disadvantaged, and because so many of them subscribe to newspapers such as Asahi, Mainichi, Tokyo, and Chunichi and watch NHK…
Readers must also recommend this book to elderly people around them, and to women who rely on television as their source of information.
This is also a reader-friendly book for those with presbyopia.
The following is an excerpt from page 65.

● Anti-Japan Tendencies Spread Throughout Society

Takayama
What the Asahi Shimbun and NHK were made to absorb was Cordell Hull’s message that Japan must never be seen as the hero that liberated Asian nations suffering under colonial rule:
“Do not let people think that Japan sacrificed itself and fell for the sake of Asia’s liberation.”
They were pressed to rewrite history so that it was not white people who bullied and exploited Asia, but Japan the aggressor.

Abiru
Once they continued broadcasting The Truth Is This under the changed title Truth Box, and once they serialized The History of the Pacific War in their own paper, they had no choice but to keep insisting that it was all correct.

Takayama
NHK still has not corrected that, even now（笑）.

Abiru
The same goes for the Moritomo and Kake issues.
Once they started saying that Abe was in the wrong, they had to keep saying it.
At this point, they can no longer say, “Actually, he had nothing to do with it.”

Takayama
The Asahi Shimbun moved exactly as GHQ wished, in order to preserve the newspaper’s standing and avoid being dismantled by the occupation authorities.
There was not even anyone inside the Asahi Shimbun who criticized it.
GHQ, for its part, used the domesticated Asahi to carry out ideological control.
Japan, they said, had done nothing but evil in Southeast Asia.
It killed 100,000 in Manila.
In Thailand and Burma, it abused Allied prisoners of war, drove local residents into forced labor, and killed 200,000.
They reported whatever GHQ told them to report, including claims that there was a corpse for every railroad sleeper.
At the same time, Americans were noble.
They had Asahi run a scoop claiming that Harvard professor Langdon Warner had told the U.S. military to protect Japan’s cultural properties and had saved Kyoto from wartime destruction.
In reality, documents later surfaced showing that the first target among the atomic bombing candidates was the airspace 500 meters above the Umekoji rail yard west of Kyoto Station, where they had planned to detonate the first uranium bomb.
They were prepared to destroy cultural properties along with the city itself.
They meant in earnest to burn 500,000 civilians alive, and to reduce Tō-ji, the stage of Kiyomizu, Kinkaku-ji, and Ginkaku-ji all to ashes.
The Asahi Shimbun helped such barbarians pretend to be benevolent protectors of cultural heritage.
And by doing so, it secured for itself the status of a leading national newspaper of Japan.
That line ran from Shintarō Ryū to Yōichi Funabashi, and now Kiyoki Nemoto as editorial chief has emerged, and there is a sense that they continue to preserve that posture as if it were a secret doctrine passed down from master to disciple.
Inside the company as well, there is no one who says, “Isn’t this a little strange?”
And so, before long, the framework that Japan was an aggressor became fixed, and turned into company doctrine.

Abiru
An acquaintance of mine had been working as a weekly magazine writer, but because he could not make a living, he got rehired at the Asahi Shimbun.
He was assigned to the city desk, and when I spoke with him before, he said something like this.
Watching them, everyone starts out nonpolitical.
But if you write an article along this line, your superiors think well of you.
If you write along that line, your article gets bigger treatment.
And so the articles become more and more left-leaning.
And after writing nothing but such articles, the writer himself also becomes increasingly left-leaning.
I once heard something very similar from a member of the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union.
People become teachers because they want to teach, and at first they are neutral, or rather nonpolitical.
But the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union is quite red.
There are several union members at schools, though not everyone belongs.
They are loud.
Everyone gets pulled along.
Then you end up joining the union yourself, and becoming colored by it.
That said, I think this is ultimately because anti-Japan tendencies that began immediately after the war had spread through society as a whole.
When we were children, or rather in our boyhood, and even around our university years, there was a taken-for-granted sense that the Japanese military had committed outrageous brutality.
Then, from around 1990, the comfort women issue began to be reported explosively, and at first many people seem to have felt no doubt at all when they were told, “The Japanese military forcibly rounded them up.”
The indoctrination that “Japan equals evil” had already been accomplished.
Within that environment, a small number of people kept steadily replying, “What.
That is not right,” and piling up counterarguments and rebuttal evidence, and only then did we finally reach the situation we are in today.
There are records of this in the Asahi Shimbun’s own archives, are there not?
When they published things such as Seiji Yoshida’s account claiming that women had been rounded up on the Korean Peninsula and made into comfort women, letters and phone calls came in from people of the generation who knew those times.
Complaints such as, “The Japanese military did not do such things,” or “Isn’t that a little different from the truth?”
And yet the writer of the Asahi Shimbun front-page column “Mado,” in that column dated March 3, 1992, actually scolded them, saying:
“There are things we do not wish to know and do not wish to believe.
But unless we struggle with those feelings, history cannot be preserved.”
How arrogant can one be（笑）.

Takayama
The postwar settlement carried out by America was extraordinarily deliberate in the sense that it sought to undermine the Japanese people as a nation from the very foundations.

Abiru
This propaganda was also for their own sake at the same time.
It was not only about defeating Japan.
They wanted to teach their children that they themselves were clean.

Takayama
America dropped the atomic bombs.
It was an unforgivable act of mass slaughter of noncombatants, and yet they somehow went on to justify it.
First, Japan was a cowardly nation that had launched a treacherous surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Second, the Japanese were cruel, and if left alone for even one day, they would massacre thousands each day across Asia.
There was a duty to force surrender quickly, and if the United States had launched an invasion of Japan, another 2 million Americans would have died, and so on.
In any event, they rewrote history.
And so they steered the narrative toward the conclusion that the atomic bombings had been unavoidable in order to force Japan’s surrender.

Abiru
Even at the Tokyo Trial, which began in 1946, the moment Japanese defense lawyers tried to mention the atomic bomb, the stenographic record was stopped.
That much shows that Americans themselves initially felt guilty about it.
They were quite nervously afraid that Japan might someday call them to account.
But within America, education continued for years teaching that the atomic bombings had been a sound measure for ending the war.
Americans themselves began to believe it that way.
Of course there are some who say it was wrong, but most people today have come to think that, in its own way, it was for the best.
Education truly is a frightening thing.