Written on May 17, 2019, this article sharply depicts, through Masayuki Takayama’s final chapter, how the Asahi Shimbun came after the war to act like a censor of public speech under the will of GHQ and the United States, as well as the arrogance, privileged mentality, and pathology through which it has continued to demean the Japanese people.

2019-05-17
A newspaper reporter ought at least to know that poison gas crawls along the ground, and does not dance through the sky, and ought to realize that killing crows would mean nothing, so I said to the responsible department head, Satake.

I thought there must have been parts of the following book that I had left unread, so I reread it, and this book is one that not only the people of Japan but people throughout the world must read.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that unless we read this book, we cannot understand at all the facts of prewar, wartime, and postwar Japan.
This is an astonishing book.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the content and weight of this dialogue, conducted one year before the death of Mr. Shoichi Watanabe, who in postwar Japan was the greatest and largest genuine scholar and intellectual, by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, make it the greatest book of the postwar era.
In Masayuki Takayama’s commentary in the final chapter below, for example, he makes it clear for the first time, and perfectly, to the people of Japan that what I have long said with deep suspicion regarding the organization called the Foreign Correspondents’ Club was completely correct, and at the same time he perfectly explains the origin of that organization.
Or again, he perfectly clarifies and teaches the correctness of my criticism of NHK and the reasons for NHK’s nature.
I think this more and more deeply.
Masayuki Takayama, of all people, is worthy in every possible sense of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize.
I am convinced that it is our natural duty of courtesy to respond to his work, unique in the postwar world.
Readers will probably think, in various passages, that Masayuki Takayama and I are like twins.
Final Chapter: “Defeat Profiteers” Losing Their Way in Their Wandering — Masayuki Takayama.
“Do you intend to defy the Asahi? We’ll crush you.”
Having finished the dialogue, there are matters that must be explained.
Why is it that the mainstream mass media, headed by the Asahi, behave as though they were censors of public speech and try to bury troublesome commentators?
At the root of that arrogance and conceit lies the fact that after the war, acting under the will of the United States, they were given the role of pursuing Japan’s war of aggression and its atrocities.
So long as they treated Japan as unconditionally evil, it was the same as being granted great power to write history however they pleased.
That Professor Shoichi Watanabe chose historical consciousness as the main battlefield at so early a stage, and fought the “defeat profiteers” for nearly half a century, was truly a mark of insight.
Immediately after the defeat, even the Asahi was still decent.
It had Ichiro Hatoyama write an essay pointing out the inhumanity of the atomic bomb, but GHQ threatened the Asahi by banning its publication, and when it threatened that next time it would be abolished altogether, the paper fell over at once.
GHQ made the Asahi its number-one underling.
That is because at the time it paid no attention to any other newspapers.
There was already a precedent for making newspapers write tall tales such as massacres by the Japanese military and the Bataan Death March, first by restricting the allocation of paper to newspaper companies.
When Britain ruled Burma, it first made paper a state monopoly and allowed it to be sold only in Christian churches.
As a result, the Burmese, most of whom were Buddhists, could no longer obtain paper, and resistance activities stagnated.
Seizing the means of transmitting information is the foundation of colonial rule.
In postwar Japan as well, newspapers were allowed only a single sheet, but when they were made to run the series called “The Pacific War,” only when GHQ used it for propaganda were extra pages allowed, that is, two sheets and four pages.
That is how the newspapers were controlled.
Just like the Asahi, GHQ also turned NHK into a tool for deceiving the Japanese people.
Large numbers of GHQ staff entered the NHK building in Tamura-cho (Uchisaiwai-cho) and directed it.
Because the space was too small, the plan was to move it to the site of the former Azabu Infantry Third Regiment, now the National Art Center, Tokyo, and make it into a Japanese-language broadcasting station directly managed by GHQ, with Stars and Stripes newspaper company housed together there.
But the Korean War broke out and the plan was interrupted, and NHK moved to Yoyogi.
The reason the United States made such heavy use of the Asahi was, as also mentioned in the dialogue, its close relationship with Allen Dulles, a founding member of the OSS, which later became the CIA.
Both Takeo Ogata, who had entered politics and had been vice president and chief editorial writer, and Shintaro Ryu, the editorial chief, had deep ties with Dulles.
As the example of the 1960 security treaty showed, a system had been established for controlling newspapers and public opinion by using the Asahi.
GHQ also set up the foreign correspondents’ club in order to manipulate Japanese public opinion.
If a politician they disliked appeared, that club would create “international public opinion” and have the Asahi and NHK purge him.
In Mark Gayn’s Japan Diary, there is a passage where, at GHQ’s wish, Ichiro Hatoyama is called to a luncheon of the foreign correspondents’ club and the correspondents gang up on him.
The Asahi followed this by attacking Hatoyama and politically burying him.
Even after GHQ was gone, this system survived.
In the case of Kakuei Tanaka’s money-network scandal, the foreign correspondents’ club invited Tanaka to a luncheon and launched a full-scale attack on him, and seeing this, all the Japanese newspapers, which until then had ignored the matter even when Bungeishunju reported it, followed at once, and Tanaka was forced to resign.
The Lockheed scandal that followed had exactly the same structure.
Because such a postwar system existed, the authority of the Asahi appeared rock-solid.
Thus pressure came to be applied to censor the claims of commentators they disliked and to crush them by the power of the Asahi.
As mentioned in the dialogue, Professor Watanabe’s long battle with the Asahi also began with the trigger of a fabricated debate page created around Ohnishi Kyojin.
Why was Professor Watanabe targeted?
Because he asserted things the Asahi Shimbun did not want.
There had been similar cases even before that.
For example, Michio Takeyama, known for The Burmese Harp, in 1968 was the only one to support the port call at Sasebo by the U.S. aircraft carrier Enterprise among five intellectual opinions introduced on the Asahi social page.
In response, a flood of emotional letters of condemnation, carried along by Asahi’s agitation, poured in and were published one after another in the “Voice” column.
While more than 250 critical letters were received at the Tokyo headquarters alone, the Asahi rejected Takeyama’s counter-rebuttal and brought the controversy to an end by cutting off dialogue.
The editor of the Asahi’s “Voice” column later argued in Shokun! that selecting letters for publication according to the judgment of the person in charge was something done everywhere.
They beat down Michio Takeyama and showed an overbearing attitude, as if to say, “We’ll let you know what happens if you do not obey the Asahi.”
The Asahi Shimbun has a way of thinking that does not permit those who oppose it.
That characteristic has continued unchanged to the present day.
Speaking personally, the beginning of my own entanglement with the Asahi was that, in 1981, I voiced a different view regarding the 1966 All Nippon Airways crash off Haneda.
That accident had almost been settled as pilot error, but the Asahi made a commotion supporting the theory of mechanical defect, and in the end the accident investigation committee was overborne by the Asahi and declared the cause unknown.
But when I became responsible for aviation and listened to many people, almost all the veteran pilots said it was pilot error, because the pilot could not fully handle the performance of the Boeing 727.
When I summarized an article to that effect in an ANA-related magazine, an Asahi reporter came to investigate and, in the lead article on the general page, attacked me and the ANA-related interviewee by name for arrogantly putting forth a view that denied the mechanical-defect theory advocated by the Asahi.
What was wrong with telling the truth?
I was utterly appalled by the Asahi’s attitude of not tolerating dissent, but ANA too could not bear being attacked by the Asahi.
Several persons in related managerial posts were punished with salary cuts and showed submission to the Asahi.
The Asahi has no hesitation in using its pages to display the attitude that “I will not permit anyone who complains about what I have written.”
I was astonished that even ANA apologized and imposed pay-cut disciplinary measures.
Why on earth is it not even permitted to advocate a theory different from the Asahi’s?
This too has the same structure of suppressing speech as in the case where Professor Shoichi Watanabe was harassed.
A little later, I became a desk editor in the city news department.
Then there appeared the front-page Asahi poison gas article also mentioned in the dialogue.
At the time, city desk reporter Ishikawa Mizuho brought in a manuscript saying, “That was not poison gas but smoke,” so I carried it prominently at the top of the city page.
Then, to my further astonishment, the next day the Asahi’s responsible department head stormed in angrily.
Ordinarily, when the mistake in an article is pointed out, the proper attitude of a reporter or editor would be to investigate thoroughly again in case there had been an error.
Even by common sense, poison gas does not rise into the sky.
The first poison gas used was called yperite.
It is another name for mustard gas, first used near the Belgian village of Ypres.
On the stalled Western Front, when the wind was blowing toward the Allied side and the lid of the cylinder was opened, this yperite would crawl along the ground and flow into the enemy trenches.
That is how the officers and men in the enemy trench died.
It is called mustard gas because the smell resembles mustard and because the color is somewhat yellow.
As also mentioned in the dialogue, in 1986, when I was bureau chief in Tehran, I actually saw such wounded soldiers in an Iranian field hospital, and I thought it was horrific.
A newspaper reporter ought at least to know that poison gas crawls along the ground and does not dance through the sky, and ought to realize that killing crows would mean nothing, so I said this to the responsible department head, Satake.
Then he said, “Does a mere Sankei think it can defy the Asahi?” [“We’ll crush Sankei and the like.”]
Who on earth did he think he was?
The point was that one must not raise doubts about Asahi’s reporting, one must not go against the thinking of the “great Asahi of the realm.”
I was astonished by such terribly swollen arrogance.
After that, Ishikawa Mizuho also found the source of the photograph and reported it, and in the end, several days later, the Asahi was forced to print a correction article, but instead of correcting itself by saying, “It was not poison gas,” it escaped by means of an evasive correction, saying, “The location of the operation had been different.”
This way of escaping is exactly like the excuse the Asahi gave recently in its Moritomo Gakuen reporting when it reported “Kaisei Elementary School” as “Shinzo Abe Elementary School.”
“Because the school name and so forth had initially been blacked out, the Asahi Shimbun reported in its May 9 morning edition that, based on interviews with Mr. Kagoike, it had made clear that Mr. Kagoike had submitted to the Kinki Local Finance Bureau of the Ministry of Finance a prospectus bearing the school name ‘Shinzo Abe Memorial Elementary School’” (dated November 25, 2017).
Even though it was wrong, it neither corrected itself nor apologized.
No matter what false report there may be, it is not permitted to point out that what the Asahi wrote was wrong, and instead it flies into a rage.
It is arrogance and a sense of privilege normally unthinkable.
Come to think of it, there was a reporter who had entered the company the same year I did and at some point moved to the Asahi.
When I was rising from bureau work to the city desk and happened to meet him at some scene and called out to him, he glared at me and said, “I am already an Asahi Shimbun reporter. Address me with ‘san.’”
He spoke as though to say that his rank was now different from mine.
Asahi people were chosen journalists, different from the rest of you.
Even between newspaper companies they flaunted that sense of privilege openly.
The pathology of wanting to go on writing about how hopeless Japan is.
What the Asahi Shimbun actually did was to emphasize the ugliness of the Japanese and to write that this people are hopeless from the roots of their character.
As shown symbolically in the coral graffiti incident, it scribbled graffiti itself and then wrote, “It is certain to become a monument to the Japanese. The poverty of spirit, the desolate heart, that feels no shame in instantly damaging something that has grown over a hundred years…”
It joyfully criticized how hopeless the spiritually poor and shameless Japanese were.
There is a commercial called “The Japanese,” created by Norway’s Braathens Airline (now Scandinavian Airlines), which won the gold prize at the 1999 Cannes International Advertising Festival.
Its content is that a timid Japanese passenger boards an airplane, picks up something in a plastic bag from among the in-flight meal items, thinks it is an oshibori towel and wipes his face with it, only to get peanut butter all over himself.
Then the screen changes, and when a real oshibori is presented next time, he jumps to the conclusion that it is a snack and says, “I’m full right now,” and refuses it.
It is a story in which the Japanese passenger, on an unfamiliar airplane, watches the people around him and in the end makes mistakes.
The in-flight oshibori service is Japanese.
Norwegians and the like did not even know to wipe their hands.
A Norwegian airline whose people, when given an oshibori, seemed to think it was perhaps for wiping shoes, recently began offering oshibori themselves.
They were so pleased about this that they created the piece thinking Japanese people probably still would not know it.
The Asahi wrote with abundant masochistic relish that this is how shameful Japanese appear from abroad.
If it were a newspaper company, the common-sense response would be to write that this is completely mistaken, and that there are no Japanese who do not understand oshibori.
Do they want so badly to write the Japanese as ugly?
This too is the pathology of the Asahi.
This article will continue.