Written on May 3, 2019, this essay criticizes the newspaper reporters, freelance writers, and so-called progressive intellectuals who defended the Asahi Shimbun, and sharply exposes the hypocrisy behind their claims of “fair reporting” and “journalism faithful to facts.”
Arguing that no historical fact exists without interpretation, it denounces the hypocrisy of intellectuals who conceal their anti-Abe, anti-LDP, and anti-conservative positions while pretending to be fair.

2019-05-03
They claim that journalism must be faithful to facts and must engage in fair reporting.
It makes me want to say that even fools should know when to stop talking nonsense.

The Hypocrites Who Defend Asahi.
The Asahi Shimbun is now being pummeled from all sides.
Though one may say this is merely the rust that has come out from its own long record of reckless false reporting, at a time like this, the progressive cultural figures patronized by Asahi
(an expression that has already become an archaic one)
ought to be striving with all their might to defend Asahi, and yet they do not show themselves at all.
In ancient China, there is such a story.
When a man named Zheng Dangshi was a high government official, so many people came to see him that they filled the gate.
But once he lost office, no one came near him.
The only ones appearing before his gate were sparrows.
And there were so many of them that nets could be spread there and they could be caught.
Regarding this, the appraisal in the “Biography of Zheng Dangshi” in the Shiji said, “Outside the gate, one might well set up a sparrow-net.”
Later, when this man was restored to office, people came flocking again, and so it is said that he wrote these words in large letters on his gate.
“With one string and one coin, the true feelings of men are revealed.”
Such is the world of men.
Replacing the progressive cultural figures who scattered and fled, those now striving to defend Asahi are newspaper reporters from other companies and freelance writers, beginning with Aoki Osamu.
Their arguments are almost all the same.
That is to say, first they criticize by saying, “What Asahi did was not good.”
Up to that point, they are the same as Monthly Hanada, Sound Argument, the Sankei Shimbun, and the like.
But after that, they are entirely different.
The above journals demand that Asahi strive to restore the honor of Japan and the Japanese people, which was damaged before the world by Asahi, but these people do not do that, and instead proceed with arguments marked by two major characteristics.
First characteristic.
They say that the human rights issue called the comfort women problem still remains.
And that historical verification and historical research on it are necessary.
They would do well to stop joking.
The history of the so-called “jorō”
(if I do not say “so-called,” there are people who start making a fuss)
began in the most ancient times and has continued down to the present day, and of course it will not disappear in the future either.
If there is a nation without such so-called jorō, let it be clearly shown.
Can that be done.
It cannot, can it.
The reason why the so-called jorō have not disappeared even now is that behind the matter lies the dark abyss of human sexual nature, one that can never be explained, no matter how upside down one stands, by the condescending and banal reasons of human rights, poverty, or ignorance.

Not only that, among historical researchers, the study of such so-called jorō is no more than a theme for third-rate scholars, and first-rate scholars hardly touch it.
What then becomes of that reality.
Second characteristic.
They claim that journalism must be faithful to facts and must engage in fair reporting.
It makes me want to say that even fools should know when to stop talking nonsense.
For in human history there exists no such thing as a fact to which no interpretation has been added.
For example, even when there is a volcanic eruption, it is impossible to report only the so-called facts.
There was this sentence in a newspaper describing disaster victims on the ground from a helicopter.
It said that the hands seeking rescue were trembling.
But the act of trembling ordinarily cannot be known unless one is at very close range.
So how could that be known from aboard a helicopter.
That helicopter was, of course, not a rescue helicopter.
It was a press helicopter, and therefore it was at a considerable height, so there is no way one could have seen the trembling of a hand.
And yet, to write that the hand was trembling means that under the reporter’s imagination or fixed preconception, an interpretation has been added, namely that “the disaster victim is trembling in fear.”
Even in the case of an eruption, interpretation is added.
How much more so in matters of history, where there is no such thing as a fact without interpretation added to it
(which, as a result, becomes source material).
To add interpretation to fact
that is to give it “meaning,”
and all of human history is constituted by that.
There exists no historical fact possessing the objectivity of some eternal and unchanging fairness.
In fact, the stance of the intellectuals and journalists who defend Asahi is uniformly anti-Abe, anti-LDP, anti-conservative… and though they themselves are already not fair, they speak as if they were fair.
There is no choice but to call them counterfeit hypocrites.
An ancient said, honesty means acting in accordance with the Way, speaking in accordance with principle, and being fair and without selfishness.