Written on June 28, 2019.
This essay examines the Occupation forces’ plan to democratize and weaken NHK, the enactment of the Broadcast Act and the parallel structure of NHK and commercial broadcasting, and the moves made by the Japanese government and NHK over television broadcasting.
Through Shigeru Yoshida’s abolition of the Radio Regulatory Commission, Telecommunications Minister Eisaku Sato’s granting of a license to NHK, and NHK’s conflict with Matsutaro Shoriki, it depicts the formation of Japan’s postwar broadcasting system and NHK’s political maneuvering.

2019-06-28
Eisaku Sato, the star pupil of the Yoshida School and Minister of Telecommunications, overrode the opposition of Matsutaro Shoriki, who was preparing to launch Nippon Television (officially Nippon Television Network Corporation), and granted NHK a television broadcasting license.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The plan to weaken NHK.　
In order to democratize NHK, the Occupation forces separated it from the government and the Information Bureau and turned it into an independent institution, though in reality it was a propaganda organ of GHQ.
They then had a Broadcasting Commission established and, at least nominally, entrusted the “management” of NHK to this commission.　
Among its 17 members were Yuriko Miyamoto, wife of Kenji Miyamoto, Samon Arahata, a socialist activist, Shizue Kato, a Japan Socialist Party member of the House of Representatives, Zengoro Shimagami, secretary-general of the Tokyo Transportation Labor Union, and Yuko Yoko, a member of the women’s division of the Japanese Communist Party.
And as part of the Five Great Reforms, reform is American propaganda, so I call it remodeling, they also had a labor union created within NHK.
During the Korean War, this union became such a radical leftist group that the Occupation forces had to purge as many as 119 people.　
The reason why workers, not managers, at the Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, film companies, and newsreel companies such as Nippon Eiga-sha obediently cooperated with WGIP was also that labor unions had been formed, radicalized, and had made management and the old wartime system the targets they pushed against and attacked.
In other words, even without being ordered, they had come to possess the psychology of denouncing and hanging up to dry management and the old wartime system.
This can also be said of the commercial broadcasting stations into which former NHK employees entered after being purged.
Since these stations were launched after 1951, chronologically speaking they had not joined WGIP, yet they came to produce anti-militarist, anti-old-regime programs that traced its pattern, and adopted the same reporting posture.　
As I also noted in the June Reiwa special issue article “The Strange Matter of NHK and Receiving Fees,” because NHK had tilted so far to the left, even though it was something CIE itself had done, once the Occupation passed its second year, CIE began to explore abolishing NHK.　
However, because it still had to be used until the Occupation ended, in cooperation with CCS they planned not abolition but weakening.
Part of that policy was the enactment of the Broadcast Act, which stipulated the parallel structure of NHK and commercial broadcasting.
Its main aim was to define commercial broadcasting, which did not yet exist, and to create the legal framework that would allow private business entities to enter it.
And they intended to permit television broadcasting only to commercial broadcasters, excluding NHK.　
At that point, NHK, just as it had once switched from the military authorities to CIE, now switched over to the Japanese government.
In the course of that lobbying, then Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida abolished in 1952, when the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect and Japan recovered its independence, the Radio Regulatory Commission, an institution independent from the government that CIE had caused to be created, which had been unwilling to issue NHK a television broadcasting license.
Furthermore, Eisaku Sato, the star pupil of the Yoshida School and Minister of Telecommunications, overrode the opposition of Matsutaro Shoriki, who was preparing to launch Nippon Television (officially Nippon Television Network Corporation), and granted NHK a television broadcasting license.　
During this period, whether NHK gave government officials the same kind of “hospitality” it had once given officers of CCS and CIE or not, the result was that NHK succeeded in outmaneuvering Shoriki and gaining the honor of Japan’s first television broadcast.
To be continued.