An essay dated June 11, 2019.
Through a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, this piece exposes the distortions of Japan’s postwar information space, focusing on GHQ thought control, the reporting stance of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, the comfort women issue, the justification of the atomic bombings, and the spread of anti-Japan education.
It sharply questions how the mass media fixed in place a historical framework portraying Japan as inherently guilty.

2019-06-11
Since they kept broadcasting by merely changing the signboard from Shinsō wa Kō da to Shinsōbako, and since they serialized The History of the Pacific War in their own paper, they cannot survive unless they keep saying that it was correct.

This is a chapter I published on 2019-02-18 under the title, NHK Still Has Not Corrected That, Has It?
This chapter makes clear just how base and malicious the Korean Peninsula, China, and the people who sympathize with their anti-Japan propaganda really 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 all Japanese citizens who can read print must 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 reporter of our time, senior and junior colleagues at the Sankei Shimbun.
Readers should not only head at once to the nearest bookstore to purchase it, but should also recommend this book to the elderly around them and to women who take television as their source of information, because the older generation in particular are the most vulnerable to misinformation, and most of them subscribe to newspapers such as Asahi, Mainichi, Tokyo, and Chunichi and watch NHK.
This book is also kind to people with presbyopia.
What follows is an excerpt from page 65.
● Anti-Japan Tendencies Spread Throughout Society
Takayama
What was drilled into the Asahi Shimbun and NHK were Cordell Hull’s words that Japan must not be allowed to be the hero that liberated Asian nations suffering under colonial rule, and that people must not be allowed to think that Japan “sacrificed itself for the liberation of Asia and then was defeated.”
They were made to rewrite history so that it was not the white nations that bullied and exploited Asia, but Japan the aggressor.
Abiru
Since they kept broadcasting by merely changing the signboard from Shinsō wa Kō da to Shinsōbako, and since they serialized The History of the Pacific War in their own paper, they cannot survive unless they keep saying that it was correct.
Takayama
NHK still has not corrected that, has it?
Abiru
The Moritomo and Kake issues are the same too.
Since they have kept saying that Abe was at fault, they have to go on saying it.
They can no longer say, actually, there was no connection.
Takayama
The Asahi Shimbun moved exactly as GHQ wished, in order to preserve the prestige of the newspaper company and to avoid being dissolved by GHQ.
There was no one inside the Asahi Shimbun who criticized that.
GHQ, for its part, used the tamed Asahi to carry out thought control.
Japan did nothing but bad things in the countries of Southeast Asia.
In Manila it killed 100,000 people.
In Thailand and Burma it abused Allied prisoners of war, drove local inhabitants out and worked them to death, killing 200,000 people.
It reported whatever GHQ said, such as that there were corpses at every railroad tie.
Meanwhile, Americans were noble.
Harvard professor Langdon Warner told the U.S. military to protect Japan’s cultural properties, and saved Kyoto from war damage, and Asahi had that written up as a scoop.
In reality, it was later found in historical materials that the first target candidate for the atomic bomb was 500 meters above the Umekōji rail yard west of Kyoto Station, where they had planned to detonate the first uranium-type atomic bomb.
They intended to destroy cultural properties together with the entire city.
They meant in earnest to burn 500,000 citizens, and to burn down Tō-ji, the stage of Kiyomizu, Kinkaku-ji, and Ginkaku-ji as well.
The Asahi Shimbun helped such barbarians pose as though they were good people protecting cultural properties.
By doing so, the Asahi Shimbun was guaranteed its place as one of Japan’s representative great newspapers.
That line ran from Shintarō Ryū to Yōichi Funabashi, and now with editorial chief Kiyoki Nemoto appearing, there is a sense that they keep that posture as though it were some secret one-line transmission.
There is no one inside the company who says, this is a little strange, isn’t it?
And while that continued, the framework of Japan as an aggressor was fixed and became the company creed.
Abiru
An acquaintance of mine had been working as a weekly magazine writer, but because he could not make a living at it, he got re-employed at the Asahi Shimbun.
He was assigned to the city desk, and when I spoke with him before, he said something like this.
Watching things, everyone starts out as nonpolitical.
But if you write articles along this sort of line, your superiors approve of you.
If you write along this sort of line, your article gets handled more prominently.
And so the articles tilt more and more to the left.
And while writing nothing but such articles, the writer himself also grows more and more left-leaning.
I once heard something similar from a member of the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union.
He became a teacher because he wanted to become a teacher, and at first he was neutral, or rather nonpolitical.
But the organization called the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union is quite red.
Not every union member, but several of them, are in each school.
Their voices are loud.
Everyone is dragged along.
And so one comes to join the union oneself and becomes dyed by it.
That said, I think this is because anti-Japan tendencies that began immediately after the war have permeated society as a whole.
When we were children, or rather in our boyhood, even when we were around university age, there was a sense that it was only natural that the Japanese military had been extremely brutal, and when the comfort women issue began to be reported explosively from around 1990, I think many people at first felt no doubt at all even when they were told that “the Japanese military forcibly rounded them up.”
The indoctrination that Japan equals evil had already been accomplished.
Within that, a small number of people who said, Huh? That is not right, is it? steadily kept rebutting and piling up counterevidence, and only then did we finally arrive at the present situation.
There are even records of this in the Asahi Shimbun’s own archives.
When they wrote and published such things as Seiji Yoshida’s account that women were rounded up in the Korean Peninsula and turned into comfort women, letters and phone calls came in from older people who knew the time.
Complaints saying, “The Japanese military did no such thing,” or “Isn’t that a little different?”
Yet the writer of the front-page Asahi column “Mado,” in that column dated March 3, 1992, even scolded them by saying, “There are things one does not want to know, does not want to believe. But unless one struggles with that feeling, history cannot be preserved.”
How pompous can they get?
Takayama
The postwar measures carried out by America were extraordinarily well prepared in the sense that they sought to undermine from the root the Japanese as a single people.
Abiru
This propaganda was also for themselves at the same time.
It was not only about defeating Japan.
They wanted to teach their own children that they themselves were clean.
Takayama
America dropped the atomic bombs.
It was an unforgivable act of mass slaughter of noncombatants, yet they somehow kept justifying it.
First, Japan was a cowardly country and had launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
Second, the Japanese were cruel, and if left alone for even one day they were massacring thousands each day in the countries of Asia.
They had a duty to force Japan to surrender quickly, and if they carried out an invasion of Japan, another two million Americans would die.
In any case, they kept rewriting history.
And so they led things to the conclusion that dropping the atomic bombs was unavoidable in order to make Japan surrender.
Abiru
Even at the Tokyo Trials beginning in 1946, the moment the Japanese side’s lawyer tried to mention the atomic bombs, the stenographic record stopped.
That is how guilty Americans felt at first.
They were rather nervously afraid that someday Japan might accuse them.
But within America, people were continually educated that the atomic bombings were a sound measure to bring the war to an end.
Americans themselves began to believe that.
Of course there are people who say it was wrong, but at present most people hold the view that, well, it was acceptable after all.
I think education really is a frightening thing.