An essay dated June 10, 2019.
Through the Asahi Shimbun’s comfort women reporting and its “Yoshida testimony” coverage, this piece exposes the structure by which Japan and the Japanese people have been internationally degraded, while introducing Ryusho Kadota’s investigation and Masayuki Takayama’s review.
It sharply questions the Fukushima Daiichi coverage, the decline of newspaper journalism, unreported-on-site reporting, and the reality of anti-Japan impression manipulation.

2019-06-10
His voice, forged by the sea wind, turned President Trump of the United States around at the Kokugikan and earned him the honor of a handshake.
With that great voice, he is appealing to today’s newspapers to regain their sanity.

Yesterday, I carried three books with me as companions for the round trip on the Shinkansen.
About a certain chapter in one of them, the Kadota Ryusho book below, I asked even a book-loving friend to cooperate, because I felt that I had to let all the Japanese people and people throughout the world know of it as quickly as possible.
My friend, while asking whether I had read yesterday’s book review column in the Sankei Shimbun, pointed it out to me.
Masayuki Takayama rarely writes book reviews, but this time, he said, he had felt that Takayama would probably write one about this book.
It was also the review most closely related to the chapter I had been intending to send out.
I will introduce that review following this chapter.
The Malice of the Asahi Shimbun in the “Yoshida Testimony” Coverage.
The “Yoshida Testimony” Coverage and the Comfort Women Coverage.
The Asahi Shimbun is, for the Japanese people, a truly “mysterious existence.”
No other media outlet in Japan has internationally degraded Japan and the Japanese people to this extent and driven them into such disadvantageous positions.
Because of Asahi Shimbun reporting, the Japanese people have suffered many disadvantages.
For example, it is well known that on August 11, 1991, Asahi turned the issue of Korean comfort women into a major matter by portraying them as beings who had been “taken to the battlefield under the name of the Women’s Volunteer Corps and forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers,” and that this has now completely destroyed Japan-Korea relations and become a great barrier before young Japanese seeking to spread their wings into the world.
In that era, when poverty dominated the whole world, there were many unfortunate women both in Japan and in Korea who, for various reasons, entered the trade of selling spring.
There were many ill-fated women who entered such work, guaranteed a “monthly income of 300 yen,” which amounted to about thirty times the pay of soldiers.
Yet because of the Asahi Shimbun, those women were transformed into beings who had been forcibly “taken” to the battlefield and forced into “prostitution.”
In the process, it was the Japanese people themselves who were “degraded.”
The basic structure of the “Yoshida testimony” coverage that Asahi began on May 20, 2014, is the same.
This campaign article was, first of all, staggering in scale.
Not only did it run from the huge front-page headline straight through page two, but it was so large-scale that a special page was created for it on the internet edition, Asahi Digital.
In that article, Asahi reported that on the morning of March 15, 2011, 90 percent of the TEPCO employees at Fukushima Daiichi had “withdrawn from the nuclear plant” in “violation of the plant chief’s orders.”
In other words, it said that the great majority of the workers had fled the site “in defiance of orders.”
And what is more, it said that this had become clear through the “Furuta testimony” of the government accident investigation commission, which Asahi had obtained.
If true, it was indeed a major scoop, something never before reported.
But was it really true?
To be continued.
Below is Masayuki Takayama’s review published in the Sankei Shimbun.
Appealing for Newspapers to Regain Their Sanity.
The Sickness Called Newspapers.
By Kadota Ryusho (Sankei Shinso Publishing, 880 yen plus tax)
There are any number of people who say, Here is what is bad about the Asahi Shimbun.
But it is not just “here.”
Everything is bad.
For thirty years it spread lies about the comfort women and degraded the Japanese people.
That alone should have meant the end of the paper, yet it continues to feign innocence.
Those around it are indulgent too.
Shukan Bunshun’s “Distrust of Newspapers” column has continued to treat it as though it were still a respectable great newspaper.
Most of those who spoke of distrust toward Asahi have also gone.
Just when I was thinking, so Asahi’s self-righteousness is reviving again, the author appeared in this paper’s “A Rebuke to Newspapers!”
This book is mainly a collection of that work, but it also includes the Yoshida testimony affair, with which Asahi has such a fateful connection.
In that TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, the devotion of plant chief Masao Yoshida and his subordinates, who stayed at the site and kept things under control, was praised by the world.
The Yoshida testimony of the government accident investigation commission was not public, but Asahi obtained it and reported that “700 subordinates had fled to save their own lives,” thereby mocking the world’s praise.
The source was a nonpublic document.
There had been no way to verify its truth or falsehood, but the author had interviewed Chief Yoshida for many hours and had also heard from his subordinates.
Through steady reporting, he pointed out Asahi’s false reporting, and Asahi’s lie was exposed.
The reporter who wrote it had not even covered the site.
He had no intention of writing facts.
He cared only about how to degrade the Japanese people.
The author says that reporters today have stopped reporting, just like this reporter.
And that, he says, has led to the degeneration of newspapers.
Though they do not report, they boast, “We are fighting with the pen against those who want war,” and he points out the symptoms of this sickness as a state of “self-intoxication that does not look at reality.”
Therefore, for example, when faced with the outrageous conduct of China and South Korea, they produce a groundless masochistic historical view, saying, “Do not forget the pain of those who suffered from colonial rule and invasion,” and thus suppress sound argument.
Even the Megumi-chan case becomes “an obstacle to Japan-North Korea friendship negotiations,” and Renho’s dual nationality becomes “is being a pure Japanese really so important?”
The author asks Asahi and the newspaper world that imitates it, What is the purpose of using all of that influence and skillful rhetoric to degrade the Japanese people?
The author is from Tosa.
His voice, forged by the sea wind, turned President Trump of the United States around at the Kokugikan and earned him the honor of a handshake.
With that great voice, he is appealing to today’s newspapers to regain their sanity.
Above all others, this is a book I want the reporters of the Asahi Shimbun to read first.
Review by Masayuki Takayama (journalist)