Published on July 14, 2019.
Based on a dialogue between two former Asahi Shimbun employees, this article records how postwar democracy, GHQ occupation policy, the newspaper’s internal leftward shift, the so-called October Revolution, the Red Purge, and Asahi Shimbun’s biased reporting were formed.

July 14, 2019
Where did the distortions brought about by that postwar democracy come from, and how did they come about?
I think it is fair to say that they are reflected exactly in Asahi’s line of argument.
A little while ago, I found the following article on the Internet.
There are many passages that factually support the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, which I am now introducing to Japan and the world, and there are also passages that testify exactly as they are to what I have continued to say: that Asahi Shimbun employees are merely examination elites and are not Japan’s finest players at all.
This is from a collection of dialogues between two former Asahi Shimbun employees who were born in 1934 and held important posts, and therefore were well acquainted with the company after the war.
“Thorough Discussion: Former Employees Speak — Why Does Asahi’s Biased Reporting Never Stop?”
Monthly Seiron, November 2008 issue.
Inagaki Takeshi, former deputy editor-in-chief of Weekly Asahi / Hongo Yoshinori, former director of the Asahi Shimbun Training Institute / Interviewer: Ishikawa Mizuho, former editorial writer at Sankei Shimbun.
Asahi Was the Mirror of Postwar Left-Wing Society.
Inagaki: I always say this, but Asahi Shimbun regards itself as the guardian deity of postwar democracy.
Where did the distortions brought about by that postwar democracy come from, and how did they come about?
I think it is fair to say that they are reflected exactly in Asahi’s line of argument.
People often say that the mass media are a mirror of society.
However, when one considers that postwar democracy was controlled and distorted by the left, Asahi Shimbun is also a mirror of what is called Japan’s left-wing society.
It can also be said that the left and Asahi have moved while influencing each other.
Then what is this left that resonates with Asahi?
It may be pro-communist, but it is not necessarily the Communist Party.
It does not have a tightly constructed theory like the Communist Party.
Rather, it is based on mood, and may be called a mode of thinking that regards that as more stylish.
In other words, there is a kind of emotional leftism to it.
Hongo: The first time Asahi clearly showed a left-wing color was immediately after the end of the war.
In October 1945, what is called the October Revolution within Asahi took place; in short, people such as Katsuji Chodo, who until then had been hiding underground and later became a member of the Central Committee of the Japanese Communist Party, and Kyozo Mori, who later confessed in his own book, “I was a Marxist,” and later became chief editorial writer, came out into the open in their true form and supported the theoretical armament.
Inagaki: Watanabe Seiki, who later became president, was also like that, wasn’t he?
Hongo: I think he resigned because of the Yokohama Incident.
Inagaki: No, he resigned from the company, but returned after the war.
Hongo: Shinjiro Tanaka also returned to his post.
He was the person who later became director of the publishing bureau and founded Asahi Journal.
Inagaki: He was implicated in the Sorge Incident, wasn’t he?
Hongo: Yes.
At the time of the Sorge Incident, he was head of the political and economic department.
Strangely, he was not prosecuted in the Sorge Incident, but he came from the Osaka economic department.
Tanaka, together with Tomoo Hirooka and Kyozo Mori, came from the Osaka economic department.
The Osaka editorial bureau was far from Tokyo, the center of power, and seems to have had a somewhat anti-establishment atmosphere even before the war.
In 1936, when a scandal involving an Asahi reporter occurred at the Tokyo Stock Exchange of the time and reform of the Tokyo economic department was demanded, Tanaka moved from Osaka to Tokyo, leading Hirooka and others with him.
At the Tokyo head office around that time, Hotsumi Ozaki was also there.
He later left the company and worked for the South Manchuria Railway, and while doing so became involved in the Sorge Incident, but it was Tanaka, who had obtained information from his subordinate, who whispered to Ozaki the top secret of the Imperial Conference, “the southward advance.”
Such people were hidden inside the company during the war, and with the end of the war, they all came out at once.
GHQ’s public-office purge order came in 1946, but the year before, Asahi independently drove out the editorial executives of the time and the heads of the Murayama and Ueno families, and in the spring of 1946 it publicly elected its executives.
This means that the labor union elected them.
Tadashi Hasebe, who was still deputy editor-in-chief, became president, but the company became something close to being managed by the labor union.
I think this was the first time a red flag was raised at Asahi.
However, the important thing is that the undercurrent of this trend had existed since before the war.
And within GHQ, which promoted the occupation policy, there were progressives, and in response to them, Asahi’s left-leaning line began.
Inagaki: It seems that there were many progressives in the Government Section and the field of social education at that time.
Hongo: Yes.
Among them were people who had promoted the New Deal policy.
Inagaki: Even among New Dealers, they were New Deal leftists.
Hongo: They can be described as people whose dreams had not come true in America.
Inagaki: Originally, they were pro-communist socialists.
They were not so different from communists.
When one says communism, the American people have an instinctive aversion to it, don’t they?
So they disguised it with words such as “liberal,” infiltrated various government agencies, and among them, quite radical people flooded into Japan.
They had slipped into the social-education field of MacArthur’s headquarters.
Hongo: And those people schemed to use newspapers for the democratization of Japan.
They brought out into the open those who had been suppressed during the war, made newspapers the vanguard, and advanced what was called the democratization of Japan.
Yomiuri had its own fierce labor dispute.
It was led by Tomin Suzuki, but Suzuki himself had been Asahi’s correspondent in Europe during the war.
However, the world situation changed dramatically.
As early as March 1946, Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain speech,” and the Chinese Communists steadily defeated Chiang Kai-shek.
Furthermore, the Korean War began to loom.
Then the United States completely changed its occupation policy.
Until then, it had removed prewar and wartime leaders through the public-office purge, but it suddenly turned to the Red Purge.
At that time, after the education world, the next target was the newspaper industry.
The largest number of purgees was 119 at NHK, followed by 104 at Asahi.
As for the method, they pushed forward denunciations within the workplace.
President Hasebe was forced to swallow a bitter cup, and GHQ even coerced him by saying, “If you do not do it, we will crush Asahi Shimbun.”
It is said that the person he worked hardest to protect was Shintaro Ryu, the chief editorial writer.
People such as Hirooka, Tanaka, and Mori, who had once appeared on the public stage and become stars with the labor union as their base, were at this point returned to their original workplaces.
Then the public-office purge order was lifted, and Ueno Seiichi and Murayama Nagataka also returned to the company.
However, both of them were second-generation members of the owner families, and there was no denying their tendency to say, “Do as you think best.”
Inagaki: They did not have leadership like Shoriki Matsutaro, president of Yomiuri and Director-General of the Science and Technology Agency in the first reshuffled Kishi Cabinet.
Hongo: Originally, Nagataka was the third son of a lord who had received a viscountcy.
Seiichi was also so gentle that it was said he had “DNA for fleeing before the enemy,” ha ha.
In the end, the relatively young people with management ability who had survived from the wartime period built the postwar newspaper boom from 1948 and 1949 onward.
On the business side, there was the major figure Daizo Nagai, later managing director, and on the editorial side, there was Kanichiro Shinobu, later senior managing director; the two became the wheels of the operation and built the postwar golden age until the beginning of the 1950s.
Ishikawa: That was the Murayama era, wasn’t it?
This essay continues.