Published on July 14, 2019.
Based on a dialogue between former Asahi Shimbun employees, this article records the free atmosphere that existed before the Hirooka regime, the copy desk’s role in judging news value, its weakening after Hirooka took power, top-down instructions, and the reality of unified control over opinion.

July 14, 2019
Before Mr. Hirooka, there was an extremely liberal atmosphere.
There were people on both the left and the right.
And people could say things quite freely.
Suppressing the Discretion of the Copy Desk and Turning It into a Group of Craftsmen.
Inagaki: Earlier, I said that before Mr. Hirooka, there was an extremely liberal atmosphere, didn’t I?
There were people on both the left and the right.
And people could say things quite freely.
The labor union did what it did in its own way, but it did not bind people.
Hongo: At the end of the year when I joined the company, there was the “96 Strike.”
At that time, the copy desk, the key part of the editorial bureau, joined the strike against the expectations of management, so the quality of the newspaper pages became miserable.
For Mr. Shinobu, who had come from the copy desk and was a senior managing director, it must have been a severe blow.
However, after Mr. Hirooka took power, the first thing he did was strip the copy desk of its authority.
Until then, everyone who became a major executive at Asahi Shimbun had experience in the copy desk.
Mr. Ogata, Mr. Midoro Hajime, and Mr. Shinobu had all worked in the copy desk for a long time, and so had Mr. Kimura.
Within Asahi, there was even an unwritten rule that unless one had worked in the copy desk, one could not become an executive.
The reason was that although the copy desk was part of the editorial bureau, it had to decide when to issue extras, how to make special editions, and whether certain advertisements could not be carried; in short, it could not do its work unless it had a view of the entire company business.
In addition, while understanding readers’ needs, the copy desk did work such as deciding that this would be today’s front-page lead, or that this article should be cut down to ten lines.
Therefore, a person who had experienced the copy desk came to understand the entire newspaper business.
However, Mr. Hirooka had no experience in the copy desk.
Neither did Mr. Mori nor Mr. Watanabe.
Among presidents after Hirooka Tomoo, there were almost no people with copy desk experience.
On the contrary, they found the copy desk troublesome and weakened it.
Inagaki: When I entered the copy desk, I was told, “Your first duty is to make an objective judgment of news value.”
Does this deserve to be the lead story?
Or should it be treated as a three-column article?
I was told that we should first make such judgments ourselves, and I once felt very enthusiastic about that.
That kind of spirit and pride has now disappeared.
Hongo: It changed, and instructions began to come from above.
Inagaki: Yes, instructions came from above.
It was especially terrible in the era of Mr. Hirooka and Akioka Ieshige, the Beijing correspondent.
Instructions such as making Mr. Akioka’s worthless, China-leaning manuscript the lead story began to pass through without any judgment.
So the copy desk became a group of copy craftsmen whose only concern was that the page should look good.
Ishikawa: They lost their authority, didn’t they?
Inagaki: I was rather cheeky, you see.
During my time in the Osaka copy desk, I once cut down one of Mr. Mori’s worthless manuscripts that was like an impressionistic essay, and I was scolded for it, ha ha.
Hongo: If that had happened in Tokyo, it would have swollen into an outrageous incident.
After Mr. Mori became chief editorial writer, the copy desk could no longer touch editorial manuscripts, even if there were factual errors, typographical errors, or omissions.
They turned the copy desk into a group of craftsmen.
That was a very major change.
Unified control of opinion.
It is a common tactic of the left.
For example, I think it was in 1966, after Mr. Hirooka took power.
An instruction was issued saying that photographs of Chiang Kai-shek must not be used.
Inagaki: Ah, yes, there was something like that.
Hongo: Without any explanation of the reason, photographs of Chiang Kai-shek’s face were forbidden.
In the copy desk, there was a handover notebook in which notices were written, and before beginning each day’s work, we always looked at it.
When I read that instruction, I thought, Come on, don’t say something so stupid.
Chiang Kai-shek was a benefactor who said, “Return virtue for resentment,” and safely returned Japanese soldiers, wasn’t he?
When I raised my voice inside the company and said, Surely we are not going to avoid using his photograph even when he dies, the desk editor stopped me, saying, “Hey, you, no, no, no.”
Inagaki: What I experienced in the Osaka copy desk was that during the Cultural Revolution, we were told not to publish cartoons of Mao Zedong.
I got angry too.
When I shouted in a loud voice, everyone was looking upward.
We called them flounders.
Those who only looked upward were the ones who rose in the company.
Gradually, even copy editors who had become desk editors but did not know how many columns an article should receive became important.
Such a comical era arrived.