Published on July 14, 2019.
Through Masayuki Takayama’s commentary, this article critically examines The Asahi Shimbun’s society-section reporting that described North Korea as a “paradise on earth,” the return project, Japanese wives, the abduction issue, and the newspaper’s editorial praise for the AIIB. It questions reporting without proper investigation, articles written from imagination, and corrections made without apology.

July 14, 2019.
Even Koreans living in Japan, who are highly suspicious by nature, would come to think it was true if such a long-term campaign were carried out.
As a result, 100,000 people returned to hell.
The following is a chapter published on July 12, 2018.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The Asahi society section’s reporting on “paradise on earth.”
He himself may have thought that this, too, was news, but readers end up thinking of it as “fact.”
But he says this.
That is up to the readers.
Those who misunderstand are at fault.
Around the same time, Iwadare Hiroshi was in the society section.
He and his colleagues wrote articles saying that “North Korea is a paradise on earth.”
They wrote that “the pace of North Korea’s economic construction is tremendous,” that “apartment buildings are being built one after another, and factories are operating twenty-four hours a day at full capacity,” and that “citizens are living stable lives, both spiritually and materially, under Kim Il-sung.”
This “paradise on earth” campaign continued for more than twenty years.
Even Koreans living in Japan, who are highly suspicious by nature, would come to think it was true if such a long-term campaign were carried out.
As a result, 100,000 people returned to hell.
The Asahi Shimbun admitted its error thirty years later, after those 100,000 people had almost all been killed off.
On July 8, 2004, after Kim Jong-il had admitted the existence of many abductees, including Megumi, and after some of them had returned to Japan, and after it had been clearly proven that the place was hell, Asahi quietly carried “The True Face of North Korea” on an inside page.
There, Iwadare admitted that because “there was little information” and because “sufficient reporting could not be done,” he had written about hell as though it were heaven, using his imagination.
Normally, if reporters cannot conduct interviews or gather information, they do not write.
Writing from imagination is called fabrication.
Aside from Koreans, 3,000 Japanese wives were also killed because of it, but neither Iwadare nor Asahi offered a single word of apology.
They apparently intended to bring everything to an end with this scrap of an excuse.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or AIIB, which Xi Jinping launched last year, had been predicted to collapse from around that time.
For example, China’s trade volume fell by as much as 15 percent last year.
In terms of GNP, it was “minus 3 percent, the same as the Lehman shock,” according to Takahashi Yoichi.
Therefore, although the AIIB was launched, it still has no rating.
In other words, it cannot issue bonds.
The person who recommended such an AIIB in all seriousness was editorial writer Yoshioka Keiko.
In her column “Hamon Fūkan,” she praised the AIIB almost every time and criticized the Abe administration’s lack of foresight for not joining, asking, “Is it all right for Japan to remain absent?”
She also wrote that “even the United States is considering joining.”
Even Chinese people would not tell such a lie.
She depicts Jin Liqun, the head of this fraudulent bank, as a good-looking man, “white-haired and plump.”
Does she not know that swindlers often have exactly that kind of appearance?