Published on July 15, 2019.
This chapter questions the nature of American journalism after NHK reported a New York Times story as if it were major news placing President Trump in a desperate position.
Through an essay by Masayuki Takayama, it criticizes the Toyota brake issue, distorted reporting by U.S. media, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Pulitzer, and the lineage of fabricated reporting connected to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

July 15, 2019.
The New York Times that slandered Toyota… if this had been Japan, both Obama and that woman would have had their hands put behind their backs for fraudulent obstruction of business.
Last night, on NHK’s 7 p.m. news, Asahi Inoue treated it as major news from the very beginning and reported it as if President Trump had been driven into an utterly desperate corner; the news source was an article from the New York Times, which they love so much.
Then what kind of newspaper is the New York Times?
The following is from a recent work by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, a book that every Japanese citizen… especially every citizen who only subscribes to the Asahi Shimbun and watches NHK, must read.
When the Toyota brake issue arose in the United States, I happened to see footage of a woman from the American Midwest testifying, and I instantly understood that this was a fraudulent story.
That is because at the time I was also a driver.
The emphases in the text, apart from the headings, are mine.
The tyranny of the American yellow press that took money from Toyota.
The distorted reporting shown by American newspapers in the incident in which 1.2 billion dollars was extorted.
Televising the “runaway Prius.”
It was five years ago that Transportation Secretary LaHood accused Toyota vehicles of “running away.”
Triggered by his statement, Lexus cars and Priuses began running away all over the United States.
Some woman’s Lexus somewhere supposedly jumped to 160 kilometers per hour even though she was not pressing the accelerator, and she thought she would die.
In California, there was even a live broadcast in which a patrol car, having rushed to the scene of a runaway Prius, drove alongside it and said, “Stay calm.
Now put the gear into neutral.”
Associate Professor David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University analyzed the way the Prius ran away and showed ABC footage of the tachometer jumping up on its own.
Thus Toyota vehicle sales fell, and the U.S. Congress summoned President Akio Toyoda and threatened him, saying that as many as fifty American citizens had died, and what was he going to do about it.
Toyota vehicles were taken to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and examined thoroughly.
Any car has at least some abnormalities.
Or else a false accusation can be attached to it.
In the 1980s, the German car Audi, which had been selling like crazy in the United States, had a defect found in this precision inspection, and its sales volume fell by 85 percent all at once.
In effect, it was driven out of the American market.
GM and Ford filled that gap and recovered.
It was the same scenario as always.
But unfortunately for them, not the slightest flaw was found in Toyota.
The U.S. government brought the matter to NASA and investigated for another year, but it was useless.
Meanwhile, it was found that the runaway Lexus involved the woman doing the foolish thing of placing two extra floor mats on top of each other.
It was also exposed that the man who had caused the live broadcast of the runaway had intentionally made the car run away in order to extort money from Toyota.
The New York Times that slandered Toyota.
The Southern Illinois University professor also admitted that he had been paid by litigation lawyers and had fabricated false data.
However, during those two years, just as Obama had hoped, Toyota lost market share across the United States and GM revived.
If this had been Japan, both Obama and that woman would have had their hands put behind their backs for fraudulent obstruction of business.
American newspapers such as the New York Times, which slandered Toyota so much while mixing in racial prejudice, should first have apologized, but no one apologized and no one was arrested.
Just when I wondered whether American citizens intended collectively to feign ignorance, I read in the newspaper the other day that Toyota had settled this matter by paying 1.2 billion dollars to the U.S. federal prosecutors’ office.
Japanese people are astonished.
Was that not a mistake for “the United States will pay Toyota”?
This is like giving extra money to a swindler.
Eric Tucker of the Associated Press explained this wondrous mystery.
I thought he might begin by writing, “As one American citizen, I wish I could crawl into a hole,” but that too was wrong.
The headline was “It Is Difficult to Indict Toyota Executives.”
“U.S. prosecutors say Toyota, as an entire company, was trying to conceal dangerous defects.
They threatened that if the company kept coordinating its stories any further, everyone would be arrested, but in the end, they imposed only a 1.2 billion dollar penalty and did not make arrests.”
“In the background was the complex structure of a cunning Japanese company, and it was not even clear who was responsible.”
Attaching a false accusation to the “floor mat.”
It is written as if Toyota were a sly criminal company.
So what exactly did Toyota conceal?
It is said that Toyota had made ambiguous “the possibility that the lubricant in the accelerator pedal could solidify and prevent it from returning” and “the floor-mat problem that caused the San Diego accident in which a family of four died（the mat folded under the accelerator pedal and caused the runaway）.”
Wait a moment.
This is not a Korean car or an American car; NASA had long since investigated and proven that Toyota had no such elementary mistake as lubricant solidification.
The problem is the “floor mat.”
This began about two decades ago with a lawsuit over a Corolla rear-end collision in the state of Georgia.
Although the cause was failure to watch the road ahead, the driver sued Toyota, saying “the accelerator did not return.”
When scientific inspection of the accident vehicle showed that the accelerator was normal, the plaintiff changed his story and said it was a brake failure.
When Toyota scientifically denied that as well, he then entangled Toyota by saying “the floor mat folded in and the accelerator did not return.”
Even Toyota could not scientifically refute a lie like that.
The U.S. federal district court saw this and gleefully ordered Toyota to pay 2 million dollars in damages.
Since then, in the United States, the false accusation against Japanese cars has been fixed as the “floor mat.”
Tucker should rather have explained, from the climate, customs, and the civic level of Americans, why the folding in of floor mats occurs only in the United States.
More than that, I wish he had pointed out the naïveté of Japanese people who believe that they can conclude the TPP with such a country and speak fairly with it.
Incidentally, the man who wrote this commentary filled with racial prejudice is, even so, a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
This was the first graduate school for training “proper journalists,” established according to the will of Joseph Pulitzer, proprietor of the New York World.
Fabricated reporting begins at Columbia University.
Pulitzer’s newspaper was called a yellow paper and was full of vulgar, discriminatory, false articles.
UFOs were also a fabrication of this newspaper, and during the Sino-Japanese War, he had correspondent James Creelman report that “the Japanese army brutally killed 60,000 people, including women and children, in the city of Port Arthur.”
Japan was saved when Belgian ambassador A. d’Anethan denied it as “false reporting that denigrates the Japanese,” but Pulitzer’s newspaper was full of such malicious false reporting.
Before he died, he repented of his past wrongs, and in order to correct the fabricated reporting that had become the habit of American newspapers, he established a graduate school for newspaper reporters at Columbia University, and arranged for the Pulitzer Prize to be awarded to reporters who wrote good articles.
Many of today’s journalists, including Tucker, are graduates of this graduate school.
And yet this is the result.
To put it in the style of Momoe Yamaguchi, “Boy, what on earth have you been taught?”
（May 2014 issue）