Published on July 31, 2019. This article discusses how, under the GHQ occupation, NHK was separated from the Japanese government and the Information Bureau, and how the establishment of the Broadcasting Committee and labor unions contributed to its leftward shift. It examines the committee members including Miyamoto Yuriko, Arahata Kanson, Kato Shizue, and others, cooperation with the WGIP, plans to abolish or weaken NHK, the enactment of the Broadcast Act, the creation of a dual public-private broadcasting system, and the process leading to NHK’s television broadcasting license.

July 31, 2019.
Among the 17 committee members were Miyamoto Yuriko, wife of Miyamoto Kenji, Arahata Kanson, a socialist activist, Kato Shizue, a member of the House of Representatives from the Japan Socialist Party, Shimagami Zengoro, secretary-general of the Tokyo Transportation Workers’ Union, and Yoko Yuko, a member of the women’s division of the Japanese Communist Party.
This is a chapter I published on June 28, 2019, under the title: “In order to democratize NHK, the occupation forces separated it from the government and the Information Bureau and made it an independent organization, though in reality it was a public-relations organ of GHQ.
Then they had a Broadcasting Committee established and, nominally at least, entrusted the ‘operation’ of NHK to this committee.”
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The plan to weaken NHK.
In order to democratize NHK, the occupation forces separated it from the government and the Information Bureau and made it an independent organization, though in reality it was a public-relations organ of GHQ.
Then they had a Broadcasting Committee established and, nominally at least, entrusted the “operation” of NHK to this committee.
Among the 17 committee members were Miyamoto Yuriko, wife of Miyamoto Kenji, Arahata Kanson, a socialist activist, Kato Shizue, a member of the House of Representatives from the Japan Socialist Party, Shimagami Zengoro, secretary-general of the Tokyo Transportation Workers’ Union, and Yoko Yuko, a member of the women’s division of the Japanese Communist Party.
And as part of the Five Great Remodelings, because “reform” was American-side propaganda and therefore I call them remodelings, they also had a labor union created at NHK.
During the Korean War, this union became such a radical left-wing group that the occupation forces had to purge as many as 119 people.
The reason the workers, not the management, of the Asahi Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, film companies, and newsreel companies such as Nippon Eigasha, obediently cooperated with the WGIP was that labor unions had been formed and radicalized, and the targets they pushed against and attacked had become management and the old wartime system.
In other words, even without being ordered to do so, they were in a state of mind in which they would denounce and put on trial the management side and the old wartime system.
This can also be said of the commercial broadcasting stations into which former NHK employees entered after being purged.
Since these broadcasting stations opened in and after 1951, they did not join the WGIP in terms of timing, but they came to create programs and take reporting stances that followed it, being anti-military and anti-old-regime.
As I also stated in “The Oddity of NHK and the Receiving Fee” in the June Reiwa special expanded issue, although it was the result of what they themselves had done, NHK had become so left-leaning that, when the second year of the occupation had passed, CIE began to explore the abolition of NHK.
However, since it had to be used until the occupation ended, CIE, in cooperation with CCS, planned not abolition but weakening.
Part of that method was the enactment of the Broadcast Act, which stipulated the parallel system of NHK and commercial broadcasting.
The main aim of this was to define commercial broadcasting, which did not yet exist, and to create the legal framework so that private business entities could enter that field.
Then, they tried to allow television broadcasting only to commercial broadcasting and exclude NHK.
Thereupon, NHK, just as it had once switched from the military to CIE, now switched to the Japanese government.
In the course of that lobbying, Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru at the time abolished the Radio Regulatory Commission, an institution independent of the government that CIE had caused to be created and that was trying not to issue a television broadcasting license to NHK, in 1952, when the San Francisco Treaty came into effect and Japan recovered its independence.
Furthermore, Sato Eisaku, Minister of Telecommunications and an honor student of the Yoshida School, pushed aside the opposition of Shoriki Matsutaro, who was preparing to establish Nippon Television, formally Nippon Television Network Corporation, and granted NHK a television broadcasting license.
Whether, during this period, NHK offered government officials the kind of “entertainment” it had offered to officers of CCS and CIE or not, as a result, NHK was able to outmaneuver Shoriki and win the honor of making Japan’s first television broadcast.
This essay continues.