Published on August 9, 2019. This article continues a roundtable discussion from the monthly magazine Hanada featuring Sakurai Yoshiko, Kadota Ryusho, and Abiru Rui. It criticizes Asahi Shimbun’s tendency to appeal to the courts despite being a media organization, and discusses Asahi’s postwar positions on security, diplomacy, and journalism as a negative example.

2019-08-09
Asahi’s characteristic is that, although it is an organ of speech, it appeals not to speech but to the judiciary.
Because Asahi twists the facts, if it fought on the field of speech, that would be exposed.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Asahi as a negative example
Kadota
Asahi’s characteristic is that, although it is an organ of speech, it appeals not to speech but to the judiciary.
Because Asahi twists the facts, if it fought on the field of speech, that would be exposed.
Therefore, instead of fighting through speech, it threatens people by saying, “I will sue you.”
Sakurai
For an organ of speech to resort to lawsuits is already hopeless.
Ogawa Eitaro and Asuka Shinsha have also been sued for fifty million yen.
Nishioka Tsutomu and I were also sued by former Asahi reporter Uemura Takashi.
Why must people of speech fight one another in court?
It is a very sad thing.
Abiru
Asahi once ran a campaign called the Journalist Declaration, and in commercials it used the copy, “We believe in the power of words.”
Yet now, it does not believe in the power of words at all.
Kadota
Surely that should be, “We believe in the power of the courtroom.”
Abiru
Although Asahi’s fabrications and misleading reports have only recently begun to surface, Asahi’s postwar positions themselves have been wrong in every respect from the beginning.
When it opposed the separate peace treaty of San Francisco, when it opposed the 1960 Japan–U.S. Security Treaty, when it opposed the dispatch of PKO personnel—the examples are endless.
Sakurai
It was the same with the Peace and Security Legislation and the Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets.
Abiru
On the other hand, it has praised Cambodia’s Pol Pot regime, China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea.
I feel that perhaps it has not written a single correct thing.
Kadota
Your long-held view, Mr. Abiru, is that “if Japan does the opposite of Asahi, it will proceed on the right path,” isn’t it?
Abiru
A senior official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the same thing.
For example, during the deliberations on the security-related legislation that limitedly permitted the exercise of the right of collective self-defense, a certain senior Foreign Ministry official stated this clearly to me.
“When Asahi opposes us this much, it gives us confidence. The Japanese government has succeeded in every case by doing the opposite of Asahi.”
(This article is a reconstruction of the July 5, 2019 broadcast of Genron TV.)