Originally published on October 23, 2019.
Based on an essay by Fujioka Nobukatsu in the special feature “Media Organizations That Do Not Fight with Words” in the special issue of Sound Argument, The Fallen Media, this article examines Honda Katsuichi’s Vietnam reporting, especially his reporting methods after The Village on the Battlefield and the problems surrounding his article on the mass suicide of Vietnamese Buddhists.
Through his method of presenting the remarks of Thich Thien Hao as if they were independent reporting, the lawsuit with Tonooka Akio, and Honda’s defeat in court, it discusses the structural problems of Asahi-style journalism.

October 23, 2019.
Thich Thien Hao was an executive of the Patriotic Buddhist Association under Communist Party control, and although reporters from the Yomiuri and the Mainichi were also present at that press conference, perhaps because they thought it was too suspiciously false, they ignored it and did not report a single line.
The following is from the special feature “Media Organizations That Do Not Fight with Words” in the special issue of Sound Argument titled The Fallen Media.
The “Hollow Man” Called Honda Katsuichi.
Fujioka Nobukatsu.
The preface is omitted.
In December 1966, during such a period, Honda was dispatched to South Vietnam as a correspondent.
This was the beginning of the era of his Vietnam reporting.
Honda began reporting under the U.S. military and the Saigon regime, and before long he encountered a village, secretly existing in the Mekong Delta, controlled by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, or Viet Cong.
Using his familiar method of participant observation, he transmitted to the world, as reportage, the actual situation of a liberated area hidden behind a veil of secrecy.
The series of reports was compiled into The Village on the Battlefield, published in 1968.
Thus, unexpectedly, Honda discovered “the Vietnamese people.”
However, this work cannot be placed on the same level as his early ethnological trilogy.
That is because The Village on the Battlefield could not help being stamped with a sharp political character that the trilogy had not had, and in the process of reporting, it is impossible to think that Honda was allowed completely free reporting.
In the end, the reporting was arranged by the Viet Cong.
It could not have been free reporting by a journalist.
Therefore, if Honda persuasively depicted the third-party nature of the Viet Cong’s village on the battlefield, the result inevitably became encouragement for North Vietnam and the incitement of anti-American public opinion.
This meant a decisive transformation from the method of reportage during the period of the trilogy.
Defeat in the lawsuit with Tonooka.
I no longer remember clearly when I first obtained the book Experiential Theory of Honda Katsuichi by Tonooka Akio, published by Nisshin Hodo in 2003.
I remember that, upon reading it, I was deeply moved, and at the same time astonished that a memoir had been written that so brilliantly accomplished the “proof of the bankruptcy of Honda reportage,” the book’s subtitle, and I felt deep respect and gratitude toward the author.
I think it is one of the masterpieces among nonfiction works written after the war.
Tonooka Akio was a political scientist born in 1941, and one of his research subjects was “communism in Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War.”
From 1974, Tonooka served as an associate professor at Tokyo Gakugei University.
In Vietnam, in 1975, Saigon was “liberated” by North Vietnamese tanks, and the United States withdrew.
All of Vietnam became a country ruled by the Communist Party.
However, once the Communist Party seized power, repression of Buddhists also began.
In this context, on November 2, 1975, at Vinh Nghiem Temple in Can Tho, a city in the Mekong Delta, an incident occurred in which 12 monks and nuns, three monks and nine nuns, committed mass suicide in protest against religious repression.
Japanese newspapers reported this through a Reuters dispatch from Paris in their evening editions dated September 9, 1976.
Regarding this, Honda wrote as though he had conducted his own independent reporting, saying that the monk Pham Van Co, the ringleader of the mass suicide, had been a spy for the Saigon government and had become ideologically corrupt; that he had had relations with many nuns in the temple and taken a total of 26 women as wives; and that, because of this, he had lost the support of the masses, become desperate, and dragged other nuns and disciples into suicide with him.
Those articles were collected in What Is Happening to Vietnam?, published by the Asahi Shimbun Company in 1977.
However, this article was, in truth, not something Honda had independently reported at all.
After writing down such things as above, Honda added, at the very end of the text, “Thich Thien Hao spoke as above.”
Thich Thien Hao was an executive of the Patriotic Buddhist Association under Communist Party control, and although reporters from the Yomiuri and the Mainichi were also present at that press conference, perhaps because they thought it was too suspiciously false, they ignored it and did not report a single line.
Honda, however, misled readers as though this were the result of his own independent reporting, and in fact quietly added in the final sentence, as an alibi, that it was nothing more than the view of a Communist-affiliated organization.
In short, Honda escaped so that he would not be held responsible in the end, and it is interesting that this pattern of behavior is exactly the same as his later response to criticism of Journey to China.
Here, there is not even a shadow or trace of the method of Honda reportage from the period of his ethnological research trilogy.
In September 1978, Tonooka met the high monk Man Giac of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam.
Tonooka described Man Giac’s reaction when he told him the contents of Honda’s article as follows.
“…The monk rose from the chair in which he had been sitting until then, and perhaps from excitement, began walking restlessly around the room.
I cannot forget the expression on his face at that time.
He tilted his freshly shaved head to one side as if in thought, flared his nostrils wide and breathed roughly, and cracked the joints of the fingers of both hands as he rubbed them together.”
Tonooka wrote a criticism of Honda in the mini-communication paper Monday Review, and in the May 1981 issue of Shokun! he wrote an essay titled “Now Is the Time for ‘Peace in Vietnam.’”
The article from Monday Review is included in The Ecology of Men of Speech: Striking at Thought, Action, and Intellect, published by Takagi Shobo in 1981.
In response, Honda filed a defamation lawsuit against Tsutsumi Takashi, editor-in-chief of Shokun!, and Tonooka.
The lawsuit proceeded all the way to the Supreme Court, and Honda lost three times.
This essay continues.