Based on Masayuki Takayama’s column in Weekly Shincho, this article revisits the reality of “articles that could not be written.” It examines the deep taboo in Japanese media surrounding unemployment relief workers, the Buraku Liberation League, the Recruit scandal, Reconstruction Minister Ryu Matsumoto, and the Kansai Electric Power money scandal.

February 25, 2020
They squatted down, became absorbed in conversation with their companions, and spent the whole day that way.
After a long observation, he interviewed the prefectural department in charge.
Extremely high wages were being paid.
The following is a chapter I published on October 25, 2019, under the title:
However, Moriyama was moving huge sums of money in defense of nuclear power by using Edano’s anti-nuclear policy as a pretext.
It seems that the responsibility to explain lies with Edano rather than Kansai Electric Power.
A friend of mine, one of the most well-read people I know, said to me, “Have you read today’s Weekly Shincho? Masayuki Takayama and you are in resonance.”
So I immediately went to a nearby bookstore to buy Weekly Shincho, and after returning home, I immediately read Masayuki Takayama’s column, which adorned the final pages.
Articles That Cannot Be Written
Masayuki Takayama
A department manager from a certain company came to meet an economic reporter of the Asahi Shimbun.
The reporter sent him away, saying, “I only meet presidents.”
This is one scene from Kiyoshi Nagae’s Thirty-Six Years of a Newspaper Man’s Life.
Or take Isoko Mochizuki of the Tokyo Shimbun.
Even if the other party is the Chief Cabinet Secretary, it is enough to ask whatever comes to mind; if she keeps pressing him, he will eventually show his faults.
She believes that a mere newspaper reporter has more power than a prosecutor of the Special Investigation Department.
Most interviewees are gentlemen.
Yakuza who use their fists before their words are rare.
So I think that, including myself, newspaper reporters in general were, to some extent, Mochizuki-like.
“That is the problem,” said Takeshi Miyazaki, three years my senior, whom I worked with at the editorial department of the Yukan Fuji, as he told me about his own experience.
He came from the Osaka head office and was assigned to the Mie bureau.
He had no stories, but he did not feel like moving around either.
He was gazing vaguely outside from the prefectural government press club.
Outside, unemployment relief workers were tending the plantings.
It was just like a still photograph.
In fact, their hands were not moving.
They squatted down, became absorbed in conversation with their companions, and spent the whole day that way.
After a long observation, he interviewed the prefectural department in charge.
Extremely high wages were being paid.
He immediately put it into print.
However, the next day, one phone call came in, and the bureau chief’s face changed color.
The group criticized in the article were people connected to the Buraku Liberation League.
Even when he explained, “I wrote the facts,” the facts meant absolutely nothing.
He was summoned to a denunciation meeting against discrimination, denounced for having committed unjust discrimination through the newspaper pages, and told to engage in self-criticism.
Even when he apologized, he was cursed, and the denunciation went on endlessly.
“I could not stop crying,” said, with a serious face, a man who normally seemed to live by devouring others.
In this world, there are beings even Isoko Mochizuki cannot defeat.
Not long after hearing that story, I had an opportunity to catch a glimpse of it.
When I stopped by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office for reporting, strange groups were sitting in the lobby and on every staircase.
When I asked the Public Relations Division what was going on, I was told, “The Buraku Liberation League is in collective negotiations with Governor Minobe, demanding that he hand over two wards,” and that the sit-in had already continued for a month.
The 23 wards were about to become 21 wards.
Not a single newspaper wrote about such a serious matter, because they were all afraid.
Then the Recruit scandal occurred.
It began when Hiromasa Ezoe came to Yoshinosuke Narazaki for help.
Narazaki, who had been the chief steward of Jiichiro Matsumoto, the don of the Buraku Liberation League, secretly recorded and disclosed the words of the person who came as Ezoe’s messenger, in exchange for helping Ezoe.
The newspapers never wrote a word about Narazaki’s betrayal.
Nor did they mention Jiichiro Matsumoto, who stood behind him.
To touch on him was taboo.
After the Great East Japan Earthquake, there was an incident that made one think such an era might have ended.
Ryu Matsumoto, the grandson of Jiichiro Matsumoto and the Minister for Reconstruction, visited Sendai.
At the prefectural office, he rebuked Governor Murai for being late to their meeting and cursed him.
At the end, he said, “These remarks are off the record. Any company that writes them is finished.”
It was a phrase the reporters had heard so often and had trembled at.
However, the media in Tohoku did not know who the Reconstruction Minister really was.
They broadcast his abusive remarks as they were.
The Reconstruction Minister was forced to resign.
It gave a slight premonition of the arrival of a new era.
Executives of Kansai Electric Power had received money and goods totaling 300 million yen from a certain Moriyama, a former deputy mayor of Takahama Town.
Amid the harmful rumors written up by the Asahi Shimbun, Moriyama had worked to attract the nuclear power plant.
Kansai Electric was grateful and gave work to local companies.
The 300 million yen seems to have been a return favor, but it was excessive.
When they went to return it, the chairman of Kansai Electric answered, “He became enraged and said he did not know what would happen to the safety of my family.”
It is an eccentric story that is hard to believe at first, but with the single word “Buraku Liberation League” reported by Weekly Shincho, everything fell into place.
The new era had not yet arrived.
Yukio Edano, of the former Democratic Party lineage and the person who should know most about that area, said in the Diet, completely missing the point, that “this was a recycling of nuclear power money orchestrated by Kansai Electric.”
If one speaks ill of nuclear power, the public will be convinced.
Is that how he intends to gloss it over?
However, Moriyama was moving huge sums of money in defense of nuclear power by using Edano’s anti-nuclear policy as a pretext.
It seems that the responsibility to explain lies with Edano rather than Kansai Electric Power.