2018-08-09
This article, originally published on August 14, 2017, examines anti-Japanese perceptions in Germany and the role attributed by the author to reporting by the Asahi Shimbun and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
It asks how views of Japan can be shaped among people who have little or no direct experience of the country.

2018-08-09
Below is an article I originally published for readers around the world on August 14, 2017, but I believe it deserves to be read again in both Japan and the rest of the world.
There are things about China and the Korean Peninsula that much of the world has never known.
Whenever I encounter what I regard as serious distortions or plausible falsehoods concerning Japan, I believe they should be brought to international attention.
There were facts that I myself learned only after August 2014.
In other words, although I had subscribed to and read the Asahi Shimbun, I had never known about them before then.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, has relied on the Asahi Shimbun and, in my view, shared a similar outlook.
Drawing on anti-Japanese articles repeatedly published by the Asahi Shimbun, it has continued to publish reports that portray Japan negatively and damage its international reputation.
At the heart of this tendency, as I see it, is an attempt to portray Japan as a country that committed atrocities comparable to those of Nazi Germany, thereby shifting the attention of the international community from Germany toward Japan.
I regard this as an extremely troubling way of dealing with history.
In that sense, I see similarities with the historical narratives promoted by China and South Korea.
It suggests that the legacy of wartime thinking has not entirely disappeared from certain parts of German public discourse.
As for the German people themselves, I have said many times that I have never been to Germany, and therefore I do not know the everyday lives of Germans firsthand.
The same is true for most Japanese people.
Most Japanese have never had any particular reason to harbor hostility toward Germans.
The reverse is also largely true.
Most German citizens have never visited Japan and have little direct experience of Japanese society.
Nevertheless, after years of persistent negative reporting on Japan by publications such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung, opinion polls conducted several years ago reportedly indicated that a substantial proportion of Germans held unfavorable views of Japan.
Whenever I consider this, I question the role played by such reporting in shaping perceptions of a country that many readers have never actually visited.
Japan’s neighboring countries, China and South Korea, have historical, political, and social circumstances very different from those of contemporary European states.
Germany, by contrast, has long been surrounded by neighboring countries with highly developed modern institutions and cultures.
Germans should recognize how fortunate they have been in this respect.
They should also consider Japan on the basis of Japan itself, rather than through narratives constructed by other countries or by media organizations that approach Japan from a predetermined political perspective.