2024/03/13

The Sins and Punishments of the Mass Media by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, first published on February 10, 2019, is essential reading for every Japanese citizen who can read the printed word.
Masayuki Takayama is the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru is currently the most outstanding and principled journalist.
People throughout the world, too, must come to know these leading Japanese intellectuals through this translation and contribute to progress alongside The Turntable of Civilization for world peace, the advancement of humanity, and ultimately human happiness.
The Fool Who Imagines Journalists to Be Aristocrats Who Watch Over the People
Takayama
At least in the prewar press, there was no such notion as being “against authority.”
There was not even a term for it, let alone the idea of opposing authority.
Its origins lie in the preamble to the MacArthur Constitution, notorious for its poor prose.
It says that the people have a duty to watch the government so that the horrors of war never happen again.
It places the people and the state in an adversarial relationship.
The state, left to itself, supposedly wants to wage war, so the people must keep watch over it.
It instills the idea that newspapers have the role of keeping that watch.
Abiru
The facts are the other way around, aren’t they?
For example, Hideki Tojo’s cabinet went to war against the United States, but Tojo himself was not particularly eager to fight the Americans.
Rather, I have heard that he received a flood of letters saying, “Get on with it,” from members of the public who had been whipped up by the Asahi Shimbun and other newspapers.
It was the newspapers that incited war.
Takayama
After the war, what did the Asahi Shimbun, which had ingratiated itself with GHQ, do?
It began declaring itself the “fourth estate.”
In 2007, when Yoichi Funabashi became the Asahi Shimbun’s editor-in-chief, it issued another “Declaration of Journalism.”
Those in power, equipped with instruments of violence, arbitrarily reach into people’s pockets and attempt to start another war.
On its front page, the Asahi Shimbun declared that it stood against such power and that opposing power was its mission.
Abiru
The media need to understand why they are called the “fourth estate.”
The fourth estate may sometimes be the most powerful of all.
Who, then, monitors that power?
If they call themselves the fourth estate and insist that one must oppose and monitor power, there must also be an organization that challenges and monitors the mass media.
Yoichi Funabashi does not want anything of the sort.
Rather, he considers it extremely harmful that the Internet is now attempting to fulfill that role.
He is decidedly cold toward the Internet.
They are saying that they are a privileged class that watches over the people and must never themselves be watched.
I think they are like the emperor with no clothes.
The constitutional preamble you mentioned earlier, Mr. Takayama, represents a geocentric worldview.
The world revolves around Japan.
Therefore, as long as Japan does nothing wrong, the world will be peaceful.
That is the argument.
Takayama
What is worse is that it treats the Japanese people as madmen.
Give a madman a knife, and there is no telling what he might do.
Since there is a madman equipped with instruments of violence, he must be watched relentlessly.
The underlying argument is not merely geocentric; it is that the Japanese are madmen and therefore must not be allowed to possess weapons.
Whenever Japan’s rearmament or the Self-Defense Forces’ purchase of equipment comes up, they simply say that if the Japanese are given weapons, they will invade again.
Abiru
Although it has fallen out of fashion recently, for a time the phrase “UN-centered diplomacy” was frequently used in the Diet.
Ichiro Ozawa and Hirohisa Fujii, who was then secretary-general of the Liberal Party, often used it.
Fujii even said that the United Nations was more trustworthy than Japan.
It is a deeply ingrained belief among people of a certain generation.
They harbor a thorough distrust of Japan, yet when it comes to what should be done about practical problems, they put their faith in the United Nations.
That is nothing short of a perversion of reasoning.
Yet there certainly have been people who thought that way.
Soichiro Tahara did that sort of thing too, didn’t he?
This article continues.