2024-02-19
Repost! America’s handling of the postwar settlement was extraordinarily meticulous in the sense of undermining the Japanese as a people from their very foundations.
February 17, 2019
The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media, by Masayuki Takayama × Rui Abiru, first published on February 10, 2019, is essential reading for every Japanese citizen who can read.
This book, which takes the form of a conversation between Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist of his kind in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, the finest newspaper reporter currently working—senior and junior colleagues at the Sankei Shimbun—is also easy on the eyes of readers with presbyopia.
Not only should you head to your nearest bookstore immediately to buy it, but older people tend to be particularly disadvantaged in access to information, and the majority subscribe to newspapers such as Asahi, Mainichi, Tokyo, and Chunichi and watch NHK…
Readers must also recommend this book to the elderly people around them and to women who rely on television for information.
● Anti-Japanese Tendencies Pervading Society as a Whole
Takayama
What was instilled in the Asahi Shimbun and NHK was Cordell Hull’s message that Japan must not be allowed to be a hero that liberated Asian countries suffering under colonial rule: “Do not let them think that they sacrificed themselves for the liberation of Asia and went down in defeat.”
They were called upon to rewrite history so that it was not white people who had bullied and exploited Asia, but Japan the aggressor.
Abiru
Having continued broadcasting This Is the Truth under the new name The Truth Box, and having serialized The History of the Pacific War in their own newspaper, they could not sustain their position unless they insisted that it was correct.
Takayama
NHK still has not corrected that, has it? (Laughs.)
Abiru
With the Moritomo and Kake issues, too, once they have said that Mr. Abe is at fault, they have to keep saying it.
They can no longer say that, in fact, he had nothing to do with it.
Takayama
To preserve its standing as a newspaper company and avoid being shut down by GHQ, the Asahi Shimbun did whatever GHQ wanted.
There was no one within the Asahi Shimbun who criticized this, either.
GHQ, for its part, used the Asahi it had brought to heel to control thought.
Japan had done nothing but bad things in Southeast Asian countries.
It had killed 100,000 people in Manila; in Thailand and Burma, it had mistreated Allied prisoners of war and rounded up local inhabitants, worked them mercilessly, and killed 200,000.
They reported whatever GHQ told them, such as that someone had died for every railway sleeper laid.
Meanwhile, Americans were admirable.
They had the Asahi Shimbun publish as a scoop the story that Harvard professor Langdon Warner had told the American military to protect Japan’s cultural properties and had saved Kyoto from wartime destruction.
In fact, historical documents were later discovered showing that the first target among the candidate sites for the atomic bombing was 500 meters above the Umekoji railway yard west of Kyoto Station, where they planned to detonate the first uranium atomic bomb.
They would destroy the cultural properties along with the entire city.
They seriously intended to burn 500,000 residents and burn down Toji, the stage of Kiyomizu-dera, Kinkaku-ji, and Ginkaku-ji.
The Asahi Shimbun helped such barbarians present themselves as good people who protected cultural properties.
As long as it did so, the Asahi Shimbun was guaranteed its position as a major newspaper representing Japan.
That line passed from Shintaro Ryu to Yoichi Funabashi, and now Shigeki Nemoto has emerged as chief editorial writer, and there is a sense that they rigidly preserve that stance as though it were a secret tradition handed down to a single successor.
There is no one inside the company who says anything like, “Isn’t this a little strange?”
As this continued, the framework that cast Japan as the aggressor became fixed and developed into the company’s guiding principle.
Abiru
I know someone who had been working as a writer for weekly magazines but could not make a living, so he took a new job at the Asahi Shimbun.
He was assigned to the city news department, and when I spoke with him some time ago, he told me the following.
From what he could see, everyone was initially apolitical.
But because writing articles along a certain line won the approval of their superiors, and writing along that line secured more prominent coverage, their articles became increasingly left-wing.
And as they kept writing nothing but such articles, they themselves became increasingly left-wing.
I once heard something similar from a member of the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union.
People become teachers because they want to teach, and when they first become teachers, they are neutral, or rather, apolitical.
But the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union is quite red as an organization.
There are several members of the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union in each school, though this does not apply to all of them.
They are loud.
Everyone gets dragged along.
Then you end up joining the union yourself and being imbued with its views; that said, I think this is ultimately because the anti-Japanese tendencies that began immediately after the war have permeated society as a whole.
When we were children—or rather, in our youth, and even around our university years—there was a sense that it was simply a matter of course that the Japanese military had committed the most extreme atrocities, and when reporting on the comfort women issue began to explode around 1990, I think many people initially felt no doubt at all when told that “the Japanese military had forcibly taken them away.”
The notion that Japan equals evil had already been imprinted.
Within that environment, a small number of people who said, “What? That isn’t right, is it?” steadily offered rebuttals and accumulated counterevidence, finally bringing us to the present situation.
There are records of this in the Asahi Shimbun itself, too.
When they wrote and published such material, including Seiji Yoshida’s account of taking women away on the Korean Peninsula and making them comfort women, letters and telephone calls came from people of the generation who knew those times.
These were complaints such as “The Japanese military did not do those things” and “Isn’t that somewhat different from what happened?”
The author of “Window,” the column on the Asahi Shimbun’s front page, even scolded them in the March 3, 1992 installment: “There are things we do not want to know, things we do not want to believe. But unless we wrestle with those feelings, we cannot leave a record of history.”
Just how self-important can they be? (Laughs.)
Takayama
America’s handling of the postwar settlement was extraordinarily meticulous in the sense of undermining the Japanese as a people from their very foundations.
Abiru
This propaganda was also for their own benefit.
They wanted not only to beat Japan down, but also to teach their children that their own hands were clean.
Takayama
America dropped the atomic bombs.
Although this was an unforgivable act of mass slaughter of noncombatants, they somehow went about justifying it.
First, Japan was a treacherous country that had launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
Second, the Japanese were brutal, and every day they were left unchecked, they massacred several thousand people in Asian countries.
They had a duty to force Japan to surrender quickly; if they invaded Japan, another two million of their fellow Americans would die, and so on.
In any case, they went on rewriting history.
Thus, they steered the argument toward the conclusion that dropping the atomic bombs had been unavoidable in order to make Japan surrender.
Abiru
Even at the Tokyo Trial, which began in 1946, the stenographic recording stopped the moment a lawyer for the Japanese side tried to mention the atomic bombs.
That is how guilty Americans, too, initially felt.
They were quite sensitive and fearful that Japan might someday hold them to account.
But within America, people continued to be taught that dropping the atomic bombs had been a good way to end the war.
Americans themselves began to believe this.
Of course, some people say it was wrong, but the majority have now come to see it as something that was justified under the circumstances.
I do think education is a frightening thing.