2024-02-15
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, which closes the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
This essay, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.

Look Who’s Talking
Reporters at the Asahi Shimbun are not particularly concerned with facts.
For example, there is not a shred of truth in Katsuichi Honda’s “Travels in China.”
At the time, its president, Tomoo Hirooka, said something along the lines of Yasuo Fukuda’s remarks—“Don’t write anything inconvenient for China”—so it became a tissue of lies.
His successor, Seiki Watanabe, was no different.
Then the Miyazaki bureau chief recklessly wrote that “the Miyakonojo 23rd Regiment carried out the Nanjing Massacre.”
When people protested, he sent them packing with, “Who are you to challenge the mighty Asahi?”
Akimi Satake, head of the Tokyo headquarters’ arts and culture department, also published a report declaring, “This is the poison-gas operation at Nanchang,” accompanied by a photograph of billowing smoke.
The Sankei Shimbun exposed the bogus reporting: “If poison gas rises into the sky, it can kill only crows. This is a smoke screen.”
An enraged Satake stormed into Sankei’s offices, blustering, “How dare you say such things about the mighty Asahi!”
But nobody recognized Asahi as “the mighty Asahi,” and when both stories were exposed as false, Watanabe was sacked.
“The mighty Asahi” was bitter.
So a photographer carved “KY” into coral and struck back by declaring that “the Japanese are the world’s foremost nation of graffiti vandals.”
Local residents, however, suspected that Asahi had staged the incident itself.
When questioned, the photographer initially tried intimidation.
When confronted with further circumstantial evidence, he offered a plausible-sounding excuse: “I used my finger to make some old graffiti clearer.”
When it was pointed out that a finger could not have done it, he adjusted his story: “With the handle of a flash unit.”
Only when other newspapers began making a fuss did Asahi finally admit that its photographer had carved the coral himself.
That admission came only after a succession of disgraceful excuses.
President Toichiro Hitotsuyanagi lost his job over this.
His successor, Toshitada Nakae, vowed revenge and first had Takashi Uemura write lies about the comfort women, maligning the Japanese people.
Next, he reviled political and business leaders over the Recruit scandal, only to resign when it emerged that he himself had been sponging off Recruit.
Shinichi Hakoshima, who took over after one intervening president, singled out Shinzo Abe as Asahi’s enemy and had Masakazu Honda write that Abe “had an NHK leftist program altered.”
The program concerned a farcical tribunal putting the emperor on trial, orchestrated by former Asahi journalist Yayori Matsui and North Korean operatives.
Honda calculated that if he wrote, “Abe interfered,” his leftist comrades at NHK would join the chorus of agreement, allowing them to finish Abe off.
But NHK lost its nerve and said precisely the opposite: “Asahi’s reporting is false.”
Exposure of such a malicious fabrication could well have brought the newspaper’s closure.
Hakoshima promptly resigned, ostensibly taking responsibility for a fabricated meeting between Yasuo Tanaka and Shizuka Kamei that surfaced around the same time.
Kotaro Akiyama, left to deal with the aftermath, agonized over the matter before deciding to entrust it to an “impartial third-party committee.”
It was, however, anything but impartial.
Its members included constitutional scholar Yasuo Hasebe, long cultivated by Asahi, and Uichiro Niwa, with his China connections, among others.
Asahi then poured out money like water on honoraria and other expenses.
Thus, nine months later, after public discussion had completely died down, the committee duly delivered the expected acquittal: “The article was insufficiently researched.”
It even declared that no apology was necessary.
Asahi has since repeatedly resorted to these self-serving third-party committees that merely look credible.
It also escaped punishment over the comfort-women lies with which it had maligned the Japanese people for 30 years, leaving only Japanese resentment behind.
In the Abe faction, which Asahi hates, some proceeds from fundraising-party tickets were returned to members and spent without being recorded.
Asahi seized the opportunity to raise an outcry over “slush funds.”
When Jun Azumi of the Constitutional Democratic Party created a slush fund of 300,000 yen, however, it described this as an “omission from the records.”
Tatsuyoshi Kato of the Abe faction had even 100,000 yen branded a “slush fund” and was forced to resign as parliamentary vice-minister of land, infrastructure, transport and tourism.
Asahi took up the issue in an editorial.
Its headline was “Don’t Cover It Up with Piecemeal Disclosures.”
But “covering it up with piecemeal disclosures” was precisely how Asahi handled that coral graffiti scandal.
That involved the serious crime of damaging a designated natural monument.
The Abe faction’s case, by contrast, concerns how its members handled money from their own political fundraising parties.
They are being held to account for their failure to record it.
Asahi, meanwhile, committed an offense and then compounded it with false testimony.
The editorial states, “The investigation into the truth is not being conducted by a third party.”
What nerve.
Asahi has itself used the pretense of just such a “third-party investigation” to cover things up.
If you want to lecture others, first take a look at yourself.
You are a hundred years too early to write with such self-importance.