This continuation of the Hanada Selection roundtable examines how the Asahi Shimbun responded to Eitarō Ogawa’s best-selling critique of its Moritomo and Kake coverage by filing a 50-million-yen defamation suit against him and his publisher, Asuka Shinsha.
The speakers describe this as a textbook SLAPP lawsuit: a powerful media corporation using the courts to intimidate independent writers instead of answering criticism “with speech, not litigation.”
Ogawa explains that after reading more than six hundred Asahi articles on “MoriKake,” he still could not see any concrete wrongdoing, and that official minutes from Osaka Prefecture, Imabari City, and the Japan Veterinary Medical Association show no illegal involvement by Prime Minister Abe at all.
They further highlight a shocking line in Asahi’s own complaint—claiming it “never reported that Prime Minister Abe was involved”—and argue that the scandal was essentially a media-manufactured mirage built on headlines, innuendo, and emotional manipulation rather than verified facts.

“Already Nothing but Defamation”
Falls Under SLAPP Litigation
Stunned by Asahi’s Complaint
No Suspicion in “MoriKake”

May 23, 2024

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.

Already Nothing but “Defamation”

Suda:
In the past, if a government were fiercely criticized by certain newspapers and other media, an ordinary administration would have collapsed.
But Mr. Abe does not fall.
So the bashing becomes ever more excessive.

Ogawa:
Of course, since he is steering the course of such a large country, there are aspects that must be strictly checked.
However, that criticism ought to be policy debate.
In his recent policy address, Prime Minister Abe devoted, for the first time in five years, eighty percent of his speech to domestic issues.
In particular, regional revitalization as a measure against the declining birthrate and aging population, and the “human resources revolution.”
He presented, for the first time, a comprehensive plan to address these.
The Diet should be actively debating that—evaluating and criticizing, or putting forward better proposals.
Yet there is no proper criticism or debate.
It is nothing but “MoriKake,” with the Asahi Shimbun at the center stirring it up.
They keep on and on engaging in defamation based on lies.
Distressed by this situation, I wrote the book A Thorough Examination of the “Moritomo and Kake Incidents” — The Greatest Postwar Reporting Crime by the Asahi Shimbun (Asuka Shinsha), pointing out that Asahi’s reporting is biased and fabricated.

Suda:
Yet the Asahi Shimbun filed a defamation lawsuit against you and your publisher Asuka Shinsha.
They are demanding fifty million yen in damages and a published apology.
Actually, you may call me a “professional” when it comes to defamation suits (laughs).
I have been sued nearly thirty times, but I have not lost a single case so far.
Even I was astonished by this lawsuit.
I have never heard of a case where one media organization sues another media outlet, and on top of that sues an individual.
Politicians and companies sometimes sue media organizations, but in disputes between media, the norm has been—and media themselves have always said so—that “speech should be answered with speech.”
So why did the Asahi Shimbun sue an individual author and his publisher this time?
What exactly led up to this?

Falls Under SLAPP Litigation

Hanada:
Mr. Ogawa’s book came out at the end of October last year.
At the end of November, a month later, a document titled a “Letter of Inquiry” arrived under the name of the head of the Public Relations Department of the Asahi Shimbun Company.
It listed sixteen points claiming that “there are problematic aspects in Mr. Ogawa’s book.”
In response, Mr. Ogawa and Asuka Shinsha submitted a careful reply by the deadline.
They said that if there were errors, they would correct them, and that if there were rebuttals, they were prepared to publish them.
In fact, there are parts that were corrected in the next printing.
However, the Asahi side posted on its website, “We cannot accept the content of your reply. We will consider our future course of action within our company,” and then there was silence—until, suddenly, on December 25, they announced that they had filed suit.

Suda:
Moreover, it is a claim for fifty million yen in damages.
Another strange point is that, apparently, the complaint was put online even before it was served.

Kadota:
Asahi’s lawsuit is a textbook example of a SLAPP suit.
A SLAPP suit is a lawsuit in which a large corporation with enough power to restore its reputation without resorting to the courts sues freelance journalists or writers, in order to intimidate and silence authors who write critical pieces about it.
Asahi could have rebutted as much as it wanted through its own speech, but it leapt straight to litigation.
It deserves to be condemned.

Hanada:
The Asahi Shimbun can print 179,000 characters in a single morning edition.
That is about the same information volume as one paperback-sized book every day.
If they had something to say against the book, they could rebut it on their pages as much as they like.
Without doing that, they suddenly filed suit.
This must be the first case of its kind in media history.

Suda:
Mr. Ogawa, you are a literary critic, but you also did reporting when you wrote this book on the “MoriKake” issue, correct?

Ogawa:
Of course.

Astonished by Asahi’s Complaint

Suda:
You even went to that “questionable bar” that former Vice Minister of Education Kihei Maekawa was said to frequent, didn’t you?

Ogawa:
You mean the “encounter bar” (laughs).
Indeed, I did not interview the Asahi Shimbun, because it is a book that critiques the articles themselves, so there is no need to interview reporters’ impressions or the company’s official view.
However, I interviewed many people, including officials from the Prime Minister’s Office and Osaka Prefecture.
The essence of this book is as follows:
In February 2017, the Moritomo Gakuen issue first surfaced as an Asahi scoop.
Then, on May 17, regarding the Kake Gakuen issue, that famous document containing the phrase “the Prime Minister’s intention” was reported as the front-page top story.
What these two issues have in common is that the Asahi Shimbun wrote up “suspicions surrounding Abe.”
It is beyond question that Asahi led the way for five full months with lines like, “Were the parties involved and the prime ministerial couple close friends?” and “Did Prime Minister Abe give favors to his friends?”
Over this period, cabinet approval ratings, which had been around 60 percent on average, fell to below 30 percent.
The stated reason was that “Prime Minister Abe has not fulfilled his responsibility to explain the Moritomo and Kake issues.”
If a prime minister were to fall in a “major case” like that, it might be understandable in the case of an international scandal involving money, such as the Lockheed case.
But “MoriKake” was nothing like that.
The cabinet was on the verge of being toppled by a complete lie.
Thinking this was a serious problem, I read all of last year’s Asahi coverage on the “MoriKake” issue—over six hundred articles.
After reading them, I was left with “no understanding at all” (laughs).
I could not tell by reading them what sequence of events had taken place, what was being treated as problematic, or how far Asahi had actually grasped the facts in its articles.
So I turned to the minutes of Osaka Prefecture, where Moritomo Gakuen had applied to establish a new elementary school, Imabari City in Ehime Prefecture, which had applied under the National Strategic Special Zone for the establishment of Kake Gakuen’s new veterinary department, and the Japan Veterinary Medical Association.
As soon as I read the minutes, the overall picture became clear.
What Asahi had been desperately reporting as if there were connections to Prime Minister Abe and the Kantei turned out to be complete nonsense.
What is wrong with describing that as “fiction” and “fabrication”?

Hanada:
You can read the entire complaint on the “Asahi Shimbun Corporate Site,” and I hope everyone will in fact read it, but on the third page of the complaint, it actually says the following:
“The plaintiff has not reported that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was involved in the above two issues (note: the Moritomo and Kake issues). Nor has it ever known that Prime Minister Abe was not involved.”

Suda:
Does it really say that?
Isn’t that itself a fabrication? (laughs)

Hanada:
That is exactly what is written in the complaint (laughs).
It is outrageous.
After having published over six hundred articles casting doubt on “the Prime Minister’s involvement” for more than a year, this excuse is simply not acceptable.

Ogawa:
Asahi’s articles are especially problematic in their headlines.
The front-page headline on May 17 was “New Faculty: ‘Prime Minister’s Intention.’”
In common-sense terms, that is tantamount to declaring that the Prime Minister was involved.
If you keep reporting something like that every day for more than half a year, Asahi’s readers will be led to believe, “In the end, the MoriKake scandal is Abe’s fault, and yet he is not fulfilling his responsibility to explain.”

No Suspicion in “MoriKake”

Kadota:
After some time has passed, it is also necessary to look back calmly once again.
For example, a year has now gone by since the MoriKake reporting began.
If we go back to the beginning and think it through again, the Moritomo Gakuen issue is the story of how Chairman Yasunori Kagoike managed to have the price of state-owned land reduced by eight hundred million yen, citing waste disposal and other factors in the process of negotiating the sale of national property.
The Moritomo issue, at its core, concerns Osaka Prefecture’s approval of the new elementary school and the actions of the Kinki Local Finance Bureau of the Ministry of Finance; Prime Minister Abe has nothing to do with it at all.
In the course of negotiations, Mr. Kagoike merely invoked the names of the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister’s wife.
Most importantly, the land that Moritomo Gakuen was trying to purchase was the site of the “Osaka Airport Noise Lawsuit.”
Because airplanes flew overhead and the area suffered from noise, the state had no choice but to buy it and make it state-owned.
Meanwhile, Toyonaka City wanted to designate the surrounding area as an educational district because Osaka College of Music had been built nearby.
To that end, the city purchased the neighboring plot from the state and turned it into a park.
The state poured 1.4 billion yen in subsidies into this land, reducing the price by 98.8 percent; Toyonaka City effectively bought it for just twenty million yen.
Furthermore, Toyonaka City offset the price of adjacent land with subsidies—effectively a 100 percent discount—and acquired it free of charge; it now uses the site for a school lunch center.
Whether or not Mr. Kagoike knew of this nature of the land, while he was negotiating and asking the state to lower the price further, the state agreed to an 86 percent discount, at which point the Asahi Shimbun reported that the price had been “unnaturally reduced.”
Yet Prime Minister Abe has absolutely nothing to do with this series of events.
He likely did not even know the details of this process.

Suda:
Even so, questioning in the Diet about MoriKake has continued into this year, especially in relation to the Moritomo issue, where blame has spread to the Kinki Local Finance Bureau and to former Director-General of the Financial Bureau Nobuhisa Sagawa.
Of course, Asahi is following this line as well.
Given that Asahi shows no sign of changing this stance, how do you intend to keep fighting them, Mr. Ogawa?

Ogawa:
In the complaint, there are thirteen alleged “statements” in which Asahi claims that its reputation was defamed by my book.
However, in those thirteen points, they do not contest the “facts.”

Suda:
What do you mean by that?

Ogawa:
They criticize my “expressions.”
For example, based on my impression of reading Asahi’s articles, I wrote, “As described above, for two and a half months the Asahi Shimbun continued to report based on Maekawa’s testimony alone.”
Anyone can see that this is a summarizing expression meaning “for all intents and purposes they filled their pages for two and a half months almost entirely with Maekawa’s testimony.”
Yet the Asahi Shimbun responds, “There is no fact that we reported based solely on Maekawa’s testimony.”
They then list the names of various people, saying, “We interviewed this person and that person as well.”
Of course they did.
It is impossible in the real world to fill your pages for two and a half months solely with Mr. Maekawa’s testimony.
Anyone with normal reading comprehension can understand that I am pointing out that they “disproportionately relied on Maekawa’s testimony.”
But Asahi still makes this kind of accusation.

Hanada:
The same goes for the phrase “Abe-bashing is Asahi’s corporate policy.”
The Asahi Shimbun replies, “There is no such fact. ‘Abe-bashing’ is not part of our corporate policy.”

Suda:
Of course it is not written there (laughs).

Hanada:
It should go without saying, but what we mean is that “Asahi attacks Prime Minister Abe so relentlessly that people say such a thing, and rightly so.”
This piece will be continued.