This chapter draws on a WiLL magazine feature titled “In Celebration of Asahi’s Death Throes as Its Circulation Falls Below Four Million,” in which veteran journalist Masayuki Takayama and rising commentator Akari Iiyama dissect the deep structural collusion between the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s bureaucratic elite, and the Unification Church.
They begin with Asahi’s inflated circulation numbers and the “oshigami” practice, explaining how collapsing ad revenue during COVID-19 exposed the hollow reality behind the official figures and accelerated the decline of a media industry that has abandoned investigation in favor of partisan attacks.
The dialogue then turns to the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe: the strange emphasis on the shooter’s background as a “former MSDF member,” unanswered questions about bullet trajectories, missing rounds, and sloppy forensics, and the media’s refusal to scrutinize these contradictions, even as they relentlessly frame the story around the Unification Church.
Iiyama criticizes how major outlets, especially Asahi and Mainichi, portray Tetsuya Yamagami as a tragic victim and “religious second generation,” use the case to demonize conservative values and the LDP, and push conspiracy-like narratives that the Unification Church controls Japanese politics—while donations pour in to support the killer.
Takayama traces eerie parallels between the Unification Church, North Korea, and Asahi’s historical reporting—North Korea’s “earthly paradise” campaign, fabricated comfort women stories, and the embedding of a guilt-based historical narrative into Japanese society.
The chapter culminates in a direct indictment of former foreign ministry official Sakutarō Tanino, described as a “twisted bureaucrat” who pushed for the emperor’s visit to China after Tiananmen and allegedly helped shape the Kōno and Murayama Statements in line with Unification Church and Asahi narratives.
The conclusion is stark: “Bureaucrats like Tanino are eating away at Japan while Asahi keeps supplying the lies that sustain them. The Asahi’s sin is truly grave.”

This is the structure whereby twisted bureaucrats like Tanino eat away at Japan, while Asahi continues to supply the lies that form their foundation.
The Asahi’s sin is truly grave.

December 2, 2024.

This is the structure whereby twisted bureaucrats like Tanino eat away at Japan, while Asahi continues to supply the lies that form their foundation.
The Asahi’s sin is truly grave.

November 29, 2022.

The following is from a dialogue feature published in the November 26 issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, titled “In Celebration of Asahi’s Death Throes as Its Circulation Falls Below Four Million,” between Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and the dashing, up-and-coming critic Akari Iiyama.

All emphases in the text except for the headings are mine.

The media is full of things that should trouble them, yet they make no effort to investigate — the negligence of the press.

Asahi Below Four Million Copies.

Takayama:
I always enjoy reading your Sankei column “A Scolding for the Newspapers!”

Iiyama:
Thank you very much.

Takayama:
The media really has become hopeless.
The Asahi Shimbun officially announced that its circulation has dropped below four million.

Iiyama:
And that figure surely includes the “oshigami” — the extra copies forced onto distributors above and beyond their actual subscribers.

Takayama:
Exactly.
When you subtract those numbers, some say the real circulation is just a little over three million.
In fact, “oshigami” also has an aspect that works in favor of the distributors.
If a distributor can say outwardly, “We deliver this many copies,” they can attract better insert advertisements.
Their actual income goes up.
For example, if the Tokyo Shimbun reaches around one hundred households while Asahi reaches three hundred, advertisers will expect much greater effect from placing ads with Asahi.
But in the COVID-19 pandemic, insert advertisements themselves fell sharply.
As a result, for Asahi’s distributors, receiving extra “oshigami” copies became not only meaningless but a financial burden, and some distributors even went out of business.
Naturally, the number of “oshigami” copies also decreased.

Iiyama:
That is something to be welcomed (laughs).
Newspapers have long since stopped being read, and now it feels as though the real numbers are finally catching up with reality.

The Media Has Changed Drastically.

Takayama:
On top of that, the major transformation of the media has further accelerated the loss of readers.
When I was an active reporter, social-affairs reporters burned with a sense of justice.
Political reporters, too, reported with a certain standard of political ethics.
Today’s reporters are different.
All they do is nitpick people’s words and actions and look for any excuse to drag politicians down.
Someone like Isoko Mochizuki of the Tokyo Shimbun is the very epitome of that.

Iiyama:
And not only at Asahi.

Takayama:
That goes for correspondents too.
Instead of looking at facts and writing accurately, they do the opposite.
Even in the case of the shooting terror attack on Abe, I have serious doubts about the way the media reported it.
The first thing a social-affairs reporter should do is to draw the full picture of the incident from the police.
Yet what we see is nothing but information leaking out from the police; there is no independent information coming from the media side.

Iiyama:
In the relatively early stages after the incident, information that the suspect Yamagami had served as a “former member of the Maritime Self-Defense Force” spread quickly, and I found that odd.

Takayama:
And along with it came an image of “former MSDF member = bad.”
Next, information was reported that his family had fallen into ruin due to donations to the former Unification Church and that he bore a grudge against it.
When I wondered when that had happened, I found it was twenty years ago.
And when did he decide to carry out the terror attack?
We are told it was in the last year or so.
It makes no sense at all.

Together with myself, the public must have remembered now that, at the beginning, the fact that he was a former Maritime Self-Defense Force member was inexplicably given heavy coverage.
As I整理(organized) this passage, I became even more convinced.
The only country in the world that wants to turn the MSDF into villains is China.
(Korea may be the same.)
My conviction that it was China that was manipulating Yamagami has grown even stronger.

Iiyama:
It just does not add up.

Takayama:
His parent supposedly went bankrupt because of donations, and he himself could not even hold down a job as a Self-Defense Officer and supposedly lived in poverty, and yet he rented two apartments and drove around in a car.
He even purchased expensive machine tools needed to build homemade guns.
No matter how you look at it, it is strange.
You cannot help suspecting that he had a sponsor.
And, as some opinion magazines have pointed out, the explanation of the bullet trajectory that hit Abe does not match the circumstances under which Yamagami fired.
According to Professor Hidekata Fukushima of Nara Prefectural Medical University, the shot that hit Abe went from top to bottom.
But as the footage clearly shows, Yamagami fired from below, upward.
The angle is clearly different, and yet no media outlet points that out.
Some dismiss any attempt to question this as mere “conspiracy theory,” the same way they did with Oswald, who assassinated President Kennedy.
But it is precisely the job of social-affairs reporters to respond to such doubts.

Iiyama:
The bullets themselves have not been accounted for either, have they?

Takayama:
The gun seems to have been constructed to fire three rounds at a time, and Yamagami fired twice.
Even if we say that one bullet hit Abe, five remaining rounds have not been found.
What is more, Nara Prefectural Police did not conduct an on-site investigation until five days later.
That is an incredibly sloppy way to investigate.
Yet no media outlet digs into that point either.
If you are a reporter, you should not just say “We couldn’t find the bullets,” you should thoroughly investigate that very fact.
There are many other questions as well, such as where Yamagami learned how to build a gun.
People say he got the materials and methods from the internet, but I find it hard to believe that something like that is truly possible.
There are questions everywhere you look, yet the media makes no effort to examine any of them.

Iiyama:
In other words, no facts at all have been revealed.

A “Tragic Hero”.

Takayama:
Meanwhile, all the attention is focused solely on the former Unification Church, and social-affairs reporters chase nothing but the ties between LDP lawmakers and the former Unification Church.

Iiyama:
They are also aggressively featuring stories about “pitiful religious second-generation victims” of the former Unification Church.
Riding on that sentiment, they are escalating their demands, insisting not only that its religious corporation status be stripped but that a dissolution order be issued.
Yet if you objectively compare the doctrines and practices of the former Unification Church with those of other religions, it is difficult to conclude that the former Unification Church is uniquely and overwhelmingly dangerous.
As for the so-called second-generation problem, children born to Muslim parents are by birth considered Muslims.
Since apostasy in Islam is punishable by death, unless they are extremely fortunate in their circumstances, they can almost never escape that status for life.
By contrast, Yamagami himself was not a believer in the former Unification Church.
It is said that his mother donated one hundred million yen, which actually indicates that the family environment was more affluent than that of the average household.
Ignoring such facts, the media has fashioned Yamagami into one of the “tragic victims” of the former Unification Church, almost like a “tragic hero.”
In particular, Asahi and Mainichi run daily pieces full of the feelings and impressions of “experts,” spinning their emotions and conjectures, repeating again and again that the real culprit is conservative thought, traditional values, and the Liberal Democratic Party that pursues them as policy.
On the one hand they defend and sympathize with Yamagami as a victim, while on the other they imply that the killing of Abe, the symbol of conservatism, was somehow his just deserts.
They are even willing to spread rumor-like narratives bordering on conspiracy theory that the LDP is controlled by the former Unification Church.
Perhaps buoyed by such rumors, more than one million yen in donations have reportedly been sent from around the country in support of Yamagami.
Yamagami is now undergoing psychiatric evaluation, but without his knowledge he is being treated as a hero.
It is an utterly abnormal situation.

Strange Coincidences.

Takayama:
It is unbelievable.
Of course, there are many problems concerning the former Unification Church as well.
One needs to keep a close eye on the movements of its founder, Sun Myung Moon.
At first he was anti-communist and called North Korea Satan.
So it is not surprising that then Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi had contact with the former Unification Church.
At the same time, Sun Myung Moon also strongly condemned Japan’s thirty-six years of colonial rule by the Japanese empire, calling that too “devilish” and demanding atonement from Japan.
Then, in 1991, Sun Myung Moon shook hands with Kim Il-sung, who was supposed to be Satan.
He gave Kim Il-sung money and abandoned the banner of anti-communism.
The only ones left were the Japanese who were to atone.
“In order to atone for the sins of colonial rule committed by your ancestors, you must donate everything,” he insisted, and sold extremely expensive vases and Bibles to Japanese believers, extracting some sixty billion yen a year.

Iiyama:
The former Unification Church built a grand structure near Seoul called the “Cheonseongwangneung Museum,” and it is said that more than 90 percent of the donors listed there are Japanese — which is staggering.

Takayama:
Then there is the mass wedding.
Financially secure, well-off Japanese women were made to marry poor Korean farmers who could not even speak Japanese.
It was human sacrifice under the name of atonement.
Regarding the Korean Peninsula, it is also impossible to ignore how Japanese newspapers, especially the Asahi Shimbun, have shown strange synchrony with the moves of North Korea and the former Unification Church.
After the Korean War, the land of North Korea, where the fighting had taken place, was devastated and many people had died.
At a time when there was not enough manpower even to rebuild the country, the Asahi suddenly launched a campaign proclaiming that “North Korea is an earthly paradise.”
For ten years, they kept reporting, with on-the-spot features, that the North was prosperous and full of energy.
As a result, some ninety thousand working-age ethnic Koreans living in Japan returned to the North.
Those who had abandoned their poor homeland to sneak into Japan were deeply suspicious by nature.
The Asahi’s “Northern paradise” reporting was so thorough that even such people were persuaded to go back of their own accord.
Sayuri Yoshinaga’s film A Town with a Cupola also urged people from the silver screen to “return to the North.”
Once they boarded the repatriation ships and arrived, they found that what awaited them was hell.

Next comes the South.
As I mentioned earlier, in the spring of 1991, Sun Myung Moon and Kim Il-sung joined hands and lowered the anti-communist banner.
After that, Sun Myung Moon focused increasingly on collecting donations from Japanese believers.
When he denounced “Satanic Japan” and its deeds, condemning Japanese rule of Korea, the Asahi responded.
Half a year after the Moon–Kim Il-sung meeting, it ran Takashi Uemura’s story about Kim Hak-sun under the headline “Former Comfort Woman Breaks Her Long Silence.”
The piece was structured to claim that the same kind of abductions of comfort women that Seiji Yoshida had fabricated as having taken place on Jeju Island had also occurred in Seoul.
Soon after, the Asahi ran a front-page story by Yoshiaki Yoshimi of Chuo University claiming “military involvement in the comfort women system.”
Later, the narrative that “two hundred thousand Korean women were taken as sex slaves” took shape, and the Japanese government’s apology diplomacy toward South Korea began.

Iiyama:
The more faithful you are as a reader of Asahi, the lower the psychological hurdle becomes for joining the former Unification Church.

Takayama:
Sun Myung Moon actually preached to Japanese believers about the “deeds of demonic Japan,” using Asahi Shimbun articles as his basis.
This was reported in the words of a former believer in the Sankei Shimbun.
“In my childhood I read the Asahi at home, and at school the teachers from the Japan Teachers’ Union told us that ‘Japan did nothing but terrible things before the war.’ So I readily believed the church’s teachings.”
More recently, actress Yōko Maki is reported to have told Korean media, “I wanted to apologize for the past. I felt ashamed of the fact that I am Japanese.”
That is how the view that Japan must forever atone was implanted in Japanese minds.

Iiyama:
From there we move on to the Kōno Statement and the Murayama Statement.

Takayama:
Exactly.
Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa bowed his head, and the narrative became officially sanctioned by the government.
Even after that, while Sun Myung Moon continued to demand atonement from Japan and Asahi went on printing plausible lies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also became involved.
One such figure was Sakutarō Tanino, a former elementary school classmate of pro-China politician Yasuo Fukuda.
This man, in response to demands from China in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident, unilaterally organized the emperor’s visit to China by silencing the prime minister and the foreign minister.
He is the worst of the worst.
From the perspective of Sun Myung Moon’s historical view, this same Tanino wrote the Kōno Statement, which endorsed the comfort women as Asahi depicted them, and the Murayama Statement, which portrayed Japan as the demonic invader in line with Sun Myung Moon’s narrative.
This is the structure whereby twisted bureaucrats like Tanino eat away at Japan, while Asahi continues to supply the lies that form their foundation.
The Asahi’s sin is truly grave.
And now, Asahi wipes its mouth clean and turns around to denounce Sun Myung Moon and use him as a weapon to attack the LDP.
The Asahi had ties with Kim Il-sung and cooperated with Sun Myung Moon as well.

Iiyama:
It is truly brazen.

Takayama:
That brazen viciousness is practically the Asahi’s defining trait (laughs).
This article continues.