Japan’s postwar media elites came of age in an era of unrest: Marxist lectures, Communist student leagues, and violent clashes between radical factions. This essay recalls E.H. Norman’s shocking background, Nobuhiko Sakai’s revelations about Asahi Shimbun, and argues that the grim expressions of today’s TV commentators and academics reflect the turbulent, tragic youth that shaped them.

It is no exaggeration to say that the ugliness of their faces is due to the fact that their youth was so tragic.
January 29, 2016.

Regarding E. H. Norman, discussed in the previous chapter, I believe that among my classmates and seniors from Sendai Second High School there are some who remember the essay that appeared in LIBRARIA about his book on Andō Shōeki.

In later years, because it had stayed in my mind, I recall leafing through some related books.

Around August of the year before last, while reading a certain monthly magazine, I learned some shocking facts about him—namely, that he had been in GHQ, and above all, that he had in fact been a Soviet spy. These were truly staggering revelations.

The book written by Nobuhiko Sakai, a former University of Tokyo professor, about what exactly the Asahi Shimbun is, is truly a masterpiece. In it, he succeeds in reminding us of things that even we ourselves had forgotten.

Needless to say, these are truths that young people today have absolutely no knowledge of.

Sakai reminds us that postwar Japan was, for a long time, a dangerous era in ways that are almost unimaginable now.

Those who made their living as newspaper reporters or as writers in the Japanese media world, represented by the Asahi Shimbun, are people who, almost without exception, grew up and spent their student years in this dangerous era and were deeply influenced by it.

To put it kindly (though in reality there was not a single such person among my own classmates), the mere exam-cramming honor students who occupied the middle to lower ranks of my class mostly grew up in rural areas and then entered the University of Tokyo or Waseda. In those days, most of the lectures there were based on Marx’s Capital. On campus, the Communist Party–affiliated Democratic Youth League (Minsei) held sway. In reaction to this, the truly troublesome group known as the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee (Zenkyōtō) swept through universities across Japan. Within that movement, sects such as Chūkaku-ha and Kakumaru-ha sprang up like thickets, waging bloody conflicts against one another. It was just like the scenes in Tōei’s yakuza films Battles Without Honor and Humanity. That is precisely why those films were so passionately embraced by them.

These dangerous characters, who spent such times as university students, then slipped into the mass media, wearing an innocent expression.

That is why the faces of the people who appear on TBS’s Hōdō Tokushū, which I have mentioned several times, and the faces of the so-called university professors, critics, and writers who hold mass press conferences to denounce the “war bills” or demand the resignation of the Abe Cabinet, are indescribably awful—indeed, irredeemably awful. It is no exaggeration to say that the ugly look on their faces is the direct result of how miserable their youth was.

Young people today must have had no idea about this background.

To be continued.

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