This section exposes Asahi Shimbun’s longstanding habit of using academics to turn falsehoods into “truth,” a practice now echoed by its affiliate, TV Kanagawa. From fabricated accounts of massacres in East Timor to false claims of Japanese poison gas, this essay reveals how self-denigrating historical narratives are manufactured through media and academia.

This is a continuation of the previous chapter.

This person is said to be a devout Christian, but that is his or her own business.

The real issue is why TV Kanagawa broadcast such a Jewish myth as if it were fact.

TV Kanagawa may argue that it never explicitly stated it was the truth, but once something is put on the public airwaves and presented visually, viewers inevitably receive it as truth.

TV Kanagawa is said to be affiliated with the Asahi Shimbun, and it is rumored that even personnel considered unusable at the main headquarters are sent there due to their extreme bias.

Regardless of whether that is true or not, the Asahi Shimbun undeniably has a bad habit of using scholars, just as in this case, to fabricate lies and turn them into “truth.”

They had Professor Kenichi Gotō of Waseda University write the falsehood that “the Japanese army slaughtered tens of thousands of islanders in East Timor.”

This was then reinforced by the influential journalist Yoichi Funabashi, who shaped it as if it were an established fact.

Or they used Professor Akira Fujiwara of Hitotsubashi University to label nothing more than a smoke screen as “poison gas of the Japanese army,” fabricating it as evidence for a masochistic view of history.

Is it not because such a tradition still survives even in their subsidiary, TV Kanagawa?

This column continues.