From the fabricated “moonlit interview” with a hidden communist leader to the North Korean repatriation campaign, the false claim that Japan rewrote textbooks, and the notorious hoax that turned smoke screens into “poison gas,” Asahi Shimbun has accumulated decades of uncorrected misinformation. This chapter exposes the newspaper’s systematic use of scholars to legitimize falsehoods and the lasting damage these fabrications inflicted on Japan.

2016-01-08

This is the continuation from the previous chapter.

All boldface emphasis in the text is mine.

There were many Asahi Shimbun frauds even before 1989, and many of them were malicious.

A classic example is the fabricated “moonlit interview” with Ito Ritsu, a communist who had gone underground.

“As for the location… perhaps the Rokko mountains?
As for the time… shall we make it a night under a waxing moon?”
—Asahi simply invented an interview article out of thin air.

Because this newspaper has such a tradition of fabrication, writing an imaginary “Kamei–Tanaka secret meeting in Nagano” was no challenge at all.

From the 1960s onward, their “North Korea is a paradise on earth” repatriation campaign for Koreans in Japan was another massive deception.

Recently, Asahi has written as though the Japanese government deported “criminals and welfare recipients” among the Zainichi.
But that is a shameless distortion.

In Japan, they could receive welfare without obstacles, and in fact continued to have a higher receipt rate than Japanese citizens.

And unlike other foreigners, no matter what crimes they committed, they were not deported.

In such a comfortable country, who would leave merely because the government suggested it?

Even so, Asahi induced ninety thousand people to “return happily” to what was in truth a hell.

It was, in a sense, brilliant writing—A newspaper capable of astonishing lies.

Later, it fabricated the claim that Japan had “changed ‘invasion’ to ‘advance’” in textbook screening.

Such rewriting was later proven not to have taken place, yet Asahi Shimbun has still not issued a correction.

A wartime photo of the Japanese army using smoke screens during a river-crossing operation in central China was discovered.

Asahi claimed this was evidence of “poison gas used on the Chinese front.”

To reinforce the lie, they used Professor Akira Fujiwara of Hitotsubashi University.

He added the outrageous statement, “This is poison gas.”

To call such a man a professor is absurd.
He was a textbook example of a scholar who bends learning to flatter the powers of the moment.

This chapter continues.